An update on Vortex development

kristijan1001 · November 4, 2017

Is vortex gonna have new features other than installing and deinstalling mods ? Will we be able to merge mods to make life abit easier ?

Edited November 4, 2017 by kristijan1001

LittleChronic · November 4, 2017

Oh boy oh boy oh boy! I want it now <3 I'm so looking forward to it! I'm still using Mod Organizer 2.0.7 to handle my games.

Levionte · November 4, 2017

In response to post #54943263. #54946513, #54952193, #54952693, #54954443, #54955813 are all replies on the same post.

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Levionte wrote: As a relatively competent mod user, I have been pretty indifferent towards the NMM vs MO debate. I recognize MO has more features built in, plus it's definitely faster and more responsive. But it wasn't enough to make me switch from NMM until I was in a position of needing to reinstall Skyrim anyway. I did make the switch a few months ago and, having used MO since then, I stand by my original assessment. It's an upgrade, but doesn't offer anything I couldn't do myself with my previous NMM setup and good modding practices.

However, as a mod creator, I've found the difference to be gigantic. When I'm making mods, I'm not following good modding practices; it's not practical. I'm dropping things into my data folder manually, then I'm constantly adding, removing, or otherwise tweaking things throughout development. When I am finally in a position to create a mod package, I have to dig through my data folder for things I've put there.

And while I try my best to keep things organized, assets are required to be separated by type. My meshes folder has base assets, face geometry stuff, and outfit stuff someone else made that I'm using. Textures are in a similar situation. Animation files, behavior files, FNIS stuff go somewhere else. Sound is split into voice, effects and music files. And don't get me started on the scripts being lumped into the same folder as every other script for the game. There's a lot of stuff to keep track of, sometimes weeks and months after putting them there. Heaven forbid I work on more than one mod at a time.

I know not all mods are so encompassing, but for some of us, having everything thrown into one folder I can change on the fly like MO does is a tremendous time-saver when it comes to development. Not to mention trying to create an environment suitable for testing the mod. With NMM, I end up having multiple "mod installations" of a release build and loose files I can still modify. Then I am constantly on the verge of forgetting a file and then having NMM uninstall it and erasing all of my changes for the old version still in the archive.

I make this long, and somewhat dramatic, rant because all I hear about is how the new mod manager can serve the average mod user. And that's fair; they're the majority. But mod creators are pretty important to the community, so it'd be nice to make some features for us, too. It's not like MO is the perfect solution. It really is inconvenient to get lip files to generate, scripts to compile, preview things in nifskope, etc.. Can we borrow just a thought or two from the "which data folder is cleanest" debate and spend it on the mod creator's experience?

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lobotomy0 wrote: +1

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PeterMartyr wrote: So your looking for a Wrye Project type setup to implement into Vortex, with the ability to detect manual drops, & reverse sync from the data folder?

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anub1s15 wrote: not sure if wrye can do it (Mod organizer cant but it happens to be the way it does things) but what he wants is to be able to show all files associated with a mod.

as MO keeps its mods separated at all times virtually building a folder as NMM does by defaut it means you can easely see every single file a mod has instead of NMM where it gets blended in the ocean of mods. another side effect/side feature is that you can see which individual files are conflicting and prioritise accordingly on the fly even going as far as to have a mod overwrite another but have it hide specific textures you might want from the or a overwritten mod. just allows you to quickly and easily make changes at any time while knowing what file from what mod your actually changing.

cannot wait for vortex though, been using NMM for FO4 and MO for SSE (it didn't play nice with FO4 for unknown reasons. I like both and can use both but the control and insight MO gave you in to your mod load order (as in the actual order in which mods get loaded in to MO's virtual whatdoyoucallit) makes it my favorite though NMM's categories make keeping track of how many mods you have per category much easier, I know MO can do it to but I've always been too lazy to make sure all mods have the correct categories, in MO I have had 4 lighting mods installed side by side I just lost track of 2 over time >.>

also, Mod organizer allows you to get rid of the mod's archives saving some space which when your Skyrim is 57gb (MO data + sse folder) and your fallout 4 is 114gb (fo4 folder + NMM fallout 4 folder) it makes quite a difference, in essense fallout 4 is only 52gb there's just 62gb of stuff beeing horded by NMM (and i have accidently deleted it before, NMM was not amused) size wise NMM's folder is more optimal but since it gets upset when you remove it's backup's it ends up taking more space, mo keeps all the files from the mods uncompressed, which if your stacking texture packs can result in a lot of duplicates that just sit there getting overwritten but you can get rid of the archives and if you have to much free time attempt to pick out obsolete textextures to make it smaller. but i ocd hard on keeping my mods up to date so it just takes as much space as it takes.

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Sulhir wrote: I dislike all mod managers for the reasons you've listed. Having multiple profiles doesn't do me any good because not only do I need different profiles - I need those different profiles to link to different installation folders.
I use three different Skyrim installs. One for testing, one for playing, and one for modding. No mod manager, or even most tools, has been able to conveniently accommodate that need.
I keep one untouched install for testing. No modifications, no alterations, no cleaning of the masterfiles, as vanilla as vanilla gets.
I keep one that I build mods with. This one suffers a lot and requires restoration from backups occasionally when somehow modifying a texture file manages to corrupt my sounds archive (I don't know how it happened, all I can say is it did).
I keep one that I play with. Clean the master files, mod, actually play the game with. Rarely any problems with that directory.
Setting up all the different tools - xEdit, NMM, everything is a pain except for the Creation Kit which seems to actually only look for the files in the directory its installed into! Who would have thought Bethesda's tool would be the only tool to behave the way I want it to with actually no set up at all!

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Ethreon wrote: "But mod creators are pretty important to the community"

I'm willing to bet more mod creators don't need a mod manager to do anything for them beyond plugin management.

Speculation aside, I never suggested mod authors "needed" anything from their mod manager. I even listed a few work-arounds I've been using to make things work. And it does work.

I never even suggested mod users technically "needed" anything from their mod manager. Modding existed before mod managers and it worked. That doesn't mean the experience isn't objectively better because of it.

I'm not saying mod author's won't manage without it. I'm saying that things could be a lot better for the experience of mod creation, and I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that's even been a consideration. And even if the user's experience is all you cared about, given how the line between use and creation has been blurred with people cleaning their own plugins with xEdit, bodyslide mesh creation, etc., I think it deserves at least a little consideration.

mpjbay · November 4, 2017

I am an avid MO MO2 user however, I am looking forward to Vortex as Tannin was brought onto the project.

My hope is that Vortex will be the new version of MO.

Can't wait to try this out.

thetrueprZ · November 4, 2017

i cant realy imagine something better than mod organizer but i hope you proof me wrong! keep up the great work guys!

lued123 · November 4, 2017

In response to post #54957218. #54958828 is also a reply to the same post.

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If you scrolled down just a tiny bit you'd see Tannin answer this question. He's also said before that it won't touch your existing installation, so you can safely test your installation on Vortex and still go back to your already working installation if Vortex doesn't quite get everything.
Bear in mind that you'll probably be using a metric buttload of disk space until you pick one and get rid of the other though.

fireundubh · November 4, 2017

In response to post #54959113. #54959528, #54959868, #54960743, #54961303, #54963573, #54963743 are all replies on the same post.

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Thandal wrote:

On 11/4/2017 at 12:47 PM, ContessaR said:
<snip>
Or you could just not mess with the data folder at all and eliminate all possible issues regarding that. I'll never understand the resistance people have to MO type installations.

The author of MO is the lead developer of Vortex. He determined that the approach he used in MO was inherently flawed, (not sufficiently flexible) especially when the application has to work with many different game engines. Hence, Vortex!

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Ethreon wrote: A variety of users dislike MO users due to the smug superiority they deploy when discussing about mod managers. If clean data folder (what an idea..) is not needed, MO loses most of its edge.

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blckknight119 wrote: What do you mean by not needed? I can not think of any case in which virtualization isn't a better alternative if it's implemented correctly. If Vortex doesn't at least allow for this option, I'm probably going to stick with Mod Organizer.

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schadowman wrote: Yeah, after I heard that Vortex won't be using a virtual structure I was out. Keeping track of mods and changing/updating mods is just so much easier with virtualization. f*#@, I haven't redownloaded Skyrim ever since I started using MO. If Vortex can provide what MO did but just without the virtualization, then that'd be pretty great, but it'd take a lot more effort since you are modifying and replacing base game files, so you'd have to have some kind of system that would keep track of these changes and you'd also have to make it unmodifiable because it would break the whole system if you did. I mean, we really don't know anything but the basic stuff, so maybe Tannin has some kind of brilliant idea that we didn't think of.

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Dark0ne wrote: Please read up on what virtualization is. People are using MO's VFS interchangeably with virtualization as a whole and it's wrong.

Vortex will have virtualization, it just won't use MO's virtualization.

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Ethreon wrote: Not needed. Not required. Should I provide an image description? Not everyone needs it.

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nagothm wrote: The greatest feature difference between MO and NMM was that MO had a lot of troubleshooting features built into it. The ability to instantly find conflicting files etc were its biggest draw for me. (Especially in heavily modded setups with many loose files.) I haven't seen anything said about these comparison features on the new Vortex. Is there any information on whether those will be worked into Vortex or to what extent?
In any case, having a strong mod engine to use with many different games is exciting.

Thanks for the update as well.

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The ability to instantly find conflicting files etc were its biggest draw for me.

The vast majority of the "conflicts" reported by MO are false positives, so much so that as a conflict management tool, MO is completely useless.

I posted the following in 2014 on a forum that Tannin frequented. He wasn't interested in fixing the problem.

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I have installed a number of location mods that appear to have conflicting assets.

- Heljarchen Farm
- Immersive College of Winterhold
- Morskom Estate
- Vjarkell Castle
- Windstad Mine

I extracted each BSA and generated MD5 hashes for every file in each directory.

I imported the results into a spreadsheet and confirmed that the totals below match Mod Organizer's results.

- Heljarchen Farm has 74 conflicts with the other mods.
- Immersive College of Winterhold has 49 conflicts with the other mods.
- Morskom Estate has 151 conflicts with the other mods.
- Vjarkell Castle has 2 conflicts with the other mods.
- Windstad Mine has 130 conflicts with the other mods.

Mod Organizer finds a total of 406 conflicts between these mods but most of these conflicts aren't meaningful.

When I removed the duplicates and filtered for actual conflicts (same file names, same file paths, different MD5 hashes), there was a dramatic difference in the number of conflicts.

- Heljarchen Farm has 6 actual conflicts with the other mods.
- Immersive College of Winterhold has 14 actual conflicts with the other mods.
- Morskom Estate has 16 actual conflicts with the other mods.
- Vjarkell Castle has 2 actual conflicts with the other mods.
- Windstad Mine has 10 actual conflicts with the other mods.

Only 48 (24 vs. 24) of the 406 conflicts reported by Mod Organizer are actual conflicts that could impact the player in the game.

Duplicates should be removed from conflict detection and the Conflicts tab.

I later wrote a script to test more mod combinations. The false positive rate averaged 90%. Only 10% of conflicts reported by MO are actual conflicts. Edited November 4, 2017 by fireundubh

FrozenParagon · November 4, 2017

exciting news. although MO2 is a solid app, trying out a new build featuring dedicated nexus/manager integration is something I look forward to

ff7legend · November 5, 2017

In response to post #54930713. #54932353, #54932553, #54932643, #54932878, #54934923, #54938668, #54945073 are all replies on the same post.

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Still has me a bit concerned given how NMM 0.63.1 nuked many users' games, including the majority of the SOT Team. Fortunately, I was able to navigate around the issue via a simple back-up of the plugins.txt file & Data folder (Skyrim). I'll likely do that again whenever it comes time to make the switch from NMM to Vortex. After the disastrous NMM 0.63.1 "update", I will never fully trust an Import option/radical update like that again.

ff7legend · November 5, 2017

In response to post #54957218. #54958828, #54968988 are all replies on the same post.

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After the disaster that was NMM 0.63.1, I still don't trust it. Things are bound to get screwy/go wrong given how NMM is being replaced in its entirety & I strongly advise everyone to back-up their plug-in.txt file(s)/Data folders for any games being managed by NMM/MO prior to making the switch to Vortex. This is far more than a mere update & the 0.63.1 NMM "update" was literally playing Russian Roulette with one's entire installation of whatever games they had mods installed/being managed by NMM.

An update on Vortex development

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