agc93

Yep, source is already available on GitHub in the Nexus-Mods/Vortex repo. Plus the Nexus Mods org has a bunch of extra libs/components (mostly used for Vortex) and a decent chunk of extensions (at least definitely all of mine) are also already open-source.

Just to expand further on Tannin's comments, Vortex's dependency management features are actually very capable already, especially when combined with a couple of its other internal features. There's at least one (I think only the one) case that's using them now and they work exactly how you'd expect them to: prompts for automatic installations, warnings on missing dependencies, version range matching, the works. As Tannin said, the issue is in the source of the mods: Nexus Mods listings are author-maintained not curated or enforced.

That sounds awesome Tannin! If there's anything I can do on my end to make that review process easier, just let me know. As it stands, my release process is almost entirely automated so I can add extra steps pretty easily if need be (or in future).

Big thanks for the follow up! I don't want to sound too demanding about it since I understand the reasoning behind the design and imagine the Vortex team already has plenty of work on their plate. Ideally, I wouldn't mind either of a more on-demand solution (i.e. requesting an update, whether over Discord or another mechanism) or even if it's just a regular thing (updates happen at the same time, every day so I can plan ahead). I've added a little more detail below. For me, personally, it's the inconsistency that can get a bit frustrating (and what lead to my previous post), and I likewise wouldn't want to suggest a solution that increases load on the Vortex team or any solution that would become untenable in the long term. ------- My only concern for an on-demand solution would be that it could overwhelm the team, even if it was used responsibly. All it would take would be for a few authors to coincidentally request an update on the same day and it would a big hit. Although Tannin also mentioned an idea above that might simplify that by pushing changes out, I'll leave that to him and the team to comment on. Alternatively, just having a reliable "submit updates before X time on weekdays" convention would be workable for me as well, but I don't know how effective or consistent that would be given the small number of people reviewing these updates. Again, I really don't want to be acting too demanding or entitled given the handful (if that) of people this applies to, but would be good to get some feedback from the team on whether and how this process might look going forward.

Just going to (probably fruitlessly) bring this up again as I just got stung by it again. I made sure to push out an update to the AC7 Support as quickly as I could yesterday since there would be new DLC dropping today and I wanted to be prepared for it. As it turns out, that was pretty pointless because the DLC is now out and my extension is sitting on Nexus waiting for an update to the extensions file. I can't tell people to manually update to the new version (because that would completely break updates), so users still end up with a couple of days of subpar experience even though I published my extension before the DLC was even out. To reiterate the same comment from last time I (also probably fruitlessly) brought this up: I understand the reasoning behind wanting to use this method but it's making it really hard to give a decent user experience in its current form.

Okay I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Looking at that page, every extension I can see there was uploaded in the last 28 days. Extensions aren't guaranteed to be there for 28 days, its basically a selection of the most endorsed mods for the last 28 days.

Which list are you looking at? The one in Vortex is just sorted by last update if memory serves, and the hot listing on the Nexus Mods "game" page is just the normal "Hot files" list, like any other game as far as I know.

This means that in the next Vortex update my translation will be recognized by the drop-down menus? This is fantastic news! I just checked and your translation is now showing in the drop-down menus for me.

Just to loop back on this, is there any chance we'll see any improvements or even just a bit more consistency around the updates for the extensions file? I uploaded a fix yesterday for one of my extensions and when I went to tell the reporter that the bug was fixed I realised I genuinely couldn't tell them when it would be available to them. At time of writing, the extensions file hasn't been updated in almost 2 full days, and I have no way of knowing when it's next going to be looked at. I was going to suggest to the user that they could manually install the update to get it sooner, but currently that would completely break extension updates. I understand the reasoning behind wanting to use this method but it's making it really hard to give a decent user experience in its current form. -- EDIT: I know its not a Vortex thing and you've all already heard the feedback, but this is already on top of the manual-only update procedure for Nexus Mods files which makes shipping updates to extensions involve a lot more meta-work than seems ideal to me.

> I suspect that if this were to start gaining traction there would be a way to flag Nexus with an "I downloaded this" flag associated with the users' account. I certainly hope not! Exposing any programmatic way to increase download counts for files sounds like it's ripe for exploitation, no matter how carefully the tracking would be done. That's not an unsolvable problem, but it's a pretty big one given the problem it's solving is, you know, paying authors for their work. > Licenses etc. Your points are all very sound, and make sense for someone who is used to working with open source code. Mod files, however, don't follow the same rules. The reason lots of mods don't include licenses is because lots of mods don't *have* licenses. Mods don't follow the same standardised method of licensing assets that software does so all the conveniences of things like SPDX lists just don't exist. You're right that authors *could* post IPFS identifiers but you're now back to the problem of having to parse some arbitrary text fields (the only API-exposed text fields per-file are the name, description and changelog), which is far from ideal. > code vs non-code mods Yeah, that ones a common misconception that also tripped me up early on. For an example, the most recent game I've been modding was Ace Combat 7. It's skin mods are literally image files, packed in a proprietary format and installed as-is. Mod creators never see a line of code, and their only real option for effective licensing would be the CC family, which is definitely not what most of them would choose. --- As for why I don't allow external uploads: the primary reason is support. Every time I get a user reporting something wrong with one of my tools, I want to know that those files came from a known source that I trust. While hashes can help with this, I don't want to have to ask users to start checksumming files just so I know that no-one has messed with the files or that they're not hilariously out-of-date (honestly the bigger concern of the two). It also lets me more effectively control the impact/reach if I accidentally introduce a critical bug in an update. If someone wants to compile it themselves, they a) have some idea of what they're getting into and b) should understand that I can't necessarily help them.

Just to add to some of the discussion we had on Discord earlier: I'm an open-source developer, work for an open-source organisation and have spent a lot of time working on modding tools at this point. The very first thing I noticed was "game mods are code" because that is definitely not always true. A massive quantity of game mods are creative assets with zero code involved. One of the main lessons I've learned is that the demands of "traditional" open-source environments and modding are surprisingly different. Couple of examples: - Licenses are frequently not distributed in-file because these files are going directly into a game's directory which you probably don't want to be full of license files. That means that mod files from different sources can have the same hash even when one of them is breaching license/permissions. - Licensing for mod source and permissions for mod files are not the same thing. My *code* is open-source (MIT), but I specifically don't allow my binaries to be uploaded without permission (in Nexus's permissions) - The target users of your files are frequently not familiar with the development side of your work. I can explain the specific terms of the MIT license to users all day, but they just want to install skins in their game - a lot more, but its hard to think of them all! That's also not even going into the fact that bypassing Nexus and downloading files from other users also takes potential earnings away from authors using the DP system, since that is measured from Nexus's download numbers. I understand your motivations (they're clear and reasonable!) and what you're looking for is *probably* doable with Vortex and Nexus with enough work, but I personally would also not recommend it and would be ensuring my files weren't being distributed through it (which admittedly doesn't really apply for most of my files).

Vortex won't manage any of your games until you specifically choose to Manage them from the Games page. If you only choose to manage the one game (Skyrim Special Edition in your case) from the Games page, then Vortex will not manage any of the other games it discovers on your PC, until you specifically hit Manage for them in the Games page.

Thanks everyone! Hope you find it useful... Yes and no. It will greatly simplify some of the annoying setup tasks, and especially the TypeScript template will get you closer to ready-to-go a lot quicker. That being said, you'll still need to code in what you want your extension to do, whether that be adding support for a game or something entirely different. So it won't do the work for you, but might make it easier. From what I've seen the Vortex team have been working on ways to add support for games with less coding required so I'd keep an eye out!

I don't have a copy of Nier to test with, but the reason it won't load is because you have a syntax error on line 36 of your index.js file: there's an extra '.' that shouldn't be there. The only other thing that jumps out at me is that you're not actually using your prepareForModding function. You need to change line 54 from setup: undefined to setup: prepareForModding to actually use it. At least on my machine I can change those two things and the extension successfully loads (I don't have the game though, so that's the best I can tell you).

Whether you're wanting to get started with developing Vortex extensions or you just want to speed up the process of creating new Vortex extensions, you might be interested in my new package: create-vortex-extension. You don't actually need to install anything to use it. Assuming you have a recent version of npm installed, just run npm init vortex-extension and it will be automatically downloaded. Just answer the questions and everything you need to get started with an extension (ready-to-run!) will be created in the current directory. If you really want to install it, just run npm install -g create-vortex-extension, then run create-vortex-extension and follow the prompts. There's templates included for either a basic JavaScript extension (literally two files) or a complete TypeScript extension (with npm, webpack and TypeScript pre-configured).