d81

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In my brain going back to the majority/minority position is not going to convince Tannin, but I think it is important. The minority, in terms of software usage and adoption, are important, if not the most important, to keep engaged or draw in. (Usually, depends on the goals of the group in question and what the software is and where it came from.) For example, Microsoft is currently going through this with their Linux subsystem and other initiatives. Microsoft may be the most used desktop, but not by the people they need, a "vast" minority compared to the number of users. Microsoft are expending huge sums of cash to attract these people. They need developers because they need people to support their systems by using them, but Linux and Mac are easier, once understood, so developers nowadays go with them instead. Entire development systems have been built for Mac/Linux compatibility, and they are just a terminal command away. Microsoft has even "embraced" multi-platform initiatives that include Linux. (Microsoft's VS Code is developed, at least partially, on Mac and puts dotfiles in my user directory, which I found humorous.) How many people are Windows Insiders versus Windows users? How many people create Firefox/Chrome extensions versus those that use them? How many people contribute to open source projects versus how many use them? Hell, how many people bother to report problems with software in general, even if it bothers them and they think it could be better? The minority tend to keep things running, and in the case of Nexus Mods, you know, make mods. I find it hard to believe that any authors who work on large projects want their load order changed around automatically, need to enter meta-data, and otherwise fool around with their management software. I may be utterly incorrect, but I manage a lot of files, thousands of them, and I want managers to reduce that management time, not increase it. I did not complain to Microsoft about their file manager being inadequate, I bought a "better" one. Better for me. Microsoft may have more desktop users, but their software leaves a lot to be desired. I may have to pay, but there are better products available under active development. Mod Managers are middleware, for lack of a better term. Mods -> Manager -> Game. So the idea of getting to the game quicker is about as valid as ideas come. Getting to the game quicker and creating a system that makes it work regardless of the inherent difficulties in doing so is damn near saintly. The desire to standardize that system comes as no surprise. But this is not like a PC replacing a typewriter. A PC objectively provided more functionality out of the gate, and I can still get a typewriter. Yes, there are other mod manager, but I for one am tired of the hodgepodge of underdeveloped and abandoned utilities (for the reason Arthmoor stated) and am enamored with the idea of an all in one solution with long-term support like Vortex. But for those of us that need fast, specific load order management for a variety of reasons I will not try to guess, Vortex falls short. This subject has been beaten to death from a variety of angles, and maybe wrong angles, IDK. But I do think this supposed minority is not a secret, has a variety of valid reasons for existing, and should not be cast aside. I can't imagine this was not a concern during development, that use cases are that hard to come up with, and still do not fully realize why it is such a point of contention, other than the wish to standardize. Perhaps UI improvements and keyboard shortcuts will help, I hope so. I don't think drag and drop is a requirement, but what would be better? One thing that would make a dramatic difference to me is the ability to pin the double-click sidebar. But honestly what I'm trying to do is work around the software to sort my load order myself. Anyway, I'm sure that made sense to no one and is full of typos. This thread should probably die, I can't stop looking at the emails :ninja:

I think the extension system is going to take off. If all it takes to add new functionality to Vortex is a JSON manifest and some JavaScript people will dive in quick. I can't code an alert box without a tutorial and can understand some of what's going on in the default extensions. :tongue:

I'm going to take that shouldn't as should :smile: Both those feature additions sound great, thanks! Don't know how hard it would be, but if that shortcut could be accompanied by some kind of visual indication of what will happen when I press the Sort button, I would be a happy camper...but if that's too much forget about it :devil:

Sorry, I didn't mean to dig at you again, I just wanted to demonstrate how different people want different things from me. Some want to discuss the reasons for the decisions, some want to convince me to change it, yet others see it as misleading to have the debate when a decision has already been made and is unlikely to change. I can't make everone happy and that's frustrating, but it's none of your fault or anyone elses. I'll just say this again: I don't like to say "never". I don't think a discussion is pointless but I will say here and now that convincing me on this won't be easy. Whether you want to have a discussion under these circumstances is up to any individual, just keep it civil please. And we should really stop the meta discussion about the discussion. Many were unhappy with how it went, rightfully though, the best we can do now is try to get it back on track. Sounds good to me, I'm all out of juice :smile: Arhtmoor gave all the good arguments, I don't have any left. Your ideas are good, and I hope it works out. The scenario that made me throw my hands up in exasperation is as follows: I have over 80+ plugins I work on related to my mod. I need these plugins in a specific order, no getting around it. Not just for visuals, I need their masters to line up in the header. I need to, preferably quickly, move plugins above and below each other to add/remove masters to them as I edit variations of the same files. It is much, much easier to group them together, usually pseudo-alphabetically, to prepare the files for editing. There is no way I could reasonably work on these files otherwise. Finding the files in the Vortex interface and assigning priorities was...less than user friendly. I did not finish. This is why I am still using NMM, for the profile capability, even though it's been a dead project for a while and screws me over every once in a while. I could not come up with a reasonable workflow in Vortex for this (admittedly uncommon) situation. However, it is a situation I deal with regularly, daily if I have the time. A potential solution is an easy way to change global priorities with the keyboard. Perhaps Ctrl+Up/Down to increment them.

You can keep digging at me if you want, but I apologize, again. Accept it or don't, I already feel embarrassed enough. The reason I used the words I did and came to the conclusions I have is because I did what I always do when searching for more information. I'm sure it's a tactic used by many, and may be contributing to those insults being hurled your way. I re-read the alpha release announcement to make sure I didn't miss anything. I came here, because this is the only place I figured I could find anything out. I read the known issues in their entirety, did not see anything about manual load order, definitely not a rationale. Maybe I overlooked it? I searched for Nexus employees posts, because they were the most likely source of real info. I searched for Dark0ne's posts to see if he had anything to say, he didn't. I searched you to see what you were saying, as far as I know you are next in line. I'll just say, rather than collect all your posts, that they appeared very out of order for a representative. Perhaps I did not fully contextualize them, but I am not the representative. The more I read the more mad and disappointed I became, which was stupid in hindsight and should not have happened, but it did. I am not using the word "dismissive" out of meanness, and there is a reason for that protecting the masses barb you don't understand, along with some of those other insults. Which lead to my toxic assertion. I may have contributed, but created...I'm skeptical. But it's over for now, I uninstalled Vortex for the time being. Now that I have that rationale (which I wish was in a thread started by you to begin with) I'll wait and see what the future holds.

I don't need per-file overwrites either. The mods tab in Wrye is Plugins in Vortex, the installers tab in Wrye is Mods in Vortex, basically.

Yea, that's pretty much it. The install tab, called "MODS" is neat. So far as I've seen the user is notified of overwrites regardless of install order, and overwrites can be changed at any time. Per-file overwrites are on the way according to Tannin. But I've broken Vortex again, so can't use it right now.

Tannin, I apologize for my behavior, for the third time. It was colored by your behavior, but that is not an excuse, which is what I was trying to say. I read through your posts and known issues section before I said anything. I found them rude, dismissive, and condescending, sorry. EDIT: I mean that, I should have been more understanding of the situation, which I usually am. Again, I am saying "I", "me", "my", etc. because I view everything I have expressed up to this point as my opinion. I should form my sentences better, I am sorry (again). Now I know how people feel that argue politics on Facebook and Twitter.

I think we can agree on that :D In my case, the hard way of doing plugin ordering was Vortex and the easy way was NMM. But with the last update to Vortex, it magically became the easy way and that happened between me starting this thread and now. Again, for me, the easy way to install mods with file-level overriding is still NMM and the hard way is (the current version of) Vortex. But, when Vortex does that too, it will perhaps become the easy way. Picking up on the OS analogy, there are some things that are easier to do in DOS or Linux than in Windows, although running Skyrim is not one of them. But when I want to do one of those things, I pull up a DOS box and start piping command lines. Because it's easier. Not easier for everybody, just for people who already know DOS. (I go back to even before MS-DOS, to CP/M and a DEC OS called RT-11, which was lovely, and IBM OS-360, which was horrible). What is easy or difficult is not absolute, it's a personal thing. OldMansBeard said it exactly how I wish I could :pinch: He swooped in and got what he wanted LIKE A BOSS. Having stepped back and thought about it a while, the conclusion I've come to is this, for better or worse - the request to not use LOOT and have a more user friendly manual load order management solution is impossible to fulfill at this time. Literally impossible. It is "wrong" out of the gate, from a technical perspective, and those requesting such a solution are corner cases. My communications with developers about their software have always been pleasant, not like what happened here. I've never been talked down to like I am incapable of forming coherent thoughts, that's for sure. I've never been translated either, which showed a level of miscommunication that I did not think possible. I have been playing and tinkering with these games since Morrowind's original release, I was an adult then and am now. But the request is from a human perspective, not a technical perspective. I don't want to be "right", nor do I want to stop others from interacting with their games in the manner they see fit. I want to have what I thought was a reasonable need met by the software that I assume many others would also appreciate. That assumption is based on years of experience, with LOOT and other tools, and seems valid, IDK. Being "wrong" or "right" isn't on the table as far as I'm concerned. Proving "rightness" is something I never should have appeared to do, if I did, because it's never what I meant. I see no righteous battle where I must be the victor. Seems to me I should have never needed to say anything, but I'm so far behind the times I don't understand, I guess. Honestly, I should have recognized it was a toxic scenario and never engaged. It's not the end of the world and the situation will be inevitably be rectified later. But I have very strong feelings about LOOT, it's goals, and it's usefulness. I have never voiced them because I have never needed to, and never thought I would need to. The LOOT maintainers are trying to help people mod their games. Although I do not like the methods LOOT employs and avoid it, who am I to tell people otherwise? Even the Vortex crash dialog tells me not to "whine", which is incredibly rude, so I am not sure what to think about this project. I've seen this behavior from other teams or individuals that develop modding related software and from some popular mod authors, so I guess it's part of the culture. But it's one thing to get annoyed by comments and posts, it's another to embed that annoyance into the software. I never, ever, want to get sucked up into that method of thinking and interacting with people again, and if I did I profusely apologize. It is not the way to go under any circumstances. I hope in the future we can have a public place to report bugs and make feature request that is not a forum. (Sorry if this thread has been hijacked, I don't use forums often and don't like them...I don't think I've started more than 10 forum threads in my life.)

Welp, the question will never be answered I guess. A point by point reply would be pointless. Here is some text, since I will never be understood I guess: I am a regular early adopter of software, not liking new ways of doing things is not the issue. (I hesitated to use that terminology because I knew conclusions would be jumped to, but whatever.) LOOT is not a new way of doing things, that is not the issue. Were a new, innovative method presented I would be much more interested. My arguments have NOTHING TO DO with whether LOOT is a good solution for Vortex or anything else. If it is better for the masses, GOOD. I know previous post may make it seem that way, I apologize. It was a mistake to argue from that angle and I assumed too much. I was, as you say, emotional. In shock really. My argument boils down to this, whether you accept it as valid or not: I want to directly control my load order for Bethesda games without jumping through hoops. It was easier in other mod managers. Now there are many steps. Direct control is better for me because I like the decisions I make more than the decisions LOOT makes. I like understanding things and making them work. I want to read and understand my load order so I can make changes that suit me. The real load order, not a human readable presentation. All of the above makes modding easier for me. Everything is ordered in a way I understand across all applications. No point in continuing to repeat myself, I'm sure everyone is tired of that, I'm leaving now, no need to reply. Please don't in fact, this has been a terrible experience and I don't want to participate any more, thanks.

I don't know what is going on in other threads, but people are "emotional" because what is considered by them an easy way to do things has been taken away and they don't understand why. If so many people are complaining, is there maybe an issue? Perhaps I behaved (slightly? hugely?) inappropriately and made harsh comments, but it was not a complete "knee-jerk" reaction, as you seem to be dismissing this "emotional" state of affairs as. I already knew I did not want to use LOOT, I am familiar with the tool and purposefully made little to no use of it, and now the flagship mod manager of the Nexus is forcing me to, which I do not like. "I" meaning my opinion based on my experiences, of course...it is not selfish or "community breaking" to have an individual opinion, as was suggested by Brabbit1987. I don't think anyone in this thread (don't know about elsewhere) is advocating for removal of the current interface (I have no beef with it, have at hoss), we want to know why, specifically, there is not an "advanced" mode where we can manually sort our load order as in all previous Bethesda mod managers (that I've ever heard of anyhow). It is what we are accustomed to and works well. We think it does, even if you don't. You know, being the expert, this would be easy to implement as a first party extension. If your API is as comprehensive as I think it is you could probably get it working in an evening. If the current LOOT-ified interface is default and the goal is to make things easier for casual players that goal would still be achieved, just look at the percentage of Firefox and Chrome users that make use of extensions versus those that don't.

I have no comment. Your response is perfect, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Thank you.

No idea if this will help or is even related, but for Bethesda games the problem seems to reside in the file: C:\Program Files\Black Tree Gaming Ltd\Vortex\resources\app.asar.unpacked\bundledPlugins\gamebryo-archive-invalidation\index.js I opened the file in Vim and cleaned the mixed line endings, specifically all the ^M characters in the section with the "isSupported" bits. Now I can select games to manage again. I selected Fallout 4, then Skyrim SE, then Fallout 4, and the switches went fine. I'm scared to select anything else though :nuke:

Vortex is not providing a "new" way, so far as I can tell it's just LOOT conformed to the Vortex UI. I see this as a stripped down version of the old way that obfuscates what was once clear. 1. Your opinion. 2. LOOT does not effectively resolve conflicts in load orders. It requires more work than putting plugins where I know I want them - why make a rule, other rules relative to that rule, and so on when I could simply put the files where I want. LOOT cannot know how I want conflicts resolved because I am a human with particular goals in mind. LOOT cannot "resolve" all conflicts anyway, I have to use other software for that because it is more complicated than load order. LOOT relies on a list of rules made by other people for games that have a continuous stream of mod releases. These other people cannot know what I want to happen, so they are effectively controlling my game unless I use "rules". Instead of all this needless abstraction I can put the file where I want in the list and be done with it (in the end it is just a list). If the people that run the LOOT project can know where files should be placed in the list relative to other files that means I can know too, which means I can do it myself. That is a very, very brief rationale why I don't want to use it most of the time. Hopefully this explanation will suffice. If you think I'm crazy, fine. The solution has been made clear, wait for the API and inevitable extension. 3. It is not irrelevant, I use the Vortex too. Your calculator analogy makes no sense. 4. I was trying to say a lot in a brief amount of space (and still used too many words). "Conflict" in relation to Bethesda games is a big word. I'm not going spell out how Bethesda games load files, the information is available elsewhere. The problem is that I have to make rules and set priorities at all. As secondary functionality this could be useful, but as primary functionality it is cumbersome. I want my load order organized in a human readable way (the real load order, not the UI presentation of the load order), which is not "wrong" to do. Yes, load order is primarily about conflict resolution, but their are other concerns, such as I need to be able to understand the list with my human brain, which does not operate as a computer processor. If this is an issue for Tannin and others, and is absolutely ridiculous as has been implied, well I'm sorry, it's not to me. I am still having trouble understanding why this is a thing, other than the prevailing need in tech to "protect" people from themselves. I prefer to make mistakes and learn from them, it's much more fun. EDIT: I never said I don't have long complex load orders, just that I keep conflicts to a minimum. I know, generally, what is in the files and their archives and when there are conflicts I know how I want them resolved. Resolving those conflicts often has nothing to do with load order and requires modifying the files with other tools. A "conflict" often means I will only get one thing or the other in game unless I edit the files. 5. I have done it in Vortex and it is a tedious, unfriendly experience. Technically possible does not equal a good user experience. 6. Again, your opinion. Yes, Tannin has said I am misusing modding software by using it's provided functionality. Not me personally, but his statements apply to my use, even though he is framing (most of) his statements behind "90%" of (uninformed) users, wherever that figure came from. There is nothing wrong with organizing how files are loaded by the game in a human understandable format, as long as the primary organization is about conflict resolution. I prefer to understand what is happening and not view things through layers of abstraction designed to "protect" me. I could just not auto-sort and have the files in the list where I want, no rules necessary. I don't know why this is so controversial all of a sudden, seems normal to me. As far as I am concerned the above only applies to load order, I think the "MODS" tab is great, aside from the bugs :laugh:. Managing overwrites in the manner provided by that section seems good, and the sorting the list by name and category works in a way I can understand easily (if the names were alphabetically sorted of course). But I also understand people wanting drag and drop there too, if they are coming from MO. Drag and drop is intuitive and fast. Then again, I usually don't bother with loose file mods or manually pack them in BSA/BA2 archives, depending on the game, so there's that. But managing mod archives is a different topic.