wrinklyninja

All these people talking about LOOT and nobody invited me to the party? For shame! Though really everyone but jet4571 has done a pretty good job of explaining what LOOT does when trying to decide load order and why it does that, so it looks like some people do read what I write. :happy: There are a few different issues intersecting, so I'll separate them out for clarity. LOOT and Fallout 4 support Recent development code supports Fallout 4, and snapshot (read: prerelease) builds are available. There will be a stable release at some point, but I don't have a date to give at this time. There's nothing in particular holding it back though. *Edit*: In fact, I received an email earlier today from someone asking if they could open a thread for LOOT here, so I expect that will appear soon. Out-of-order masters not crashing the game This is news to me, because I haven't tested it since the early days of Skyrim. In general though, a load order that does not crash is not necessarily one that works well, and loading plugins after those they edit still makes sense, so I see no reason to claim LOOT's "irrelevance" or for me to change its behaviour here. LOOT not being a mind reader It's correct to say that LOOT cannot guess what your intent/desire is. As others have said, it assumes you want as many of the plugins that you have installed making as many of their changes as possible, and orders them according to that, subject to various constraints like loading plugins after those they depend on. However, as others have again pointed out, you can tell LOOT what you want by supplying metadata. Anything more seamless would require, as Zilav alluded to, machine learning to refine its behaviour, which means collecting data from its users about the load orders they use and the changes they make, and even then that would only reduce, not eliminate, the need for you to supply metadata. This has always been a limitation though, it's not some brand new problem and doesn't make LOOT any more "irrelevant". "Use LOOT" In the end, you can manage your load order however you like. Plenty of people do so manually, probably more use LOOT, perhaps because they find it quicker and easier. While knowing what you're doing is always beneficial, ideally we'd like to have a system which is effective enough that you don't need to, and in many cases LOOT gets close enough for that to be the case. I don't consider the blanket recommendation to use a utility to hide the details from you to be a bad one, because not everyone has the time to spend hours learning before they install a couple of simple mods so they can better enjoy their free time. If relying on LOOT or any other such utility proves to not be enough for them in the future (because their game blows up or whatever), they can learn then, when it has become necessary for them. You can only lead a horse to water, not recommending LOOT isn't going to stop people who aren't interested in learning from trying to use mods. LOOT isn't some pancea, it's just a utility most find useful. Also remember that LOOT does more than just sort your load order: its metadata, including the messages it displays, helps users identify mistakes they've made, and its reporting on dirty mods alone is worth the download, IMO.

In case anyone's interested, no, I haven't been contacted by anyone at Valve or Bethesda.

The issue seems to be caused by the packaging scripts not including a couple of files in the archive and installer. I have now replaced the packages with fixed versions, so if people could re-download v2.3 and let me know if that fixes the issue, that would be great. (Thanks to Sasha-alTherin for linking me to this thread on GitHub, I wouldn't have seen it otherwise.)

I think that bans and strikes should be public, but warnings not. The difference as I see is that you could get a warning for posting something particularly distasteful whilst very drunk (random example), and while bad, this isn't a reflection of your typical behaviour. It shouldn't then be an ugly stain on what might be a pretty good record, especially since it's not 'official'. A ban or strike is an official statement from Nexus saying that the user has either crossed or regularly toes the line, and that's worth notifying other users of. Such notification is pretty useless unless details are given.

Yeah, because messing with things you don't understand then distributing what you've done to people even more clueless than you is always a good idea. Just wait till the CK gets an update, is better advice. You're far less likely to accidentally break something in ways that may not be immediately obvious.

AFAIK comment lines and empty lines are just ignored. Causing a parser to fail when either is encountered in a relatively free-form file is pretty stupid, and I trust that Bethesda's programmers aren't pretty stupid. (Though with the Skyrim launcher being case-sensitive, it is sometimes difficult to tell.) Try it and see what happens. Steam mods don't have a separate load order. Mods are mods to the game, it doesn't matter where they come from. That's a list of things you can download, not a load order. I'd suggest starting a new thread for your issue, if you've already done a search for it and found no existing threads. Just use BOSS if you don't know. There are explanations of how to decide on a load order lying around the internet. TESCOSI has a reasonably accurate article on Load Order, IIRC.

Well, um, yeah. Enough to eat, anyway. Can't have the slave workforce starve away now, can we? Yeah you can. You just call them interns. :confused:

Maybe because it's hard enough to get legalese right in the language you know? Also issues with who does the translation: Dark0ne has to be able to trust that the ToS are the same in the translation, so he'd have to take it to professionals to get good piece of mind, which is an extra expense. At the risk of sounding a stereotypical monoglot, English is still the most widely spoken language in the world (Chinese has a greater number of speakers, but they are geographically concentrated in and near China), so there's not much point. You reach the widest range of people with only one language if you use English, and English happens to be the primary language spoken on the Nexus and the primary language of all its staff, AFAIK.

OP updated with some instructions on manual load order management.

1. Other utilities need to show total load order (and allow editing of it) too, so a universal file is necessary. Otherwise you'd have Bash and NMM, etc. telling you different things. 2. Plugins.txt does allow '#' comments, but is Windows-1252 encoded so can only hold a subset of possible filenames, which isn't good enough.

Yes, I'd like to file a bug report for this issue too, please. It is very inconvenient. :P

To clarify, BOSS isn't renaming any files. It just displays them with different cases in the BOSS Log. Such case differences should be reported on the relevant BOSS threads. EDIT: I've had an independent report that the plugins.txt is case-insensitive for Skyrim, as it was in Oblivion.

Are you a programmer wanting to use the BOSS API to handle the load order access/modifier functionality of a utility you're writing? If not, I'm afraid I don't hand out code unless it's for beta testing, and I already have enough beta testers for the next version. If you really want the latest (uploaded) code, you can checkout the SVN and build your own executables/DLLs.

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. You don't need to change your behaviour: just be aware that modding utilities may have no effect when you try to set load order with them until they are updated. If you're thinking that the loadorder.txt distribution is necessary so that beta testers know where to load their mod, then that's not the case. Modders should just continue giving instructions on where to place plugins and leave the actual placing to users, like how is done ATM.

I replied to this in the news post, but to state it again here: AFAIK it will be changed forcibly. That is to say, Skyrim won't do anything to it, but it won't recognise it from your timestamps any more. It seems to list active plugins in alphabetical order by default, so it would probably change it to that. I didn't really look into the issue, I was more concerned about the long-term consequences. If you want, you could back up your load order and then restore it again after the patch is released and utilities have been updated to be compatible. If you don't use non-Bethesda utilities that use load order in any way, you don't need a loadorder.txt. If you really feel like making a loadorder.txt manually though, it's as you've said, but the file has to be encoded in UTF-8.