Nexus Mod Manager plans, answers and if you're a coder, we want yo

[JianXintou]

In response to post #11344295.

What you said in your first sentence is actually a great idea, it would definitely prove a lot more fruitfull than copouts, denial and all the "I didn't know anything"-shtick. Especially when nobody on the outside (and more often than not even people on the inside, at least with big firms) have no clue why and how things work.

[Fallhammer]

Dark0ne, I am a little late to the party with this comment, but I would like to add that many people may not realize is that Nexus as a whole has a membership currently as I write this of 6,770,853 Ok let me write that again 6,770,853 members. This greater than the population of the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland combined which as of 2012 had 6.4 million*. So basically your are trying to run a site that is on par with providing information to the population of a Country, I am always impressed with how well the site handles all of this traffic, obviously not everyone of these members is active. As far as NMM goes, it is still my main go to software I use when ever I run Skyrim, in fact I use it to "run" Skyrim, so for me it is become part of my Skyrim experience. Thank you and your team for the great product your provide for free.

 

* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_population_analysis

The population of the island of Ireland in 2012 was approximately 6.4 million comprising 4.58 million in the Republic of Ireland with another 1.8 million in Northern Ireland.

 

Irish population analysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Edited January 22, 2014 by Fallhammer

[blacksmithkazuma]

I think it works well so far, only thing I see wrong with it is it crashes on large mod installations and the the Automatic Server Picking is, well not all that smart lol.

[Brenman94]

Hey, I use NMM for Skyrim. I'd use it for FNV but it has some troubling installing certain files to the right places (at least the last time I tried, which was during v0.43). Nexus Mods is still my go-to for Bethesda games. Really the main thing I can think of right now that I don't like is the automatic server selection. I have fast internet (100 Mbps down), but it'd be nice if NMM would download from a server other than Salt Lake City when I live in SC. Good luck in the future and Godspeed!

[tetris11]

Hi there, first of all - thanks a lot for this great tool, it truly does make sense of the messy jungle of mods out there and I would be lost without it.

 

On a slight technical complaint; one of the biggest headaches with mods is reading through the manual to find and instal the pre-requisities - and this is needless:

 

I know the majority of users here are Windows/Mac, but I was just wondering how hard it would be to take a leaf out of linux's book and create a clear dependency system and set up repositories for all these packages using the well established 'stable', 'testing', 'devel' model ?

 

Ideally, such a system would be implemented on the nexus site first, where modders must first explicitly tag their packages with mod requirements (>= mod version), and then later that data would be used by NMM.

 

But that really shouldn't stop NMM from having it's own repos and tagging and promoting the packages itself.

 

Also, I understand that you want NMM to have this great over-arching engine to handle all mods, and I applaud your efforts in this difficult task. But genuinely, why not take the modular approach amd handle each game separately? You can optimize/merge strategies later if need be.

 

Sorry if I sounded ungrateful just now, I truly am thankful for this fantastic tool.

 

Edited January 31, 2014 by tetris11

[r40k2011]

Wrye Bash still more feature-complete than NNM.

 

But if i would start developing this kind of software from scratch i would just reimplement gentoo linux repository and package system. There's practically no limit for what you can do with custom build scripts. You can create rules like "compress all *.dds files in category texture/landscape according to my configuration file" or "run ReProccer every time new items installed with mod". Modders would specify mods conflicting with their one in package files without needing end-users to look in description for that info. Or specify localizations, compatibility patches and optional mod features to build conditionally - in gentoo there's USE flags in which you specify features you want to be installed. Like, if you build STEP, you set USE="+core -gameplay' and it would install only core STEP mods without gameplay mods. And most importantly, mod authors could specify the load order declaratively, like "after <some esp>" - that would make tool like BOSS obsolete, because maintaining a database that large without sql-goodies must be a real pain.

 

Also it would be nice to enforce some release quality requirements for mods on repository endpoint and automated testing for modders' uploaded packages.

Edited January 31, 2014 by r40k2011

[r40k2011]

In response to post #11579498.

I agree, the only way to do things right is to specialize things. Implementation of planned features on current technology stack is a huge amount of work - and finished software will still lose to universal and tested linux package systems. Creating a GUI wrapper on top of CLI tools is more designer's job than coder's.

[RanTanTan]

Besides some errors and mistakes and crashes and maybe problems with other games... honestly I would be LOST without you and your mod manager in getting skyrim to run properly with all the mods I have installed. After reading your open and honest approach I, who has rarely commented here on anything at all yet, just want to say one thing:

 

The ammount of work you guys pured into the manager and the site plus providing it for free for anyone wiht that kind of traffic this sites gets is just admirable! I would definetly NOT have such a great experience with my bethesda games and for that alone you all here desere a BIG Thank you Verry much.

 

All your effort is highly appreciated.

 

Kudos

[askfor]

Major issue which prevents me from releasing Fo3 mods with more permissive license is possibility of mod being adapted for New Vegas. New Vegas is released only as DRM software which requires on-line access. I am opposed to that concept and can allow any of my work to be used in that way.

 

Game vendors earns extra money from mods, because they extend the product lifetime. The least thing I can do to hurt those DRM software vendors is to deny them that money. So, unless New Vegas gets released as non-DRM software, my mods will remain with strict license.

 

[Helmic]

In response to post #11658022.

I think this is exactly what he's addressing. A lot of modding communities have their own ideas of what's "right" or acceptable and try to force their vision on anyone who wants to use their mods, which has resulted in utterly ridiculous scenarios like the Open Cities Skyrim mod debacle where the author decided everyone MUST HAVE OBLIVION GATES BECAUSE MY CANON IS THE ONLY CANON and tried to get a user who modded the gates out banned from several sites.

That's not healthy for the modding community as a whole. Large, comprehensive reworks of a game are difficult to do because that one mod author either outright refuses to allow his mod to be included in a compilation or insists his mod runs his installer which loudly plays his poor taste in music and brands his logo like nothing else.

I mean, what you're advocating seems much more reasonable than trying to sneak in Oblivion gates, but that's not something necessarily everyone on the site themselves are going to agree with. It's something YOU believe in, not necessarily community-wide effort. A LOT of gamers actually favor consumer-friendly DRM like Steam and only take issue with the most draconian practices like with EA or Ubisoft.

And catering to each mod author's unique demands just isn't feasible on the scale the Nexus and NMM seems to be aiming for: the ability for users to easily install a collection of mods for any game and the ability for mod authors to mod with as many tools and as few obstacles as possible. It's certainly not serving the user by denying them access to possibly superior edited versions of a mod or to quality modpacks, it's not serving other mod authors who might want to tweak it or use it to create something better.

I really have to agree with Dark0ne fullheartedly. If modding as a whole is to improve, we need to become MUCH more cooperative. Restrictive licensing being seen as acceptable or the norm (you can't mod my mod) has caused way more issues than it's really worth. For every stubborn modder lost we'd have another working and updating a mod that would have otherwise been abandoned once the original author went AWOL. Rather than having twelve modders release twelve shitty performance mods, they could borrow from whoever released first and just improve on each other's iterations. Mods that have compability issues with more popular mods could release a modified version of the conflicting mods. Users could finally be able to download entire modpacks in one click without having to worry about compatibility or wasting an entire afternoon installing everything piecemeal.

We have so much to gain from more open licensing, I don't think any one mod author's personal agenda is worth forgoing that. Edited March 17, 2014 by Helmic