I've been lurking in the modding scene for a long time. Over a decade. Rarely do I engage beyond an endorsement and even more rarely, a comment.
When I started modding heavily I used Wrye Bash as my mod management program. Wrye bash is amazing, and the development of MO2 has brought us a software that does what the Installers tab of Wrye always dreamed it could be.
Wrye B/Mash brought with it the BAIN file structure that MO2 can read and utilizes masterfully. However, I have found in my last year of heavily playing with my morrowind mod list in MO2 that hardly anybody uses BAIN formats correctly.
BAINs were developed as a simple and convenient way to partition off optional parts of mods (i.e. Alternate textures, meshes, anims, patches, stat rebalances) and allow the user to easily select what the want and what they dont.
Many, if not most, BAINs I've seen in the past year on the MW Nexus do not do this well. There is no obvious delineation in the file naming conventions, theyre just numbered.
The numbering system of the BAIN formatting is where the strength of it lies.
We generally see two types of BAIN Structures:
Example 1 (Correct BAIN format):
00 Core
00 Core (for BCOM)
00 Core (Rebirth)
01 Textures 1024
01 Textures 512
02 misc patch
03 misc patch
The above shows us an example of a BAIN that has two options for the 00 Core package. They share the same number so they should not be activated together. We have two misc patches ( misc can be any mod in existence for the purposes of the example) being numbered 02 and 03 tells us that they are not mutually exclusive with each other
Ex 2: (UI Mod)
01 Silver
02 Gold
03 Copper
This mod is packaged in some horrific manner that only BTB can adequately flagellate. Ostensibly, in a UI mod, I should only pick one trim color. So why does the numbering scheme communicate to the user that all these options are referring themselves as usable alongside each other?
Personally, I dont believe theres a reason to not package the vast majority of mods as a BAIN Archive.
I used to repackage all the mods i downloaded manually to be more legible in their file structures so i wouldn't have to refer to the readmes every time I checked the mod out. However with the rate of updates in the modern era of the MW modding community, this is a fools errand.
Speaking of readmes, docs can all be put in their own optional folder so you dont overload your game folder with misc documentation.
Anyway, I know this post may come across as largely whinging, but it is my hope that as a community we can move to packaging more mods in a BAIN format, and within that structure we package them in a more uniform way, and roll more mod options into the main file to genrrally reduce file and download bloat and make the end user experience more streamlined and silky smooth across the community.
Now that I've gotten this off my chest, what are your opinions on the BAIN formatting? Would you like it to be more or less unversal?
