Qwinn

In response to post #67823186. #67823236 is also a reply to the same post. Agreed. As I said in my interview, respect from a content host towards the content creators is a rare thing in this crazy online world, and it is very very much appreciated.

In response to post #67553571. #67576956 is also a reply to the same post. Version 3.5 of the Qwinn's Ultimate Dragon Age: Origins Fixpack has been released :) I hope you'll all enjoy. Now back to QUASIPC...

Thanks for the kind words all, and to Pickysaurus and Nexus for the soapbox. Just FYI, in celebration of the PC Gamer article, I'm hard at work on version 3.5 of my DA:O Fixpack. Already got another 30 fixes done for it (including a couple of pretty awesome dialogue restorations in the Mage Origin, about 40-45 lines of voiced dialogue total there) and at least another 30 fixes to come. You can keep up with the progress on it on the thread in the mod's Forums tab.

In most cases, the dark face bug is not due to any issues with facegen, it is simply an install/load order issue. A good rule of thumb that will generally avoid the problem is to simply have your installation order match your plugin order as closely as possible. It's easy to do in MO2, just make your left pane order match your right pane order as closely as possible. 95% of the time, the bug is caused by having the install and plugin orders not matching, which results in the meshes and textures from mod A winning the install order conflict, and mod B winning the conflict in the NPC Actor records in the ESP plugin. That mismatch is what most often causes the bug. Note that, if some of your NPC replacers are archived (in BSA files), and others are using loose files, then simply sorting them as described above may not fix the problem, because loose files will always override BSA files regardless of load/plugin order. In those cases, if you want the mod with the files in the BSA to win the conflict, you will have to either extract the BSA so that both mods are using loose files, or archive the one with loose files so that plugin order can establish which one wins the conflict. These days however, at least for SSE, almost all NPC replacers provide a loose files option in their download section.

There are a few things about Vortex I'm not happy with (and it's still alpha so no final judgments yet) but this isn't one of them. If you install a crapton of mods and hit the "purge" button (don't worry, you can reverse it by hitting "deploy") and literally a couple of seconds later you see that all mods have disappeared from the game directories completely, it becomes pretty clear that what Vortex is putting in the games folders probably doesn't amount to more than a few kilobytes - just links. It just LOOKS like the files are all there, but they're not, and the links can all be removed instantly at any time. And it apparently resolves a number of issues this way. Seems a fine design to me.

I never used Loot even when I was a noob at modding. Here's one reason why. If there's a way to handle this with Loot that isn't as ugly as what I have to describe, please let me know When I do my load order, I like having certain categories of mods in a certain succession, for example, in Skyrim SSE: NPC Replacers, then Grass and Tree texture/mesh mods, then Water, Mountain and Road texture/mesh mods, then Weather and lighting mods. There shouldn't be any conflicts between each of those categories, right? (Note that I do NOT have my mods sorted into *actual* categories, did not find an actual need to do this, as I can find things faster just by having all mods listed alphabetically). But I still like having the mods in given categories as the above grouped together, and it's not just for "visual" or "organizational" reasons (though I don't really get why those wouldn't be motive *enough*), it also reflects my research and conclusions from reading author suggestions about which mod types should be generally higher and which should be generally lower in the load order. Like, the general notion that weather and lighting mods should be near the bottom of the load order, and that Realistic Water Two should be near the bottom as well. When I had Loot sort a while ago in Vortex, I suppose because I installed the weather mods earlier on, it left them all near the top of my load order. Anyway.... in my "NPC Replacers" mod category, I have 6 mods. I'm fine with setting up rules that order those 6 mods. The last one of those 6 happens to be a mod called "Fresh Faces". And my first mod in my group of 5 "Grass and Tree mods" is Verdant. To get these groups of mods to follow each other the way I want, I have to create a rule that says "Verdant" must come after "Fresh Faces"... which is silly. The mods have nothing to do with one another, there's no conflict, it's an artificial dependency that I have to create. And if I move Verdant lower in my Grass and Tree mods order for whatever reason, now I have to reassign my rules. Hope that made sense, and if there's a more intuitive way to get these categories to sort in the load order, I'd like to hear it (I really have no experience with Loot prior to this, so yes, I'm a total noob at it. Maybe there's some fantastic way for me to order generally non-conflicting categories, but so far, I haven't seen it.). EDIT: Another thing... it seems to me that if Loot finds some mods in a load order that it doesn't have any rules for, and doesn't find conflicts for, and basically just doesn't recognize, then it doesn't move them, it just leaves them where they are. This effectively means that the install order determined the load order for those mods. So, if I wind up uninstalling and reinstalling everything for whatever reason (hard drive crash, whatever), on my next install, those mods will probably be moved around. So what, you say, if Loot doesn't find a conflict or require an order? Because I simply don't want moving parts in my load order when I'm trying to recreate something - Loot isn't infallible, and maybe there was an unknown file conflict between two files, both archived in BSA's, that work in one order but not another, and I got lucky and had them wind up in the correct order the first time, leaving me with a perfectly working mod installation, I don't want to have to remember that I either have to install things in a certain order OR set up a rule sequencing EVERY SINGLE plugin in order to duplicate what I had before exactly. If I have to do all that, if I have to set up rules for every single mod in order to fix a specific load order, I'd rather use a mod manager that just lets me put them in the order I want by dragging and dropping rather than creating rules for every single mod. All I need is a text file with my previous load order, order them that way, and I've recreated my previous working installation *exactly* with minimal hassle. And recreating my working installation *exactly* gives me peace of mind.

I agree drag nd drop install order is a much bigger deal than plugin order. Single best feature of MO. Tannin: imagine 6 mods containing at least some landscape textures, all with varying amounts of conflicting files. Depending on which mods overwrite (which until we get file by file overwrite, is basically just the mod install order), some textures are replaced by others, some textures look better on their own but the seams between other textures get worse, etc. When I was figuring out the ideal order to prioritise these mods in MO, I'd test an order, exit game, switch the order of a couple of the texture mods, check in game, back out, switch order, etc. Every different install order resulted in slightly different landscape, seams etc. If you already know exactly what you want your final priority order to be, setting it up once via your dependencies isn't that bad. But when you go in to check what the effect of prioritizing each different mods textures and how they combine several dozen times, it seems it would become WAY more cumbersome. The drag and drop method of re- prioritizing the texture mods is definitely the fastest and most efficient way of carrying out tests like that.

Yep, that's how Vortex is working so far, with the drag plugin on another to load after thing. I'm trying to give it a fair shot, though I miss doing it manually. Have only installed about 30 mods so far, will see how it handles 150 this weekend.

I'm trying to figure this out as well. I get nothing useful when I click View Meta Data in the Downloads section... in fact, several fields become outlined in red as if indicating that there was an error reading the information. I didn't try to type anything in to those fields, because with several hundred mods that would be ridiculous. An "Acquire metadata for all mods" button like NMM has would be ideal. (that wasn't the label on the button, but I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about). That was always my favorite feature of NMM versus MO, actually. With MO you had to do it one by one with Query Info (unless I missed something).

Okay, actually, my apologies. Ousnius is right. It doesn't work the way I expected it to. Cross posted from my other thread where I initially discussed this issue:

On point #5... after a TON of testing, it turns out the profile specific INI thing doesn't work like it does in MO/MO2, where the profile specific INIs are saved to their own folders (at least, that's how I thought it worked). When you switch from one profile to another, it actually replaces the INI's in the standard Documents/My Games folder. That does have the benefit that you can use BethINI or whatever to tweak-modify the INI's as usual in their normal location, and it will only affect that profile's INIs. What I'm finding weird about that is that the Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPref.ini that are stored in the gibberish folders under Vortex do NOT seem to be the ones that are getting put into the Documents/My Games folder when you switch to that profile. I don't know where they're coming from, but it doesn't seem to be there, cause if I overwrite what's in the gibberish folder of a profile with a different version (or edit them), it doesn't change what gets put in Documents/My Games when I switch to that profile. Weird. Still... I like the implementation. It appears I don't *have* to know where or how the INIs are being stored/handled, I can just make my changes in the INI in the normal place keeping in mind that those INIs will be replaced if I switch to another profile. Yeah, it works. I like it. You can scratch #5 too. (Glad I didn't file these through feedback yet!)

Honestly I never understood why folks use the "download with manager" option. I've always just downloaded manually (to my D:) and then "install from file". If I ever need to wipe and restart from scratch, I don't have to worry about my mod archives being blown away. What advantage is there to doing it the other way? Serious question.

I never used Loot even when I was a newbie. When I'd try it, it would shuffle things around unnecessarily and I'd always hit cancel rather than apply the changes. Not a fan. As long as I can't use MO2, I'll learn to live with it, I guess, but I gotta agree that not being able to sort the order manually is a negative in my book.

Installing mods will use up room on C: as normal, but -enabling- them, the step that appears to add the files to Data, appears to increase the size of the Data folder (this is apparently an illusion) but actually only uses up a tiny amount on C:. That's the results of my tests with Skyrim SE anyway.

Yeah - if MO2 could do everything I need, I would be using it. And if that proxy library issue ever gets fixed, and it's otherwise reasonably stable (which the last version seems to mostly be), I'd be greatly inclined to go back to it. In the meantime - very happy that something superior to NMM is being developed, and willing to lend a hand in testing and hopefully making good suggestions.