BeowulfSchmidt

Essentially, except for the parenthetical part. Vortex copies hard links into the data directory, not the files themselves. This is a more space efficient method.

Was there no âBlack Tree Gamingâ directory between âProgram Files (x86)â and âVORTEXâ?

I suspect that Nexus would have to secure permission from the mod author to do any kind of conversion. Any given individual is, of course, free to convert any individual mod for personal use, but not for distribution, which is what Vortex would effectively doing.

According to the release notes automatic updates was just enabled in 0.13.2. If I read it correctly, it will post a notification when an update is available. Then you can respond to the notification to install. That would explain why mind didn't notify me then; I had 0.13.1. Updated now.

Is the Settings => Vortex => Update setting supposed to automatically update the application, or does it notify the user that an update is available? If the former, an option to notify rather than auto-update would be good. I presume the fact that it's not working at the moment is because the program is neither beta nor stable. :smile: Do I need to uninstall the previous version before installing the new one, or will the installer take care of that?

preface: i hate steam. and especially its library management - it's unreliable, wonky, can't select a drive root as a librariy, can't import a library unless it's empty ... i could go on forever. so, i let steam do its thing and download stuff into, (e.g.for skyrim) E:/.../steamapps/common/Skyrim then go on and copy this skyrim folders contents onto my ssd (e.g. C:/tesv/main) and delete the folder in E:/.../steamapps/common/. Next step, i create a symlink in E:/.../steamapps/common/Skyrim and let it point to C:/tesv/main, which makes steam believe skyrim is installed in E:\, when infact it isn't. Now VO always thinks the game is installed in the /steamapps/common/ folder. To be able to set the path manually i had to fool VO into thinking i hadn't skyrim installed - i had to delete the contents of /steamapps/common/ - which was my symlink bottom line: steam works, and i have my games managed the way I want to. Pretty sure you can change the drive to which steam installs games. I have steam installed on C: and all my games installed on E:

Correct, for now (at least when I tried it). There's no reason it can't be extended since Vortex will allow files to be installed in to the game directory such as ENBs. Sounds like a good feature request. Thanks for the confirmation. For SKSE, this is not a problem for me, as I never intend to ever run a Bethesda game again without the appropriate version of a script extender installed. I might possibly make an exception for TES: VI when/if it comes out, but even there, I'm likely to delay buying it long enough that there will be an SKSE version by the time I do so. :smile: I can definitely see where it would be handy for things like ENBs. Though I've never used any myself, I've seen some examples of well done set ups, and might consider it if Vortex were able to better automate the entire process.

I presume that setting up SKSE64 with Vortex is essentially similar to setting up SKSE with NMM and MO, i.e. copy the SKSE executables into the Skyrim SE game folder, and then packaging up the scripts into a "mod" that Vortex can install. Is that correct, or is there a way to make Vortex handle the entire process?

I had this problem as well. What "symlink inside steam" did you delete?

Thanks for the responses. With regard to the inheritance, I wasn't even thinking that the visualization issue would be the most problematic. Honestly, I think it could be visualized moderately easily (he says without knowing anything at all about the code implementation) with forced placement on the panel and connecting lines (maybe even tell-tale icons), indicating parentage. No, I was thinking the difficulty would actually lie with making sure a child was compatible with the parent, and vice versa. For one thing, if one isn't careful about setting up the parents and the children, mod order could end up with all of the "parent" mods being loaded prior to all of the "child" mods for one parent/child set, but a completely different mixture, even completely opposite, for another parent/child. Adjudicating that kind of load order seems like it would be possible, given the way I've seen the rules being described, but I wouldn't want to be the one to implement. :) I don't think it's an issue anyway given the way you've described the dependencies working. Making sure a new mod makes it into all the cloned ones shouldn't be that arduous. WRT to the editor, cool. That'll be one of the first things I check out. Thanks.

The news post says sometime in the coming week. And it's still Sunday the 11th in most places in the world, including where we are in the UK. Plus, to a dev team, "sometime during the week of the 12th", means they have until the 18th at 23:59 before that deliverable is "late". :laugh:

So far, from what I've seen described here and in videos, I think I'm gonna like Vortex. Possibly not quite as much as MO, but definitely more than NMM. We shall see. I do have some questions that I haven't seen addressed so far. Not claiming they haven't been, but I've read most of this thread and don't recall them. It's possible that I will find these answers when I start using it, but I'm throwing them out anyway just in case there are nuances that a simple review of the features doesn't reveal. If I set up a dependency between two mods, will that dependency be respected in all of my profiles, or will I need to set it up in every profile in which the affected mods appear? If the former, the next question is moot, but if the latter, when I set up a dependency between three different mods in one profile, and only two of those mods appear in another profile, will that portion of the dependency be applied? You've chosen "Clone" as the terminology for creating a new profile from an existing one, so I assume that choice is deliberate, i.e. that Vortex makes a completely separate copy of the source profile and renames it, and that changes I make to the original will not be reflected in the copy. Are there any plans to implement some kind of inheritance between profiles such that changes made to the base will be reflected in the children? For instance, say I have a base profile for Fallout 4 that includes all of the DLC, and several child profiles that add different things for different play styles. Then Bethesda releases another DLC. Will there ever be a way to add that to the base profile and then have it automatically show up in all of the children of that profile? I think I've seen Tannin state that the Vortex UI "themes" are CSS based. Will there be an editor, or do I need to break out Eric Meyer's books again and review my CSS. :cool:/bs

Having been a programmer for 30 plus years, 40 if you count high school and the hobbyist years before I turned "pro", it's highly defensible. For the vast majority of users, who just want their game to work, the system I've seen described here, and demonstrated in several videos now, will tend to result in a more stable game experience for that majority of users. As a programmer, that's going to be one of my first goals. Adding bells and whistles later is farther down the list. Maybe much farther, depending on how many users and how difficult they are to implement. However, you're right that nothing precludes a rule based system from having manual control, and from what I've seen, Vortex does, in fact, allow manual control. I mean, isn't that what manually setting the dependencies is, i.e. manual control of the rules system? As for "more clicks, more time," I guess so. Once. Then the rule is set and you move on. Most users aren't going to need to do very much more than LOOT does, even for a moderately large mod list. And then not for long, as someone who's more civically minded than others will see that LOOT's master list is updated. /bs

I apologize if my search fu is just bad, but will Vortex have an import from Mod Organizer as well as NMM?

I'm sorry, but this is just flatly untrue. Creating links isn't a particularly time consuming process, but it isn't, and pretty much cannot be, as fast as MO's VFS. If you're talking about creating a dozen or two links, the chances of anyone actually noticing are close to nil. But, at the moment, my Fallout 4 data directory contains around 150,000 files. Even an optimized process to scan the directory structure and create the needed links is going to be noticeably slow. Not hours, of course, but minutes is certainly reasonable. If I were still actively working on mods, and still in the habit of switching Mod Organizer profiles regularly, that would be plenty long enough to be a significant irritation. I understand the benefits of Vortex's approach, I really do. But the PR here seem to be either misunderstanding or misrepresenting the trade-offs. When Vortex comes out, if people have been promised something that works "just as easily and quickly" in all things, they are going to be seriously disappointed to find out its not true. And I say this as someone who is likely going to switch over to Vortex when the time comes. I'm not averse to making certain trade-offs, I'd just rather everyone be more upfront about the fact that those trade-offs are going to exist. Your point about trade-offs is well taken; I agree with it entirely as a general rule. However, I don't think it's going to be as big a difference, even for large mod setups such as yours, as you fear. The vast majority of the "heavy lifting" of creating profiles and links to individual files, and updating whatever the game uses for "load order" data, will likely be done by Vortex itself interactively with the user, as they add mods and adjust overrides and conflicts. Since those will involve only a few files at a time, the time spent manipulating the links will be negligible, and mostly unnoticeable to the user. If done the way I think is likely, i.e. a directory for each profile, which is filled with links to individual mod files, then switching profiles is a matter of changing one junction (aka "link"), the one the game sees as it's "data" folder, to point to one of the profile folders. That operation should be as close to instantaneous as it's possible to get; it certainly won't be noticeable to the user. Since each profile folder would contain the links to actual files, it seems likely to me that the game is going to have to traverse only two links, the one for the "data" directory, and the one for the individual file. In Windows 10, this is still going to be fast enough that people won't notice it. For games that don't use something analogous to Bethesda's "data" folder, it might be more complex, but I can't imagine that it will be necessary to have links much beyond two or three levels even for those.

Given who is working on it, I'm tempted to say that Vortex being better than NMM is a given. :) I've been a developer on large teams long enough, however, to know that it's not just one person that makes or breaks an app. My hopes remain high, though, and will until something comes along to make me change my mind.

WRT what symbolic links are, that's pretty much correct. To running programs, at least with regard to opening, reading and writing contents, they are the file to which the link points. Honestly, if I were doing this, I'd be tempted to investigate making the Data folder itself a link, and have separate "Data" folders for each profile, then fill each of those profile data folders with links to the individual files, which would be in still other locations. That way, switching profiles is a matter of changing the Data directory link, and not copying. The heavy lifting (relatively speaking) of filling up a profile data folder with the appropriate stuff would be handled interactively with the user, rather at game start up time. I haven't done much with links though, so I don't know the performance characteristics, and how well links to links to links are handled.

Thanks for the update. Hope to hear more soon.

By gum, if Vortex doesn't do things exactly the way that both Mod Organizer and Nexus Mod Manager do, I won't be using it! And get off my lawn! A couple of observations. One, people who tell programmers that something isn't difficult or complex to implement will largely be ignored by actual developers unless the commenting one can definitively prove their qualifications to make such a statement. Even the people who pay me to develop software don't get to tell me that unless they can prove they're better than me. Second, Tannin has no doubt learned many lessons from writing Mod Organizer, and if I don't miss my guess, he's also perused the NMM source code. The notion that he might not apply those lessons and observations to the current project is simply ludicrous. If I understand correctly, he wrote the original vfs that MO uses, so I suspect he has a rather more thorough understanding of its strengths and weaknesses than anyone else posting here. If his opinion is that it's not appropriate at the present time, I for one will believe him. Fortunately, I suspect that most mod users just want software that works, is moderately simple to use, and has the features they want, whereas how it works, as long as it doesn't muck up their computer or game, will be almost completely irrelevant. I've avoided using my Skyrim SE installation precisely because I've been waiting for three things: SKSE, SkyUI and what is now known as Vortex. And yes, I'm aware that some months will pass before all of those things are done, but my existing modded-out-the-wazoo-with-MO installation of Skyrim is perfectly adequate at the present moment, so I'm not all that concerned. So if you need a tester, at any phase, using Windows 10 and a pristine copy of Skyrim SE, one who knows how to submit bug reports with detailed reproduction steps, screen shots, and other assorted QA like activities, I'll be on the lookout for the publication of the application.

After reading though this thread, I have to say I agree with those who are calling bullspit on this one. What sane person would take the chance? I take it there's still no mod out there that allows for an alternate path, like cancelling or disabling the launch sequence before entering?

What turned out to be the problem?

I can't imagine why it might be a problem, but is there any problem with unsubscribing mods from the Steam Workshop, and then reinstalling them from Nexus? I have a few mods that I subscribed to when I first installed the game, but before I found Nexus. I've since found them on Nexus, but haven't taken the time to switch them over. If this has been covered before, my apologies for not finding it, and would someone who knows of it point me at that discussion?

You don't call NMM "stable"? Wow. I see software available off the retail shelf that isn't as stable as this. As for why more developers aren't stepping up, speaking as one of those developers, I'm too busy playing the bloody game. :)

A Paladin would by preference use whatever weapon his or her primary worship focus would use. A Paladin might use restoration spells to heal or help those who aided him in battle, and those innocents who were injured or harmed by either his enemies' actions, or his own if someone were caught in the cross-fire. A Paladin might use one of his enemies' weapons if the weapon itself weren't evil. If he could use it to forward his own deity's agenda more effectively, and his soul is not imperiled by its use, then he might consider it justified. In fact, depriving one's enemies the use of their weapon, while wielding it against them might be perceived as a greater good, as that weapon will now not be used against those the Paladin supports. If it really bothers you, destroy it and enchant whatever weapon your deity prefers you use. Although, I suppose Dawnbreaker probably isn't disenchant-able, huh?

So, I went a picked up a gamepad and I have to say, it does make a number of things, like movement and combat, much easier for me than the keyboard and mouse (though that could be because my mouse is crap for gaming; I may still get a "gaming" mouse and try that out as well). However, I do very much miss the hotkeys that I had set up for favorites and such like. I wasn't expecting the keyboard to be disabled while the gamepad is plugged in. Is that normal, or did I do something wrong? Is there some setting somewhere that I've missed that lets me use both? I say "disabled" because when I try to set up SkyUI's favorites menu to keystrokes, I can't. As for breaking the flow of battle, I'm enough of a newb at combat with a controller (or keyboard) that breaking the flow is sometimes necessary, as I'm not quite as conscientious as I should be of watching my stats in heat of combat. :)