Removal of the Add Game Wizard extension

[insomnious]

Back in 2020, a Vortex extension was created called the “Add Game Wizard” which had the aim of giving community members a starting point to add new game support to Vortex. When the extension was installed, it added a button to launch a step-by-step wizard where you can fill in a form, find the game, choose from common options, select folders etc. This sounds great in theory and it can work for a lot of games that are based on common patterns. More often than not, however, they only work on the author's machine and just aren’t appropriate for distributing to other users.

Historically we've always encouraged the sharing of these extensions with the wider community, but over the last 9 months we’ve reviewed and updated our internal processes to improve how we verify game extensions.

As part of this work we found that 90% of extensions created with the wizard simply don’t work. The result is lots of frustrated users who expect things to work, large overheads for us verifying (and primarily failing) newly submitted extensions, as well as dedicating the time needed to provide support for broken extensions already available.
What’s going to happen?

As of this morning, we’ve removed this extension from the site which means that users won’t be able to download and install it anymore. Any users that already have it installed on their computers won’t be affected and can continue to use it as normal.

What if I want to add support for a game?

You still can! Nothing has changed regarding extension development and they can still be submitted as they always have been by uploading to the site. This then kicks off our verification process and we will take a look.

For the budding extension developers out there, you can:

• Download our barebones extension template - game-extension-template-0.1.0.zip
• Check out other working extensions 
• Read the developer documentation

Please test the extension where possible before it’s submitted, here is a guide to what it needs in order to pass verification.

Where can I go for help and support?

We can always be found on Discord or on the forums and we are happy to support wherever we can along with the helpful wider community too. Here are some links: 

#vortex-dev on the Nexus Mods Discord 
Vortex Support on the Nexus Mods Forum
Developer Docs on Modding.wiki
Legacy Docs (but still useful)

Future plans

We have made a start on our plans to overhaul our Vortex-related help and support. Some of this is more complicated than others and it will take us many months to fully sort out. The developer docs are a bit all over the place right now but we are going to make them more accessible and up-to-date as well as in a single place!

[CreativeB34ST]

Following article still references this extensions: https://nexus-mods.github.io/vortex-api/2022/04/03/Creating-a-game-extension.html

Edited February 9 by CreativeB34ST

[sylfest]

So you removed the easy way to add gamesupport for the masses and now I have to play coder for 99% of the games I own because you want to gatekeep your users?

I don't understand this... Why are we supporting you? I might stop because now I have to do all this stuff pr game because your app only supports 7 of 150 games on Steam.. I thought we paid you to make it work, so we don't have to..

 

oh well...

Edited February 24 by sylfest

[Dark0ne]

We removed the easy way to add broken game support into Vortex for the masses.

[2luce4u]

Well, there goes my ability to mod the games i have that you dont list, back to waiting on others to do the work as i dont know how.

it was worth paying for the freedom to mod games i added, but now i tend to agree with slyfest.

 

hopefully something can be done in the near future to rectify this issue allowing us to play and mod the games we play, not just the community picks or those already supported.

[Pickysaurus]

2 hours ago, 2luce4u said:

Well, there goes my ability to mod the games i have that you dont list, back to waiting on others to do the work as i dont know how.

it was worth paying for the freedom to mod games i added, but now i tend to agree with slyfest.

 

hopefully something can be done in the near future to rectify this issue allowing us to play and mod the games we play, not just the community picks or those already supported.

You can still create an extension for any game, you just have to do it in a way that won't break your setup (and that of anyone else who uses the extension created via the Add Game Wizard). The extension was removed because it caused so many issues. 

 

If you want to make a Game extension, follow this guide (it's linked in the game tab of Vortex too!) https://nexus-mods.github.io/vortex-api/2022/04/03/Creating-a-game-extension.html

[Tannin42]

Just for the record: I'm the creator of the extension, it's open-source, Nexus Mods has my number.

At no point did anyone reach out to me to figure out what the problem is or if it could be fixed before deleting it. I learned about the removal from this very thread.

[Anvillior]

Really? Some broken extensions is still better than no extensions at all. Terrible frigging move by nexus.

[ChemBoy1]

@Tannin42 - Not sure if anyone at Nexus has talked to you about this now, but I think one of the issues was in the makeFindGame function. You should remove or comment out the "catch" line as it prevents the dialog for the user to specify the game location manually from coming up if the game was not discovered.

function makeFindGame(api, gameSpec) {

    return () => util.GameStoreHelper.findByAppId(gameSpec.discovery.ids)

       //.catch(() => util.GameStoreHelper.findByName(gameSpec.discovery.names))

        .then((game) => game.gamePath);

 

The extension should also include a basic "setup" function as that is part of the standard specified in the github documentation:

function setup(discovery) {

  try {

    // make sure the mod folder exists (! is for trusting that it won't be null)

  fs.ensureDirWritableAsync(path.join(discovery.path, spec.game.modPath));

  //return Promise.resolve;

} catch (error) {

  return Promise.reject(error);

}

}

 

function applyGame(context, gameSpec) {

  const game = {

      ...gameSpec.game,

      queryPath: makeFindGame(context.api, gameSpec),

      queryModPath: makeGetModPath(context.api, gameSpec),

      requiresLauncher: makeRequiresLauncher(context.api, gameSpec),

      requiresCleanup: true,

      setup: setup,

      executable: () => gameSpec.game.executable,

      supportedTools: tools,

  };

 

Finally, a clearer explanation of the pathPattern function and how it works would be helpful. Took me a minute to understand. Your code is extremely useful for specifying mod types. I was not able to find any official Vortex documentation explaining how to properly set up mod types aside from one line of comments in the actual API code files on github. 

When going through the Wizard to specify mod types, it is not clear to the user that they should use the pathPatten template function to specify the targetPath so that it is not an absolute folder address. 

I hope this is helpful and that these edits could help the Nexus team feel comfortable allowing this mod to be re-uploaded. It is extremely useful to the community and helped me get my start in creating and sharing working game extensions for Vortex. Thank you for making it!