Things are getting out of hand with incompatibility, let's fix it now.

[StuykGaming]

There's a lot of modifications out there that adjust the values in the FormID lists for the menus. Which results in a lot of incompatibility issues. What makes it worse is that there's no guideline set to try and correct this issue. Instead mod authors are currently throwing together random categories in random places.

 

I know it's pretty early, but it's better to start this now then to have to deal with it in five months when there's too many people not willing to try and fix this.

 

Currently the best structure I've seen for categories is OCDecorator. His structure is super simple and easy to make a patch for. It goes like this:

 

Main Menu -> OCDecorator -> Anything to do with OCDecorator

 

Huh, who would have thought you could add things to the main menu under your own section?

Now you're probably wondering, but wait why is his way of doing it superior to my way?

 

Because when it comes down to it, I can add one more section before OCDecorator called 'Addons' and now everything that is in Addons has another category for each modification.

 

Main Menu -> Addons -> OCDecorator, SSEX, etc.

 

Which in turn makes everything way more organized and compatibility patches are easy to make.

If we start doing this now, we can stop the cluster that I see in the future. It's coming, I don't know how fast but it's coming.

 

Homemaker on the other hand...

Almost like a lost cause if you ask me, he's got everything everywhere. Seriously needs to be fixed before it gets worse.

[bombasticmori]

The reason that I ended up changing so many of the a vanilla categories is that currently the vanilla system is a cluttered mess, especially with other mods enabled, making it very difficult to find anything. I also wanted to make my mod feel a bit more aesthetically like vanilla, by integrating them with the existing system, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to compatibility.

 

Unfortunately, the changes you're proposing aren't really going to do that much at all in terms of dealing with lots of compatibility patches and issues right now. Even if everyone makes a pact to only add their mod to the main menu, we'd still have to make a patch to make it compatible with any other mod that also edits the main menu. While yes, it would be easier to make the patches themselves, but the difference is you only have to edit one formlist instead of the five that are currently in Homemaker, and since you can just drag and drop the keyword names in FO4Edit, it's not really like there's that much more work involved.

 

I'm sure once we get the GECK we'll be seeing a lot more elegant solutions arise to deal with this problem, and like I've said when asked about this previously, the current system *is* untenable. Luckily Bethesda games already have a lot of modder made systems for dealing with this, like SkyProc patchers, Bashed Patches, MCM menus and Merged patches. I'm sure we'll be able to think of even better systems as time goes on, but until the GECK releases incompatibility is just something we're unfortunately going to have to deal with.

[KimberJ]

Bump, I don't really understand it. I kind of think that the large amount is disorganized gamers wanting to learn how to mod. That or the amount of gamers that end up producing one. Though also the game shouldn't be allowed to be modded right now, as all kinds of hacks an work arounds are created, in massive amounts due to the exciting nature of the whole thing. All this stuff is junk mostly, while maybe not, later all those files will remain an cloud things post GECK launch, as well as be forever endorsed ecstatically under excited an often fun stupidity mode to which large portions of our now much larger community has become. It was negative enough when it was a small thing. I figure, the same thing will happen, though with a more forgiving game. In that an amount of the compatibility will exist an create a set we can use, it won't all get updated though. So I vote yes, but I'll have to read it again to understand it, unfortunately not my area, I'm thinking.