dcd111

I've recently been playing around with Vortex on SkyrimSE. I used MO for Skyrim for a long time, and briefly used MO2 for SSE before trying Vortex. I used NMM for about five minutes four years ago and that was agonizing. Anyway, that's where I'm coming from. Overall, so far I have a favorable impression. I had some difficulties with profile-specific save games, but I think profiles will probably be made more robust in future versions so I'm not too worried (and honestly I don't really use many different profiles anyway so I just made the saves non-profile-specific for now). But there are a few major features of MO that I miss. Regarding the manual plugin order debate, I strongly disagree with Tannin's contention that in most cases, if LOOT doesn't care, you shouldn't care. This ignores the many situations where stability or mod functionality is not the critical factor. I find that most of the specific plugin relationships I need to define are a result of my arbitrary preference for what appears in-game, not to make the game stable or to make a mod work properly. This was particularly true for facegen mismatch issues that would lead to the grayface issue in Skyrim. For example, I had around a dozen NPC face mesh improvement mods, some covered all NPC's, some covered specific NPC's, and they had to be loaded in a very specific order to make sure the same mod wins both the plugin conflict and the facegen asset conflict in the left pane. That decision appears arbitrary to LOOT, which would just alphabetize those types of mods and it would result in a mess in-game. But where I agree with Tannin is that manually ordering these plugins is far more tedious than using LOOT-style rules and priorities, so I actually agree with the Vortex approach (although I think it is unnecessarily stubborn to prohibit manual load order for those who want it). In my own experience, I used MO's manual plugin ordering capability to correct LOOT's incorrect assumptions maybe three times before I wanted to pull my hair out. Every time I added a plugin to my load order, I used LOOT, and every time I used LOOT I'd have to remember the manual fixes for dozens of plugins. So I started using LOOT's rules and priorities to make it match my own priorities, and then I knew that those manual requirements would automatically be applied every time I ran LOOT. What I do miss from MO is the manual placement and visual feedback of the left-panel order, especially for texture and mesh replacers (I was using well over 300 visual "mods" that had no plugin in MO). The rules-based conflict-resolution system works okay, but it's not as visually intuitive as left pane order. And if I notice an incorrect texture in-game, it's not at all straightforward in Vortex to troubleshoot that. Combined with the lack of a data tab to track down which mod is contributing a specific file, and not having the ability to temporarily hide mod files from within the program, I expect texture and mesh replacers are going to cause a lot of frustration for me in Vortex as I ramp up my visual replacers.

So, from what I gather from various google searches, nobody has ever come up with a way to override face texture paths specified within the facegen nif file for a particular NPC. Or am I wrong? In other words, if you want to change the path of the skin texture files used on a particular NPC's face (femalehead.dds, femalehead_msn.dds, etc., I'm not talking about the facetint file), you need to modify the facegen mesh file or regenerate it using CTRL-F4 in CK, this can't be done by overriding NPC records or head parts records in CK/TES5edit using a defined texture set, or by some other similar plugin-specific method. The reason I ask is because it would be helpful if default body/default texture plugins for any particular custom follower mods could be distributed by others if the author is not interested in creating that plugin themselves. You can do this for the body by overriding body part records and referencing the game's default textures in those records. But if you change the body texture to the game's default texture paths, you have to do the same with the head to avoid mismatches and if the only way to do this is by modifying the custom facegen nif, then you can't distribute it. Even with permission, the changes need to be reapplied or updated every time the author distributes a new facegen mesh, it would be cleaner if it could be done with plugin records. Anyway, I'm just hoping I am missing something about the way the game uses head parts records and facegen meshes. Thanks for any suggestions.

I started playing Skyrim only a few months ago and I soon started looking for mods. I'm not much of a gamer these days so that was my first introduction to this site. Frankly, I was surprised to find out that a site like this exists at all, let alone for free. I have downloaded hundreds of mods from here in the meantime and I am very grateful to you and the staff of this site for this amazing resource. Happy New Year.