Witcher 3, Vortex really needs to stop restoring/overwriting user.settings

[HadToRegister]

Vortex needs to stop resorting/overwriting/saving the user.settings file, because whenever you make changes to any mod you have installed, Vortex will ask you on next deploy to REVERT/SAVE CHANGES etc to that file whenever you tweak in-game mod settings, leading me to have to check the mod menu every single time I start the game and adjust the settings BACK to what I changed them to, because Vortex keeps changing them back to the old settings, no matter whether I pick SAVE.

There's no reason for Vortex to even manage the user.settings and input.settings files, because it makes modding TW3 harder because in this instance, it is working AGAINST the person modding it.
Especially when a mod requires you to manually edit the user.settings and input.settings files, and then vortex comes along and restores the defaults, undoing everything you just did.

Have Vortex ignore these files for TW3

 

Also, please bring back the MOVE (Deploy) option for the Witcher 3, this worked perfectly for me with an older version of Vortex, but sadly, only Symlink is available now.

[Pickysaurus]

If you just save the changes on deployment surely that does what you're asking?

[HadToRegister]

If you just save the changes on deployment surely that does what you're asking?

 

 

Yea, I have to do that every single time I deploy mods. And it always saves the user.settings with the OLD settings, so that I have to change them back to what they were once I've loaded the game, which causes and endless loop of every time I start the game, Vortex telling me that changes were made outside of Vortex, and if I should save the changes, and so Vortex saves the OLD changes, and when I load the game, I have to change the mod settings again, so the next time I load the game, Vortex tells me that user.settings was changed outside of Vortex and if I want to save the changes, so it saves the OLD changes, so I have to change them back once I load the game etc etc etc

[HadToRegister]

OK, I have tried SAVE, REVERT and Whatever the third option is.
No matter which option I pick, Vortex restores the SAME file every single time, the WRONG one, I check it each time, and it always restores the user.settings that has all of the autoloot AS+ filters turned OFF (which is a PITA to have to turn them on every single time Vortex insists on restoring that file) and it restores Font settings for a mod to 18, instead of 16.

EVERY.SINGLE.TIME

I always do a quick compare using the program "Beyond Compare" and a known good backup of user.settings that I made with the correct settings, but no matter what, Vortex finds the wrong file and restores that instead.

Sometimes the user.settings is a Symlink, and other times the user.settings file is an actual file.

I assume that Vortex is restoring/Saving the file from the "Witcher 3 Mod Menu Data (Default)" folder, but what it does, is it is finding the WRONG file somewhere that does not exist in the "Witcher 3 Mod Menu Data (Default)" folder, and it's restoring THAT file with the wrong settings and filters turned off, instead, and it's also replacing the correct file in the "Witcher 3 Mod Menu Data (Default)" and overwriting that one with the wrong one as well, so when Vortex insists on doing a SAVE, REVERT etc, it will restore that wrong file.

 

Also, something strange occasionally happens with the Load Order display, it will list a bunch of mods with the ! in a triangle and says "This mod is not managed by Vortex"
Today, the load order is perfectly fine, but it seems to randomly decide to list some mods TWICE, once as "Not managed by Vortex" and another entry that IS managed by Vortex.

[Pickysaurus]

So Vortex installs mods to that folder and does so by a merge.

 

Messing about with the files post deployment may not do anything as the merge overwrites it. Or potentially the merge could try and pick out values changed by the user and re-apply them (spoiler: that's not super easy to work out programmatically!)

 

It's probably possible to create a mod in Vortex with your settings that will override the others during the merge.

 

I'm not super familiar but the source of the merge is here: https://github.com/Nexus-Mods/vortex-games/blob/74cfe63cc1cf213e29e906a7002dcf5404d53f65/game-witcher3/index.ts#L987

[sljensen63]

It modifies the input.settings AND the dx12user.settings. Whenever Deploy is initialized, any settings you had in either file are gone after deploy.

I've recently been saving the changes after exiting the game to another file, then after deploy, and I know that no user.settings should have been changed due to the mod I'm installing, I overwrite the new file with the saved file.

Drives me crazy.

I've liked the simplicity of Vortex. But I'm going to have to go back to the Witcher mod manager, if I can't figure out how to stop it.

[AngeleJR]

I've been using W3MM because of this. I got tired of always changing the settings to what I have it to.

[anjenthedog]

+1. I just updated a bunch of mods (skyrim SE) and vortex implicitly recommended a file deletion in almost every case. Since I can't say with certainty that these defacto recommendations aren't correct, who am I to challenge the expert opinion of Vortex? And yet for all the ones in which I agreed to their default position, I had to turn around and reinstall each because afterwards, their content showed "blank" in the content column.

 

Not end of world, because I fixed each one (by reinstallation after the fact), but it seems silly to have vortex default to a destructive process that doesn't inject the new content in its place and leaves a "new" version of the updated mod as composed of nothing.

 

It only started happening sometime last fall (first time I noticed a problem, I had already inadvertently collected over a dozen "empty" mods from trusted update processing, and then once I figured out what was going on, fixing them revealed why so much content had been missing), so I think something got broken in the update code during one of the updates in or around late summer early autumn.

 

The utterly confusing explanations and option titles provided by the modal popup with each optional recourse (save-delete and revert-restore ) compounds the problem

[Pickysaurus]

Sounds like you're talking about the External Changes window. If Vortex made the changes itself, it would know what to do with the files, but this window shows because something outside of Vortex (the game, another modding tool, etc) made edits. Vortex can only then take a best guess on what is supposed to happen.