acidzebra
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Posts posted by acidzebra
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I turned 50 this year, I'm fine with it I guess, it is what it is. Despite our society's obsession with youth, everyone gets old. My family had a TI-99/4A before the C64, but the Commodore was my first computer love. Endless games, programming in basic and later assembly, experiments with the electronics and soldering, with the sound (that SID chip is still awesome), it offered so many possibilities and learning opportunities and sparked off a life in technology. My original c64 died long ago, I bought a refurbished one recently. Out of nostalgia I suppose, but it was very satisfying to finish some games I never did as a child or wanted to have but never found back in the day (we were at the mercy of what friends and the local stores had). The new-old C64 also has an SD-card loader, games load in seconds and not minutes (you can't see it but my inner 8-year old is still jumping up and down about it).
Anyway, I also never got around to doing the family script, and in between travel and reading and career stuff and various tech projects I kept up gaming as well. From the C64 to Amiga, through the console wars (mostly on the Nintendo side, I have a soft spot for Zelda and Mario), to PC gaming, then online gaming, watching new genres emerge (and die), the endless race for better hardware. It's been a wild ride so far, can't wait to see where it goes next.
As for why I play still games, I'm a big fan of two things in this life:
1) travel, I love seeing new places and people, trying new food, experiencing different world views, seeing all the weird and wonderful and sometimes breathtaking stuff that billions of years of planet earth has produced.
2) the stories we tell, I don't care if they're in book form, or a movie, a sculpture, painting, a song, a videogame. I love stories. One of the few redeeming qualities of the human race imo.
Videogames allow you to travel to places and tell stories in ways that would be hard or impossible to convey in another medium. Is it all escapism? On some level, I guess. But there's more to it imo. A life spent experiencing new things and being entertained and having experiences worth thinking about, it seems like a pretty decent life to have. Looking at the bulk of history, it could be a lot worse.
And when we all get really, REALLY old and sit in retirement homes, we'll have LAN parties again. It'll be great.
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Much of this can be done through quests (which can run in the background invisible to the player) rather than papyrus scripting.
the rough outline (one option at least) would be quest reaches stage X > quest has alias that gets filled by specific NPC > NPC gets a travel AI package from quest through the alias and will move to new location > quest reaches new stage when NPC is at location > quest loads sandbox AI package to NPC through alias > quest reaches new stage, waits, and goes back to start > rinse, repeat)
https://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=Category:Tutorials - if you have no idea about quests you will want to start reading at section "Quest Design Fundamentals" to get a general grip on what bits go where, and then from "Intermediate Quest Design" the stuff about packages and aliases. It will take a while and practice to get the hang of it, but will help you in pretty much all NPC-related work going forward.
You can also see how others solved it by looking at their mods and how their quests are set up, there are lots of mods on the nexus that give NPCs travel/sandbox packages through similar mechanisms.
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Moving time forward won't be an issue in most instances (passing days or months in this way could cause needs/survival mods where you need to eat and drink and sleep to freak out though, but for small enough values like a few hours it should be fine - note that I have not tested this as I don't use survival/needs stuff). Moving time backward can conceivably break things (I can't think of concrete examples, but I could see how this could confuse things).
Either way there are a bunch of global variables you can mess with using getvalue and setvalue
GameHourGameDayGameDaysPassedGameMonthGameYearThere used to be discussion and examples on the creation kit wiki but I can't seem to find it anymore.https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/baw4ni/comment/ekepg2e/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 see the comments for some example code, not sure if this is optimal code but it's a base to understand the general process and potential pitfalls from. -
My hunch is the largest reason to not openly license a mod nowadays is monetization, which is understandable. Guessing things like the Creation Kit restrictions also make it bit trickier, too.
This situation existed well before DP and patreons etc, so while that may be a contributing driver, it's not the original driver. I also think that for the vast majority of mod authors the number of hours they put in vs. the payouts in form of DP/other sources are well below any kind of living wage levels, so I don't even think the profit motive is all that strong of a driver tbh.
My anecdotal observation is that modding is where very distinct kinds of people meet by virtue of wanting to create and share stuff. Imagine a spectrum, label one end "engineer" and the other end "artist" (these are convenience labels, nothing more):
Engineer types
- generally have a technical background
- are used to open source projects and similar frameworks and value the ability to share and remix stuff as they see fit
- may take a "do whatever" stance when it comes to permissions on their works, which tend to be open
- mods may tend to demonstrate higher technical complexity (game engine hacks, patcher frameworks, etc)
- ownership/credit may be viewed as less important
Artist types:
- generally have an artistic background
- may want strong controls over their work, permissions tend to be restrictive
- may have strong feelings on how their work is experienced (which should be according to their intentions)
- mods may tend to demonstrate higher artistic complexity (textures, models, music, etc)
- ownership/credit may be viewed as more important
Game modding brings these types together as it straddles both the artistic and the technical (in varying degrees depending on the game). As I said, I imagine this as a spectrum with people trending more towards one end or the other. I think this is intrinsic to people; it's just how they're wired. As an engineer-trending type, I definitely have my own bias so it's hard for me to be objective about it. I do wish people would be more open with permissions (and think it's a bit futile to try to rigidly control stuff you put on the public internet for all to download which is the furthest opposite of a controlled environment) but it is what it is. Neither view is right or wrong imo, they're just different, and people on opposite ends of the spectrum probably find it hard to understand or fully grasp the other viewpoint.
Ultimately the mod scene thrives thanks to contributions from people on both ends of that spectrum (and everyone in between). Whoever made the mod, it's their stuff, their creation. They can do with it as they wish. Even if understanding is hard, a little acceptance goes a long way.
Afterthought: this spectrum model works to explain why mod scenes for different games can be vastly different; Minecraft has a high technical ceiling (extensive modding capability) but a limited artistic ceiling (not to disparage all the excellent texture packs but it's a pretty blocky world), so I would expect more engineer-trending types to be drawn to it, hence more open permissions. TES games have both a high technical ceiling (extensive modding tools) and a high artistic ceiling, so would draw a mix of both. Other games without modding tools but with limited options to swap out textures/meshes would thus draw more of the artistic-trending type, ending up with more closed permissions.
I also think that once a "default" baseline for permissions is established for a particular game modding scene you will see a certain inertia; a lot of people will mostly go along with the default no matter where they fall on the spectrum. Perhaps here Nexus could encourage more openness by defaulting to open/permissive licenses rather than closed ones, because I suspect there might also be a large group of people who don't care all that much, they just want to share some cool stuff they made (and they would click through whatever defaults are set, imo the current permissions screen you get when uploading a mod is an intimidating mess).
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On the site, click your profile picture, go to site preferences
Then allow adult content but add tags to block specific content you don't want to see.
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https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:A_Cornered_Rat details the vanilla options;
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:No_Stone_Unturned requires starting a ton of stuff in vanilla, unfortunately.
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We could look at adding something like this, but the big question is where to put it. The forum is currently structured with siloed sections for each game, so you could always post it under the game forum with a tag for Collections?
Just add a Vortex Collections section in the... Vortex section?
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FWIW the 'person' you're addressing actually crossed the line in another thread and attacked and belittled another modder's MODS.
Something IIRC has never done before.
Yea....this is how divided this decision has divided the community.
Totally pathetic.
Just going to point out here that in the GMAD thread (which a lot of people here can't access) I said that
a) your mods are pretty niche (in terms of audience/reach/scope)
b) you appear to have last published a mod about two years ago
c) I am in the same boat (niche mods/rarely publish) which you appear to have missed completely.
If you perceive this as "AN ATTACK ON MY MODS", then well, don't really know what to say. "lol" covers it pretty well.
The reason I pointed this out is that there is a distinct pattern of authors who have this sort of niche mod and/or who haven't published in years, who will not be affected by this in any real way, but who have been absolutely frothing at the mouth. Fielding the most insane conspiracy theories, trying to work out how to sabotage things, and anyone who doesn't toe their line is a shill or whatever else you throw at people constantly while trying to shout them down, so they no longer engage and you can sit uncontested in your toxic little echo chamber being angry at everything while you try to work out how to best inconvenience the users. All that will accomplish is complaints on your mod pages and a further drift into obscurity and irrelevance. And maybe that's for the best. Case in point:
3. "Being user-hostile is generally perceived as a bad thing", I would never have wanted to do these things, to protect myself from this kind of hostility towards authors, but I have 0 choice in the matter since Nexus gave me an ultimatum of "surrender in 30 days or leave", so don't blame me for their forced ultimatum, I really wish I had other options to pick from, but I don't.
And how dare you asking me to surrender just so its more convenient for you, be frigging happy that you get a big mod that took 2 years to build all for free, but your too lazy to download some files from another website and then call me the hostile one.
You want convenience? Go to McDonalds and die of heart-disease in your 40's, or you can put in some effort and make decent meals... Clearly you prefer the convenience.
Dear lord listen to yourself.
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Maybe a stupid question but if you're not going to make your entire mod available for users from the nexus but force them to use some offsite thing (allowable or not), why even bother? Because as a user I would go "that's nice, I'll use another mod instead". Being user-hostile is generally perceived as a bad thing, and inconveniencing users for whatever point you were hoping to make IS user-hostile. If you have that level of disagreement with a hosting site, find another one altogether. Why this tortured construct?
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I just noticed that the user name of a closed account is no longer being posted, only a series of numbers.
Just out of curiosity, when and why was the posting of user names for closed accounts discontinued?
I would say that directly relates to GDPR compliance, unlike so much of the mod noise going on. Don't know when but probably around the same time GDPR came in effect.
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Nexus is throwing a bit of a wobbly at the moment, forums were down for a bit, https://www.nexusmods.com/ itself was down too (still as of writing)
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I'm honestly amused that people think I'm upset or want specialt treatment. I was simply asking for clarification. Which I have gotten and made my peace with.
Comparisons to company boards and drivers and doctors licenses are completely out of place.
fair - can you do us all a favor and type "please close this thread".
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one mod will give one option and another will have the same, but not know what got selected earlier. Example-Def-UI asks for a screen ration default 16:9, second mod asks for a screen ration, but 4:3 is selected. I could not remember what ratio was the default in Def-UI.
If you mean "the mod I'm installing presents a popup and I need to stop and look up some stuff before continuing", just click the X button in the top-right of the popup, that'll stop the install.
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Recently I had to move my Skyrim VR install to a different disk. Remembering what this was like in the days of OG Skyrim and my last experience with this of almost a decade ago, I nearly just deleted everything to start over, but I had a 170 hour savegame that I was rather attached to. So I gave it a shot.
I purged my mods, told steam to move the install folder, manually moved over the non-Vortex stuff (SKSE things mostly), and restarted Vortex. It complained about folders being moved and told me to go to settings. I did and adjusted things there to reflect the new locations. Vortex obliged and moved my staging folder over. I deployed my mods again. Started the game.
And... that was it. Absolutely painless. (Wrye Bash gave me some lip afterwards but that was a simple matter of a quick run of the game and a reinstall of wrye after and has nothing to do with Vortex)
Some of the concepts in Vortex took me a while to get my head around, the UI layout, dealing with rules, but after a while it all becomes second nature and it's really a very powerful tool (that in some parts of the community is woefully misunderstood/underrated because RTFM can be hard for people).
So, thank you for all the effort to make this amazing tool!
ps. one suggestion I do have - the button tooltips could use some improvement. In most cases they literally just repeat what the button text says. e.g. "ghost" - tooltip: "ghost". "combine" - tooltip: "combine". I figured out what these do because once again, RTFM, but two or three lines of text would do wonders there.
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we will likely see more gamers abandoning the s*** show Windows for Linux as time goes on
I love linux (but would never seriously attempt to use it for a hardcore gaming rig), this is a pipe dream but hey, maybe THIS is the year of the linux desktop lol
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Long story short, if you don't own the content or have permission to use it, your mod will get removed.
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Country: Australia
ISP: Tesltra cable.found your problem.
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In response to post #82737178. #82738688 is also a reply to the same post.DarkDominion wrote: @acidzebra,
Thank you for taking the time to reply to my post. Appreciated.
True, because I also never said that or mention that. But that's the typical reaction for someone who is a fan of the thing people frown upon.[...] "LOOT is not infallible" [...] neither are you (or me) [...]
One thing is for sure, and that is that it's my game and I would like to mod it via my ( load-order ) rules. Even if that isn't the perfect load order ( and assuming it didn't break my game, dôh ), it's still my load order for my game.
Your quote:[...] I'd take large group consensus over individual opinion [...]
Quote from Pickysaurus a few posts back:
Picky in contradicting himself by saying I as a member of said (Bethesda) modding community, and part of that group that has combined their knowledge, is more correct than I as an individual... My perception of a good load order is automatically false by his standards, because it's not from LOOT, so it must be based on faulty advise, advice which comes from that same (Bethesda) modding community who made LOOT into what it is. Actually Picky just says LOOT is build upon faulty advice.[...] chances are what you perceive as "correct" is not so or based on faulty advice. The LOOT masterlist is maintained by the entire Bethesda modding community so their combined knowledge is likely to be "more correct" that whatever you're basing your load order on [...]
( And if by "based on faulty advice" Picky means anything not from the Nexus....that would be..wow o_O )
Looking at your quote you are just echoing what the moderators say. Individual thoughts have been replaced by group thoughts or so it seems....
Sorry, but no-one besides me knows what my load-order is, so the "general consensus" that has been build in LOOT as to what my load-order should be doesn't cut it completely : every load order is unique. Some of the mods I have installed are tweaked to my liking but put back in the load-order manually ( through Vortex, using their standard Nexus ID ). How is LOOT going to tell me where that tweaked mod should go if it can't detect what I have done to the mod?
Just pick it up and move it to the place I want, quicker, cleaner, less hassle.[...] just create a rule [...]
It's borderline delusion of grandeur to think one has created the perfect mod manager, just by building it around a sorting mod ( which is what Vortex basically is : a shell for LOOT ). Nobody has an absolute monopoly on wisdom, I do not have that either, but I frown upon the method of LOrtex/VoOt telling how I should mod my game.
Moderators and ( the ) developer(s) are tired of us bringing this up every time they are trying to shut us down by saying (quote/un-quote) "Ultimately, this is a discussion that has been done to death, [...] not going to discuss the load order approach any further".
It's been discussed to death, shouldn't that just be a reason to listen to the people discussing it and maybe implement some of their ideas instead of brushing it under the carpet or shutting it down by ending discussions with a show stopping one-liner ?
( somewhere down the line I see Tannin42 jumping in and saying : can't change it, because otherwise Vortex and LOOT can't work together....sure. seperate them, that's all I want :smile: )
Love to hear everyone's thoughts on my opinion.
Cheers
-=DD=-Pickysaurus wrote: I'm not sure why you think my statement is contradictory. I am saying that your own opinion or the recommendations from a mod page are posted by one person with limited knowledge, whereas the LOOT masterlist is curated by users pooling their combined knowledge of modding from experience. If you feel you know better than LOOT, I suggest you help the community out by telling the LOOT team what's wrong.
We often see posts like "I have this plugin and it says it must load last.". No. It doesn't. It has to load after anything that it conflicts with, yes, but beyond that, it doesn't have to be dead last. Here's an example. I was always under the impression that my bashed patch for Skyrim had to be last, but I am able to load my Dyndolod plugin after it without issues because the Dyndolod plugin doesn't touch any of the lists modified in the bash. Had I not used LOOT I'd still be pointlessly moving my bashed patch to the very bottom of the load order.
Vortex will let you adjust your load order using rules and groups. You may prefer the "bad habits" from the NMM days, but you barely need to mess with your plugins when using Vortex, as acidzebra said you can have a full load order with less than 10 custom rule/group assignments. You have to also consider that a lot of extra headaches for our mod authors come from users who think they know best and load things in a silly order. So we're making it easier on both users and authors by providing an auto-sort solution.Could have created a ton of rules in the time you took to write this and never have to worry about that part of your load order again. Maybe write your own mod manager?
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In response to post #82644678. #82648508, #82649243, #82649413, #82650088, #82650933, #82705298 are all replies on the same post.The flip side of "LOOT is not infallible" is that neither are you (or me). In general, I'd take large group consensus over individual opinion. However, if you have a mod that you consistently want somewhere other than where LOOT wants to place it (and in a list of ~300 skyrim VR mods I have about 5 or 6), just create a rule. Done. Now every time you deploy/sort, your mods will be placed in the exact same place you want them to.Lindaleff wrote: Look at the thing for Mount And Blade, how you can drag mods up and down in the load order. Did you ever do that for Skyrimr? The lack of such a button or mechanic means several Skyrim mods will not work. For that reason, I uninstalled Vortex, and continued using the old Nexus Mod Manager. Skyrim is simply not playable otherwise.
And before anyone says anything, LOOT also does not allow you to manually move mods. LOOT is simply a rough guideline, but you are stuck with what it gives you, so mods will still break.
So, if you have not already, do the same thing for Skyrim, and add a button or mechanic to manually move mods up and down in Skyrim load order.acidzebra wrote: this is mostly you not taking the 2 minutes to understand how this program works
https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Managing_your_Load_OrderLindaleff wrote: That is almost word-for-word what someone told me when Vortex replaced the old Nexus Mod Manager. I looked at that page then, and looked at the thing in Vortex, and it was entirely too complex to understand. It literally wants you to learn how to program something, which I did not have the computer know-how to do then, and I still don't have now. It was not a "2 minutes" thing as you describe it. I spent hours on it, and could not figure out how to program it, much less program 150+ mods to work together.
The old Nexus Mod Manager has two simple arrow buttons, up and down. Click the up arrow to move the mod up, or click the down arrow to move the mod down. Easy to understand. Easy to use. Effective. This is what I want in Vortex. This article says the Mount And Blade section has been given a similar mechanic. Now we need the Skyrim section to have that same mechanic.Pickysaurus wrote: I suspect you're messing with your load order more than is actually required. Most of the time you don't even need to look at the plugins tab. And even then in my 600-ish mod install I probably had about 10 custom rules or group changes for however many plugins I ended up with.
NMM drilled a bunch of bad habits into a lot of modders. If you let Vortex do it's thing and only adjust the load order if it's actually necessary you'll find it much easier.Lindaleff wrote: Exactly the opposite. I was not able TO change the load order, which is why mods were conflicting with each other. I did not have a way to move stuff up or down to resolve those conflicts.
Those simple up and down arrows in NMM allowed me to resolve any conflicts without needing to learn a complex programming language, which is exactly what Vortex wants me to do.Pickysaurus wrote: You can double click a plugin and use the group drop-down to reassign it. I'm not sure why you feel it's like a "programming language" but if you have constructive feedback please feel free to submit to through the app.
I would suggest reading this first though: https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/The_Vortex_approach_to_load_order_sortingDarkDominion wrote: I really like Vortex, but it’s dependency on LOOT ( or rather it being a shell for LOOT ) has always been the beef I had with it. LOOT isn’t infallible. One needs to go through more hassle than necessary to manually adjust something.
I really wish the developers ( yes, looking at you Tannin42 :) ) would give us a choice:
LOOT version of Vortex
Non LOOT version of Vortex
I bet a lot more people would want to use Vortex because besides being tool for LOOT it really has some great features
Cheers
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In response to post #82644678.this is mostly you not taking the 2 minutes to understand how this program worksLindaleff wrote: Look at the thing for Mount And Blade, how you can drag mods up and down in the load order. Did you ever do that for Skyrimr? The lack of such a button or mechanic means several Skyrim mods will not work. For that reason, I uninstalled Vortex, and continued using the old Nexus Mod Manager. Skyrim is simply not playable otherwise.
And before anyone says anything, LOOT also does not allow you to manually move mods. LOOT is simply a rough guideline, but you are stuck with what it gives you, so mods will still break.
So, if you have not already, do the same thing for Skyrim, and add a button or mechanic to manually move mods up and down in Skyrim load order.
https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Managing_your_Load_Order -
Thanks Tannin, appreciate the insight.
As a suggestion, maybe update the popup box text at some point to clarify; it mentions "save" and "revert" but omits "use newer".
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When deploying, if I've been messing with xedit, I get a few choices. Vortex detects something has changed and offers me to
- revert
- save all changes
- use newer files
Revert works as I would expect, deploy the file from the staging folder overwriting the active file in /data
save all changes also does what I expect, overwrite the file in the staging folder with the active file in /data
use newer file is a bit confusing. is this for people somehow making changes in both folders? It appears to have the same behavior as save all changes otherwise (I typically don't make changes in both folders - what is the use case?) so I'm not sure what its function is.
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For many mods it does not matter.
https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/5lyvf6/actual_relevance_of_forms_4344/
provides some insight in what records in a mod do matter when it comes to form 43/44. If someone has some more up to date actual information (like, data, not hearsay) that would be welcome.
The rest is just noise; mod makers upload their free stuff, all that follows afterwards is your problem. Caveat emptor, as they used to say.
On the DL page it states that I need ".NET 6.0+"
in Vortex Support
Posted
the + in .NET 6.0+ stands for "or later versions". So you should be good.
This could be made a little clearer on the download page tbh.