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Thanks for the sharing this, that's quite a trove of information. You're evoking bad memories here, I think I got so used to repackaging stuff that I forgot how bad standardization was in Oblivion times (let's not mention Morrowind). And of course a few years of Skyrim modding finished overwriting my memories. Are you saying that Vortex unlike Mod Organizer doesn't have OMOD support, at least through a plugin? I'm starting to reconsider my game plan. Which mod manager would you consider to be the most newbie-friendly for Oblivion, given that initially I'm only gonna advise he installs Unofficial Oblivion Patch, a UI mod and perhaps OOO and a couple others? (No more than 10 mods total, he's playing on a laptop so graphics mods will be out of the question). I'm leaning towards OBMM, which actually looks/feels much simpler than Vortex (no integrated download, though).

Thanks for the tip. Nope, there are no permission issues whatsoever. The prompts go away if I switch to hardlinked mods. You're confirming what I remembered about TES games not understanding symlinks. The full story is I was using Vortex only for Stardew Valley (where symlinks work) and assumed that the constant prompting was how it's supposed to work... for security reasons and what not. Now I'm evaluating what to recommend to a modding newbie who wants to get back into Oblivion, and this got seriously in the way until I discovered the option.

Guys, you know that "it works for me" answers or even suggesting that something is wrong with my computer aren't super-helpful right? If you were knowledgeable about this program one would think you'd at least know about the option I'm describing below. But if you're not, you're unlikely to provide a useful answer, so why bother replying? Upon further examination the constant elevation prompts are caused by this setting being enabled: I never fiddled with this setting. Perhaps this got enabled automatically because initially my mods staging folder wasn't on the same drive as the game? I don't remember getting a warning about this. (Hardlinks cannot cross file system boundaries. Symlinks can.) Assuming most games read symlinks properly (I think it wasn't the case for Oblivion), it would be nice to implement that admin service I was mentioning to make symlink mode work without elevation. Otherwise why keep it around, it's guaranteed to make you insane with the flurry of prompts. Besides having to be on the same disk (a problem if you lack HD space and install a lot of mods), hardlinks have the inconvenient that you can't distinguish them from regular files, whereas it's easy to tell something is a symlink.

I'm trying out Vortex to see if it's worth recommending it to people new to modding (myself, I prefer MO1/MO2+Wrye Bash). I must say that the constant prompts for elevation - twice for every mod I install - drive me crazy. Is there a way to stop those? I tried to launch Vortex as admin but it objected and spouted some nonsense about file permissions. But if I check Effective Permissions on my game folder, my Windows user has Full Control. So what gives? If it can't be prevented at the moment, I'm strongly suggesting you guys implement a service that runs as admin to do the tasks that require elevation, just like Steam has. Thanks!

I can really say anything? Well there you go: "anything".

Congrats Tannin, I hope you're gonna love your job and that the new mod manager will be stellar. I wish that Dark0ne would first pay you to finish Mod Organizer 2 and fix the few remaining MO1 bugs though, so as not let the community hanging. If done with code reuse in mind i.e. as a base for the new mod manager, MO2 work wouldn't slow you down that much. My wishes for the new mod manager: - Please bring back the VFS (of course) - Please make the VFS behavior bug-free (read: write a massive amount of tests) and well-documented. It takes quite a bit of time with MO to realize that if you edit a mod file with TES5Edit it gets modified in the MO mod folder, whereas newly created files such as Bashed Patch end up in Overwrite. Or at least that how it works on my machine, some people say different things which is incredibly confusing. There's some even weirder s*** happening when a file gets created then renamed by SkyProc, but the rename gets swallowed by MO and you end up with the intermediate file sitting somewhere in Overwrite. - Please bring back the .BSA archive management from Mod Organizer 1. It's one of the best things you ever introduced, just set it as off so people who have no clue don't shoot themselves in the foot and annoy modders with false bugs. - Work with the Mod Picker guys to figure some kind of integration. Mod Organizer is just a few bugs away from perfection really, I'm super hyped about what you'll be able to come up with with more support.

I was curious so I loaded the mods you mention in TES5Edit. Are you referring to the XCAS entries in each cell, as in my screenshot? If so it seems to me you can obtain the desired result simply by not checking the XCAS records on any mod in Mator Smash settings, and loading Lively Inns and Taverns after SoS/WAO and any other XCAS-changing mod in your load order. LIAT will win the conflict and restore the vanilla acoustic space.

Thanks for the quick fix! I gave it a try with the same settings and the results are promising: as expected the Cure Poison potion doesn't show up in the patch anymore, in fact my patch's size has reduced dramatically. Makes sense, since I believe that CACO carries most of USLEEP's fixes already except the most recent ones. There remain a few records which IMO shouldn't be there, the last four seen in my screenshots: the BYOHHouse{1,2,3}Exterior ones already have USLEEP as a conflict winner, so I don't know why they're repeated in the patch. The WhiterunWorld entry is considered conflict-free by TES5Edit, so I'm not sure either why it ends up in the patch. Here are the logs + patch again: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22764021/MatorSmash%20-%20Logs%20for%20extraneous%20cell%20and%20world%20entries.7z EDIT: Venturing a guess about what happened after looking at the log (forgive my inexact TES5Edit vocabulary): some TreeThicket01 were placed in those cells by USLEEP. Then in the cleanup phase those were all determined to be ITPO and removed from the patch, but that left their parent cell entry. I guess Mator Smash needs to check everytime it removes an ITPO from a cell whether that cell has any more children, and if it doesn't, check if it is itself an ITPO. And so on recursively going up the worldspace hierarchy: in the case of my patch all the worldspace/cell entries should be gone this way. Now you're getting me worried, it doesn't sound like a good change. I like the "regular Skyrim rules apply except for stuff you check in settings" behavior. Are there any convincing use cases to change how things work?

Good catch for the screenshot, I did expand the wrong record setting. Will show the proper one below. But I never changed any setting, just used what Mator Smash assigned when starting the program for the first time, based on USLEEP's bash tags. I believe you're wrong about how Mator Smash processes records by the way, which is confirmed by what Mator says at #2 below. Say you have an .esp in your load order that modifies a bunch of ALCH records but only changes the FULL (Name) record of one of them relative to Skyrim.esm. I you use a setting with only the FULL box checked, only this one FULL entry will be forwarded. The names of all the other ALCH records will be ignored since they're identical to vanilla. So they're not considered "a change brought by this mod". Thanks for confirming, it seems I understand correctly how your algorithm works. Shouldn't there be a fourth step here, assuming things were working correctly? 4. ALCH record is completely identical to conflict winner (CACO), and is removed from the patch. Assuming this since I see a lot of "removing ITPO" messages in the log. No point in having a record in the patch that ends up the same as if you had no patch. Anyways, I reproduced the problem with a freshly extracted Mator Smash, loading only USLEEP and CACO + masters. USLEEP has the default settings generated from the Bash Tags when you first start the program, everything else is on skip. All files are added to the JustUSLEEP patch. I've enabled all debug options. Here's the whole resulting Smash folder (minus binaries) so you can look at all the logs at will. I've added screenshots of the Mator Smash setup and the resulting problem as seen in TES5Edit, and I put the resulting patch in the zip as well while I was at it. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22764021/Reproduced%20name%20forward%20bug.7z

Is this normal? I made a Mator Smash patch (JustUSLEEP.esp) with USLEEP on its default setting and all the rest on Skip. Added my whole load order to the patch. From what I understand Mator Smash should only carry forward whatever is different from the master file (as a default behaviour, I guess an option to "force carry" might perhaps be handy in certain cases - a bit like the unimplemented RELEV tag which can restore removed elements in leveled lists). But here USLEEP only adds a keyword to the potion, and the same keyword is added by CACO. So, nothing to forward. Despite that, the Name is carried forward from USLEEP even if it's no different from Skyrim.esm. I would expect this record to not end up at all in my patch? EDIT: The logs: Main http://pastebin.com/0QNgpWaz Patch http://pastebin.com/acdXuZuw

That was the plan, but they have said a few times now that they have scrapped this feature, so it will not be implemented. They will provide links to the mod's page on Lover's Lab, Steam Workshop, and Nexus Mods and a user will have to find the download there by themselves. Okay, good to know. That particular feature, as stated, was rather worrisome to me. It seemed to me that a direct download link would have allowed the bypassing of things such as site membership/age filters, and site bannings. It also seems that it would have defeated the purpose of driving more traffic to the mod page itself. I understand your worries, but the Mod Picker team are only proposing to feed nxm:// links to Mod Organizer/NMM/whatever tool one by one. It's the exact equivalent of clicking the "Download with NMM" button for you, and for that to do anything you need to have your Nexus credentials entered into your mod manager. It doesn't bypass anything. Personally I really hope that the auto-download feature doesn't get scrapped. It's the key feature that would, down the line, allow someone with little free time (say a dad with a wife and several kids) to just go to the Mod Picker website, find a load order by a reputable community member, click GO, and an hour later have a playable, fully configured modded Skyrim ready to roll. The ingredients are already there to automate everything, said community member would probably have to provide scripts to clean or repack properly certain mods, and the mods themselves would be downloaded from the Nexus. (Before over-reacting, read the rest of my post :wink: ). Mod picker isn't only for "dummies" wanting to just click a button though. It's incredibly useful for people who want to make informed decisions about which mods they pick, because as you add mods to your "shopping list" on the website, it will be able to tell you if a new mod you're about to pick has any potential conflict with your list. It does that by storing a list of all the records modified by every mod. The "driving traffic to the mod page" issue is indeed a bit delicate. Let's be realistic, some people are just gonna download and never bother to check the mod page. It's not very different from people who just follow a guide by a Youtuber or the STEP one though: do you think they bother reading the descriptions? They just click the "download with NMM" button or go find the download link and close the page. However the huge increase in ease of use Mod Picker will bring will bring a potentially insane number of people who will be able to experience Skyrim mods. Among those, a good proportion will be in awe at how awesome such-and-such mod is and will feel grateful towards its author. And they're gonna want documentation, updates and bugfixes. (Because everybody knows that anything not updated frequently these days is "dead". Like Chess and Soccer, no updates in a while so nobody plays them... wait.) It's at this point that the Mod Picker website must make it as easy as possible to get to the actual author page and thank him through endorsements or cold hard cash. Or the hard love of bug reports. Regarding the bug reporting specifically, I think some mod authors are afraid of the support issues new users coming through Mod Picker could bring - pretty much the same issue raised every time someone dares to utter the word m.o.d.p.a.c.... *ducks* . If you think about it though, with the most stable load orders from people who know what they're doing rising to the top through a well-conceived reputation system, support problems will diminish. People will mostly run, say, Arthmoor's or Gopher's fine-tuned load order instead of coming to poor mod authors with their messed up, horribly maimed Skyrim install that they further damaged with half-understood cleaning instructions. So when they report bugs it will be actual bugs not the result of unspeakable mod mixing. Even people who mix their own mod list should have less bugs with the advanced warnings about compatibility, and some basic annoying questions such as "Is it compatible with X" will be less frequent. All in all this project will make the process of making 300+ mods working together a little bit more bearable, and you'll be able to share the fruit of those hundreds of hours of work with others while respecting copyright. I really hope the project is allowed to realize its full vision. If there ever was a time to be open-minded, it's now. EDIT: As an aside, I think that if the Nexus and some mod authors find it's too unfair to be able to download without visiting pages (and thus viewing Nexus ads and having the slim chance of being motivated to donate to the mod author), automated downloads from Nexus triggered by Mod Picker could be reserved to premium Nexus members or members who have at least donated to a mod author once. It would massively restrict the potential user base and I think it would be a mistake to not test the system without paywall first - as I explained above Nexus traffic will probably increase not decrease. But it could be a solution down the line if things are not satisfactory. (And removed repeated paragraph.)

Funnily enough, looking again at my screenshot in the previous post I realized that Immersive Weapons has probably no business being tagged Relev (or even Delev). It just adds stuff to the leveled lists and shouldn't be putting back or removing anything - more investigation needed. It currently works as intended in Wrye Bash given the assigned tags though, so it's still a good example. I agree that Smash is probably only missing the re-adding of deleted items in order to replicate Bashed Patch functionality for leveled lists. Will you add it in a short timeframe? You claim to implement all Wrye Bash tags, which at the moment is rather misleading. Wrye Bash's way might not even be the best or most correct way to do things, as you say, but a lot of mods have been organized around it's capabilities, so I think it's very important to perfectly match its functionality before proposing a different, potentially better way of doing things. It'll ease the transition and drive adoption of your tool. It's pretty simple to find a use case for re-adding leveled lists elements though. Mod A (Delev) removes vanilla items from leveled lists and replaces them with its own variants. Mod B just adds some cool new weapons to the lists. Mod C (Relev+Delev) loads last and is a big overhaul that wants to integrate some changes from mod A but completely rebalances the leveled list, so it puts back its own twist on the vanilla weapons in the list, keeps some weapons from mod A and removes others. The bashed/mashed outcome should logically be Mod C's list + mod B's additions. With your current setup a full rebalancing patch like mod C can't work properly, the best you can get is mod C's list without mod B's additions.

I've made modifications to a plugin, and now I'd like to turn my modifications into a patch. Is there a way in TES5Edit to diff the modified plugin against the original and output the difference? How do you guys typically go about doing this? Related: is there a way (while in TES5Edit) to copy to a new plugin all modifications you made to an existing one? The Construction Set has the concept of "active plugin" where your modifications end up, haven't seen anything equivalent in xEdit. Otherwise I think it these would be good suggestions for new automation scripts. Thanks for the great tools!

Alright, I can definitely see huge potential in this tool, but as of now it's unable to produce the same results for leveled lists merging as Wrye Bash. As a reference here's how Wrye Bash's leveled list patcher and tags work: https://wrye-bash.github.io/docs/Wrye%20Bash%20Advanced%20Readme.html#patch-lists As of now in Mator Smash 0.2.2: At least viewed from the GUI (somehow when I diff the setting files with a json diff tool they're not the same), Delev and Relev tags have exactly the same settings, and most importantly, they both preserve deletes. Only Delev tags should preserve deletes.Relev tags cannot add back to a level list an entry removed by a previous setting with "preserve deletes". Looks like you want another parameter "override deletes" if your goal is to provide a functional Wrye Bash replacement.So you end up with this, where Immersive Weapons (alternate esp from PaMa patches) is tagged Relev: Wrye Bash correctly puts back the vanilla Iron Sword in the leveled lists, while Mator Smash incorrectly preserves the delete from previous mods marked Delev. Something that's unclear to me (more testing needed) is whether a file with the "Skip" setting is completely ignored by the patch. For Wrye Bash's leveled list patcher, every mod has an implicit "Add" tag in addition to the eventual Delev and Relev. Not sure which kind of setting I should apply to a mod in Mator Smash to ensure basic "Add" functionality as described in the Wrye Bash readme quoted above. EDIT: What's the best forum to discuss this tool, BTW? I might be interested in further testing and maybe even participating in development, depending on my time (and how repulsive Delphi ends up being :P ).