GBHHornswoggler

Grestorn: Thanks; sorry for not being as clear as I should have been. I mean the Plugins tab of Vortex; I'm talking about load order. Tannin42: Thanks for replying. Vortex is definitely putting the game ESMs at the top of my load order, in the correct sequence, as expected. I'm not seeing any behavior I'd call an error within Vortex. This may be my ignorance speaking, but it feels like Vortex is saying "these plugins are loaded automatically; they are not managed" and other tools are interpreting that as "these plugins are not active." The game engine understands Vortex; the game launches. But the other tools -- maybe the versions I'm using? -- are misinterpreting Vortex's instructions. It almost certainly is due to my idiosyncratic setup, so I'll keep tinkering with things. I'm still figuring out how Vortex works, but it's interesting and quite elegant. My one current hope for future development is for a system like Mod Organizer's "mohidden" status for inactive plugins; looking at a list of plugins and having to remember which are inactive on purpose (because of individual choices and options) can make things difficult, particularly when building patches. I'm not planning to use Vortex for Fallout New Vegas any time soon in large part because of the much lower plugin cap on that game. Being able to hide inactive plugins from the Data folder would be a nice enhancement, eventually.

First of all: I'm pretty sure I'm doing something fundamentally wrong. (Probably something really basic, too.) But I haven't been able to figure out what that thing is. So any insight would be welcome. I'm experimenting with Vortex to familiarize myself with it, and attempting to manage Fallout 3. (For two reasons: I'm not actively playing that right now, and it tends to be crash-prone anyway, so it will be clearer if Vortex helps on that front.) I have basically the list of mods I'd like to run with installed and deployed, and have cleared up the obvious conflicts. Autosorting is enabled. I'm using Vortex 0.15.2. And I'm trying to make my patches now. In Vortex, the Fallout 3 ESM and DLCs are at the top of the load order, with star and lock icons, as expected. But when I open up Mator Smash to make a Smashed Patch, the DLCs have migrated down to the bottom of the ESMs, and are unchecked as well. That puts a number of plug-ins above their masters, and so making a patch fails. Oddly, when I open FO3Edit, the DLCs are still unchecked (as is the Fallout 3 ESM), but they're in the expected positions at the top. But the two plugins at Mod Index 17 and 18 have switched positions -- which makes that program fail, since #18 is dependent on #17 (and has a rule to enforce that). So making a patch in FO3Edit also fails, for what seems like a different reason. If I open Wrye Flash, the game ESMs are in the correct position and unchecked. (I was able to get LOOT to sort the plugins by first opening Wrye Flash, checking those ESMs, closing Wrye Flash, and then opening LOOT. Without doing that, the game ESMs are not checked in LOOT, and it won't sort.) I can make a Bashed Patch in Wrye if I check the game ESMs first. It seems like something else is changing the load order, or just marking the game ESMs inactive -- either a Vortex process I don't see, or some other application. I do have Mod Organizer 2 open, but that is managing Fallout 4, which shouldn't affect Fallout 3. I've been launching other applications from Vortex, since I'm used to doing it that way from MO2. Any thoughts, or ideas to test, would be welcome.