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.

Load Order and You Introduction Load ordering is the method used to determine how conflicts between mod plugins (.esp, .esm files) should be decided. If two plugins alter the same game data, then the changes made by the plugin loading later will override those made by the plugin loading earlier. This "rule of one" results in a list of plugins, with those earlier in the list having any conflicting changes overriden by those later in the list. This list is the load order of the plugins. A game will only load the plugins that are active. Up to 255 plugins, including the game's .esm file, can be active at any one time. Active plugins are listed in the game's "plugins.txt" file, which is stored in the user's local application data folder. Nevertheless, it is useful when working with load orders to consider the load order of all plugins, even if only some of them will actually be loaded. This is both because it is easier to display a single list of plugins than a list and an unordered set, and because modders have engineered methods that allow the changes made by inactive plugins to be loaded by another plugin (eg. Wrye Bash's Bashed Patch). When any such methods are being used, the load order of inactive plugins decides which plugins override others, similar to as if they were active. In Oblivion, Nehrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and early versions (pre-1.4.26) of Skyrim, load order is decided by the relative timestamps of plugins in the game's Data directory. An installed plugin's load order is therefore an intrinsic property of that plugin. In Skyrim v1.4.26, a new textfile-based load order system was introduced, in which load order is decide by the order in which plugins are listed in "plugins.txt". This brought with it a fundamental change, in that load order is no longer an intrinsic property of a plugin. This has the result that inactive plugins do not have any load order. The Solution The solution agreed on by Lojack (Wrye Bash), Kaburke (Nexus Mod Manager), WrinklyNinja (BOSS) and Dark0ne (owner of the Nexus sites) was that total load order would be stored in a "loadorder.txt" file, itself stored in the same location as "plugins.txt". "plugins.txt" would be kept in synchronisation with "loadorder.txt" so that the order of plugins that the game loaded was the same for both files, but the latter would allow the load ordering of inactive plugins. Modding utilities would then perform their changes on "loadorder.txt", updating "plugins.txt" to reflect any changes to active plugin load order as required. This provides a common store for the total load order in lieu of the plugin timestamps used by the other games. There are of course a few more technical details to it, but that's the basics. What This Means For... Mod Makers & Users The bad news: Any utilities that you use to manage load order may stop having any effect. This is because nothing currently released knows about the change in load order system. In time, utilities may be updated to handle the text-based system as their programmers become aware of it. Until then, Skyrim's launcher is the only way to change load order. Also be aware of the current limitations of the solution, given above. One very important thing is that if you have a utility that can handle the text-based system, do not use Skyrim's launcher to set load order. This is because it doesn't know about the total load order, so if you change the load order through it, only the active load order changes and synchronisation between the two is lost. The only way for a utility to re-sync the two load orders is to undo the changes you made in the launcher. The good news: Nothing changes when it comes to making or using mods, it's just business as usual. Just bear in mind the point about the utilities you use to manage load order needing updating, and have patience while the programmers do their thing. If you want to manually set your load order, the instructions below may be of use: Open your plugins.txt in a text editor. plugins.txt is found in your local application data folder. On Windows Vista/7, this is C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Skyrim\plugins.txt. In plugins.txt, list the plugins you want active in the load order that you want them in. Each plugin goes on a separate line. Master files should go before non-master files. Merged or imported plugins are not active plugins, so should not be listed in plugins.txt. If you also have a loadorder.txt in the same folder as plugins.txt, then update it so that the plugins in plugins.txt are in the same order in both files. Save the edited file(s) and quit. Don't try to then edit your load order through the Skyrim launcher. It has been reported to reset your load order if you set it up manually. What This Means For... Mod Utility Programmers The bad news: Your utilities will no longer function when it comes to load order (both getting and setting) until you update them to support the current system. The good news: I've already done a lot of the work for you. The BOSS API supports both the timestamp-based and text-based load order systems through the same interface, so you don't need to worry about the differences, and includes all the functions required for querying and changing load order and activation status. The BOSS API will be included in the v2.0 release of BOSS, but if you PM me I'll send you a copy if v2.0 hasn't been released yet. Note that the BOSS API is licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0 license, so your utility's license will have to comply with that to use the API. If your utility's license is such that you cannot use the API, it's still worth looking at the BOSS API's readme as that contains the information on the textfile-based load order standard. If BOSS v2.0 hasn't been released yet, PM me and I'll send you a copy of the readme. Utility Compatibility List All known modding utilities that make use of load order in their functionality are listed below, with their compatibility status with regards to the text-based load order system. The three possible states are: Compatible: The latest release of the utility is fully compatible with both the text-based load order system and the timestamp-based load order system. Compatibility In Progress: The utility author(s) is (are) working on adding compatibility for the text-based load order system, but the latest release is not yet compatible. Incompatible: The utility is not compatible with the text-based load order system and the author(s) has (have) either stated that they will not be adding compatibility, or are not known to have made any statement on whether they're working on compatibility or not. BOSS - Compatible Wrye Bash - Compatibility In Progress Mod Organizer - Compatibility In Progress Nexus Mod Manager - Compatible Oscape - Compatibility In Progress TesModManager - Compatible Final Notes Please remember to have patience if you're waiting on someone to do something in relation to this issue, eg. users waiting on programmers, or programmers waiting on me to fix an API bug. Everyone who can do anything about this situation is pretty busy, and these things take time to get done right. Also please don't hate on Bethesda for changing the system. It's better than the old one, and the issues that it brought up are because we're too smart for our own good, coming up with ways to bend the rules (eg. Bashed Patches), so it's wrong to think that Bethesda need to cater for the situations in which they arise. It's probably a good idea if people post below any utilities that use load order in some way that aren't listed above, so that I can add them to the compatibility list. Finally, spread the word. If someone's having trouble setting the load order, let them know that it might be to do with this. If you know of a modding utility not listed above that changes or uses load order in any way, let the author(s) know about this. Please be polite while doing so though, I don't want to end up reading verbal abuse resulting from this instruction. When letting utility authors know, don't demand they update their utility, just post a note saying that it doesn't work any more and link to this thread. Related links: Thread #1 on the BethSoft forums Thread #2 on the BethSoft forums This thread on the Nexus forums News item for the issue on Skyrim Nexus

Thanks. I got a third confirmation on the BethSoft forums, so this can now be locked.

I posted this on the Oblivion BOSS thread, but it'll probably be worth putting it here too. Skyrim is being released tomorrow/today. If you didn't know that, you do now. If you did know that, and will be getting (installing) the game tomorrow/today, then I need your help. I need to know three things: The filename for Skyrim's executable. For example, Oblivion's is "Oblivion.exe". The filename for Skyrim's master file. For example, Oblivion's is "Oblivion.esm". Whether the directory structure is the same as for Oblivion. Specifically, is there a Data folder in the same folder as Skyrim's executable? Does this Data folder contain the master file? If not, I need to know where the executable and the master file are located (absolutely or relative to one another). I'm not buying Skyrim myself unless I become convinced that it's worth getting, so I can't figure this stuff out myself. This information is crucial to BOSS if it is going to support Skyrim. If you can find out the above three pieces of information, please post them in this thread, unless three others have already posted the information before you. The "three others" bit is for confirmation, but I don't need a hundred confirmations. Of course, we don't even know if load order will be important in Skyrim, but all signs point to the system being retained, so it's worth being ready in any case (especially since the extra work to support it is hardly anything). Also, if you want to volunteer to be a committer for Skyrim's masterlist (assuming one is required), or any other masterlist for that matter, feel free to do so. The earlier we get things sorted out the better.

There are two ways Bash determines dirty status: 1. uses BOSS's information regarding the CRCs of known dirty mods and checks the CRCs of your mods for matches. Basically: a. Someone scans a mod for dirty edits in TES4Edit, and finds some. b. They report the dirty mod's CRC to the BOSS team. c. The BOSS team add that info to the masterlist. d. Wrye Bash uses the masterlist to tell users. BOSS does the same, using roughly the same method, when you run it. 2. It scans the mod records for ITMs and UDRs using CBash. This calculates the ITM/UDR count directly without referencing any external info. It may give slightly different values from TES4Edit, because the latter (incorrectly IMHO) lumps some other types of unnecessary but not dangerous edits in with the ITM count it gives, that are not strictly ITMs. I can't remember which "Scan for Dirty Edits" uses, you're best off asking the Bash team directly.

Incorrect. BOSS only does that for plugins that it doesn't have CRC information for. The required info is all laid out and explained in the readme. If you're getting those messages not disappearing, it's because you haven't reported their plugins' information to us as requested in the relevant official BOSS thread.

The Support Plugin is basically useless in OBGEv3, we didn't really update it. There's an alternative linked to in the OP of the official thread. Two posts in as many months. This isn't me...

Shoot to kill (metaphorically, of course). It's the only way to deal with scum like them. Yeah, they caused a bit of a stink. Not being a regular here I don't know what the response here was, being mostly mod users, but we basically burned them at the stake over at the BethSoft forums. They're asking for permission now, but before they were basically scraping Nexus for mods. Of course, choose what you think is right, but bear in mind that they have a record of not just disrespecting modders' wishes, but actual copyright theft. It's not the sort of place I'd want to host my stuff, even if it was treated OK.

Voted Liquid Water because v2.0 has pretty much no bugs and is far superior to the water in most games, let alone a mere mod. (since LW relies on a rewrite of part of Oblivion's graphics subsystem, hacking the game engine, it's not a mod like Realistic Water is) It's not a fair comparison, really. If you can get OBGEv3 working, then LW is going to beat RW every time, because RW was made with the CS, and LW was made by hacking the game engine, so can just do so much more.

Oh the irony. I just changed my passwords. Thanks for letting us know.

I was wondering why I was getting MySQL errors, haven't had one in ages... Keep up the good work Dark0ne, and hopefully if anyone does make a police report something will get done about it. :)