FollowTheGourd

I'm not sure if it's people just making sure they have the latest version, but I find it peculiar how a lot of my individual files sometimes have twice as many downloads as unique ones (I'm not looking at the all time downloads). I've half wondered if it's from people tracking files and then getting alerted when I edit anything on the entry's front page? I don't make much use of the tracking feature myself, but I figure it's got to be something like that.

Just for me, the only thing I find annoying is when other mod sites change your readme or module metadata to point to their own web site. I've seen it on some foreign language sites where they also translated the description text, but also on one other English language site that seems to always come up above the Nexus in page rank when searching by mod name. I take it as inevitable that it'll get uploaded without asking if popular enough, but I figure the least they can do is let people know where to look for it themselves and maybe even get support for it if needs be. One way I think I've found around that is to just say the mod's hosted on the Nexus or wherever. Sometimes it doesn't seem like anybody reads the readme except to strip out URLs. Only slightly more annoying is when whoever uploaded it to the site thinks the abbreviated name of the game is your username...

Sure, the numbers' character value should come before letters, but I have my doubts the engine is going to give them special consideration as numbers.

Just dredging up my own thread here... So anyway, for sure .dzip files are loaded in alphabetical order (unless there's a surprise), and those that come first take precedence over those that come later. So one big gotcha is to name your .dzip something so it gets loaded before pack0.dzip. I've been naming almost all of mine with the pattern MOD_[ModName].dzip, which should be fine as long as there isn't anything in those DLC .dzips I need to worry about. Same reason I've named some of my mods MOD_AAA[ModName].dzip if I need to make sure it comes before some of my other mods so it overrides the files they use. I try to do that as little as possible, since otherwise it'd probably lead to an arms race of AAAA...AAAAA.dzip. That way it's also convenient for the players to later know what's a mod instead of all the free DLC, and to be able to sort them all alphabetically in case they need to remove them for whatever reason. There doesn't seem to be any restrictive length on the .dzip filename either, so there shouldn't be a problem making the mod's .dzip filename something meaningful. Just some I've seen have completely nondescript names, probably following the pattern of the game's dzips.

A week late in seeing this... Anything's possible, but it ought to work with the Steam version from seeing people talking about it on their forums. I have the GOG version, but my guess is the the Steam version's base folder is "Steam\steamapps\common\the witcher 2", or something like that. You're copying it there?

I don't see a repacker in that link, though, unless quickbms also handles that easily. There's also a project here: http://svn.gib.me/public/red/ with the whole shebang. You'll want to get an svn client to check it out, and then it should compile with Visual C# 2010 express even. That includes a repacker, which in another thread, the creator mentioned hasn't been completely tested - but I haven't run into any issues using it. The source code licence would explicitly allow it, but I don't know how he'd feel about people hosting compiled versions of it (not on the Nexus site) since it still appears to be a work in progress somewhat, or even if it were complete.

Hey, So thanks to Rick (aka gibbed), we have a pretty easy to use DZIP packer and unpacker. Right now we're mostly just pasting folders into CookedPC, but sooner or later we're going to run into file conflicts. Edit: he mentioned in a thread that it hasn't been extensively tested yet, but I don't know of any case where it's failed yet for my stuff... Plus, if we could keep mods isolated to their DZIP, somebody could even possibly make a mod manager that could warn you about conflicts, make it easy to uninstall, backup, disable (rename the extension maybe?), or reinstall mods without keeping track of too many files manually. I've seen some mods already start to throw things in DZIP files, and at worst users seem to think they need to extract them - but I think they'd get used to it if it became the norm. I was wondering if anybody would even be interested in taking it a step further. Try to adopt some standard naming scheme - at least something like mod_[yourmodname].dzip, so it hopefully wouldn't clash with any patches or downloads CDPR come out with. Plus, I suppose we'd need to figure out the loading order if multiple DZIPs contain the same file. That and maybe even some kind of standard XML manifest, listing things like author, URL, version, etc. I wonder where that I've seen that before... Anyway, I think I'm going to start packing things in DZIP format myself, but just wanted to see first what other people think of that, any issues doing it that way, complications where a dzip might not override the files, or whatnot. Hopefully it wouldn't encourage people to start naming their files zzzzzzzzzzzz_mymod.dzip if the loading order is alphabetical for conflicting mods (haven't tested it yet).

I just archive everything in ZIP format, since it's the easiest for anybody to handle and Windows or Mac OS X comes with the ability to open it without third party applications - even if it's a DAZIP file, so I can include a readme with it. It's good enough unless I really need to compress things further. Before, what was it again, the v1.03 patch, you couldn't just double click to install a DAZIP file anyway; you had to manually run daupdater from its directory or include the XML file it was looking for along side your DAZIP. So including a readme with install instructions still doesn't hurt. The only time lately where I didn't create a DAZIP was because the mod just contained a single DDS file, and for some reason, the game wasn't properly disabling and reenabling it in the addons XML unless I put some dummy files in there - it was just a hassle to deal with. Btw, WinRAR isn't free last I knew. That nag screen means you're supposed to actually buy it if you keep using it.

I think it's a game issue more than the Nexus'. Simply open and save your screenshot in MS Paint or anything that can read the file. I don't know exactly why, but for some reason Dragon Age has always produced screenshots that don't work with a lot of image hosting services.

Disclaimer before this gets locked, I know: "Unless and until BioWare releases an updated Toolset to allow modding of DA2 at the same level as DA:O/A, there won't be a separate section on the Nexus. Too resource-intensive for the realtively small amount of content involved. Authors, (and others) are encouraged to "tag" the mods appropriately in order to allow easier sorting." But they have to get tagged in the first place which is the purpose of my forum suggestion in the last paragraph, and even then it can still be a hassle to search on tags. Ultimately, I think it could be helped with a general "Dragon Age 1" tag that encompasses Origins, Awakening, the single player campaign etc - which are all currently separate tags and almost randomly assigned by people if not the mod author. If I create a mod that works in any campaign, DLC, or expansion then I need to make sure I at least check off all of those, even though it has not much to do with them in specific? One could argue that tagging against Origins is enough - but that's to tell it apart from DA2. What about people filtering by tags to Awakening to know it's compatible since the game v1.03 patch or expansion itself? The current solution may just be to add as many tags as are true enough, but that still seems pretty hit and miss compared to a simpler all-encompassing tag. Also this is the subforum I'm talking about: http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/forum/302-dragon-age-uploaded-files/ Instead of something like "Nightmare_Ultra / Official thread", maybe the "site bot" post could start with "[DA2] Nightmare_Ultra / Official Thread" or "Nightmare_Ultra / [DA2] Official Thread" For some people it might as well be mixing Oblivion mods in with the listing there - and it's not like I have any statistics on it, but I don't see as people starting to make tag searches to find DA1 stuff if they were used to searching and browsing for it other ways for a year and don't have to on the other Nexus sites.

Sorry for the bump, but I've worked on actually implementing it and I'm actually pretty close now after giving it a couple days work. http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/75/index/7058637 Just some things to sort out I've mentioned on that page. I guess this is just more for requests, so request away but preferably minor tweaks to that, and please keep in mind the limitations I mentioned in that post. At best, I think I could change which quickslot gets assigned a hotkey, but not more than the default supported (maybe unless I did something like 1-2 = slot 12, 4-8 = slot 48, but that seems kind of meh). I'm not going to make the quickbars detachable or anything.

I never got around to finishing this yet, but it's not in the game engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFATC9sGtII My point is that moving the quickbar should be a lot simpler than that. The main limitation from the engine is the number of quickslots you can practically have and keybinding them. Only reason I saw this request was because it was in the other forum first.

A new site would sound like overkill, but I'd settle right now for the current site to filter them better. Already people are posting DA2 mods in the DA:O categories instead of using the right ones. If it gets worse, DANexus will eventually become like BioWare's projects page in terms of finding new mods - maybe not as bad, but not worth the effort.

You should be able to move the quickslot bar easily enough without interference from the game engine - it's a separate thing at that point. It's probably more a matter of recalculating its starting position when somebody starts expanding it.

Hi, I guess they're just separate groups of categories, but if you go to http://www.dragonagenexus.com/downloads/ you mostly just see DA2 mods now. I'll assume if there were more DA:O activity, then we'd see more DA:O mods on that page, but for those of us who don't have DA2, there doesn't seem to be a way at first glace to narrow our interests. I know about the categories page, but that seems impractical to keep on top of. Anyway, just thought I'd ask if it might be possible to keep those two games separate there. Edit: I know it's already been asked about having two separate sites and it won't happen unless there's another toolset - but my point is more along the lines that the DA:O updates are probably going to get washed out under DA2 for a while like this. Kind of like people posting ME2 projects on the BioWare projects page under DA:O categories... and just make it that much harder to find anything new and interesting. Edit (from my other post): A new site would sound like overkill, but I'd settle right now for the current site to filter them better. Already people are posting DA2 mods in the DA:O categories instead of using the right ones. If it gets worse, DANexus will eventually become like BioWare's projects page in terms of finding new mods - maybe not as bad, but not worth the effort.