An update on Vortex development

[MysteriousGuy]

In response to post #54935243. #54935523, #54947223, #54947753 are all replies on the same post.

MysteriousGuy wrote: "Not long now!"

We are talking 2 months minimum here. It was months in development already. Makes me wonder how was Tannin able to build fully functional mod organizer in such a short time when he was working all alone, but its not the case now when he has whole team around him.

So after months of waiting for something, you cant even provide a screenshot to public? Really?

fluxxdog wrote: Yes really.

lunsmann wrote: Perhaps it was purely due to MO only needing to support ONE game. Vortex (like NMM) will be supporting many different games.

All I want is for FNIS to install and work out of the box (like it does in NMM). MO is a pain in the arse with FNIS, and abandoned almost straight away.

SharraShimada wrote:

In response to post #54935243. #54935523, #54947223 are all replies on the same post.

MysteriousGuy wrote: "Not long now!"

We are talking 2 months minimum here. It was months in development already. Makes me wonder how was Tannin able to build fully functional mod organizer in such a short time when he was working all alone, but its not the case now when he has whole team around him.

So after months of waiting for something, you cant even provide a screenshot to public? Really?

fluxxdog wrote: Yes really.

lunsmann wrote: Perhaps it was purely due to MO only needing to support ONE game. Vortex (like NMM) will be supporting many different games.

All I want is for FNIS to install and work out of the box (like it does in NMM). MO is a pain in the arse with FNIS, and abandoned almost straight away.

Tannin made MO alone back in the days, when he had the time. And it was only 32 bit. Developing such a tool with full 64 bit support is a completely different thing.
Thats why MO2 never was what Tannin was expecting from it.

And now, it takes time, because its a team. Tanning cant work all alone, doing things like he wants them to be all by himself. Everything has to be first an idea, moves to a meeting, and later there will be a consensus. Such things take time... a lot of time.
And sometimes you try something, test it, and as a result, you throw it into the dumpster, because it wont work.

Software-development is time consuming as hell. Its not just coding. In fact, thats, what take the leas amount of the time. Its everying around the lines of code.

Seeing what Tannin was able to do with MO makes me fully believe he is more then capable to easily create amazing mod manager. Its complexity or 64-bit doesn't matter so much - he is the man for the job.

What doesn't feel right is nexus itself. Being game modding site you would expect they would promote and share information about their main modding tool - Vortex.
Instead it was kept in secrecy for months. Check news how many times they shared any information about Vortex this year. Then check how many of those posts actually speak about Vortex. Most of them are just recruitment posts.
Seems focus was moved more to the side projects (Web site redesign) or development was facing issues leading to delay (no info about why everything is so delayed because nexus is all shiny and beautiful).

Ignoring what it feels like and back to what we do know is - it's over a year now that Tannin was recruited for this job. That's one year of people waiting for new mod manager or at least some information about its functionality and looks. A week ago new site design was announced and then they said we are finally getting an update about vortex this week.
This week they tell us we will get nothing (not even a screenshot because imagine if people say they don't like it, and everyone has to like it when its finished) but we have to wait for 2 months now to get something.

Do we get an update in 2 months that now we have to wait a year for an update?

[Ethreon]

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

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?

lobotomy0 wrote: +1

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?

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.

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!

"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.

[Dark0ne]

In response to post #54935243. #54935523, #54947223, #54947753, #54954958 are all replies on the same post.

MysteriousGuy wrote: "Not long now!"

We are talking 2 months minimum here. It was months in development already. Makes me wonder how was Tannin able to build fully functional mod organizer in such a short time when he was working all alone, but its not the case now when he has whole team around him.

So after months of waiting for something, you cant even provide a screenshot to public? Really?

fluxxdog wrote: Yes really.

lunsmann wrote: Perhaps it was purely due to MO only needing to support ONE game. Vortex (like NMM) will be supporting many different games.

All I want is for FNIS to install and work out of the box (like it does in NMM). MO is a pain in the arse with FNIS, and abandoned almost straight away.

SharraShimada wrote:

In response to post #54935243. #54935523, #54947223 are all replies on the same post.

MysteriousGuy wrote: "Not long now!"

We are talking 2 months minimum here. It was months in development already. Makes me wonder how was Tannin able to build fully functional mod organizer in such a short time when he was working all alone, but its not the case now when he has whole team around him.

So after months of waiting for something, you cant even provide a screenshot to public? Really?

fluxxdog wrote: Yes really.

lunsmann wrote: Perhaps it was purely due to MO only needing to support ONE game. Vortex (like NMM) will be supporting many different games.

All I want is for FNIS to install and work out of the box (like it does in NMM). MO is a pain in the arse with FNIS, and abandoned almost straight away.

Tannin made MO alone back in the days, when he had the time. And it was only 32 bit. Developing such a tool with full 64 bit support is a completely different thing.
Thats why MO2 never was what Tannin was expecting from it.

And now, it takes time, because its a team. Tanning cant work all alone, doing things like he wants them to be all by himself. Everything has to be first an idea, moves to a meeting, and later there will be a consensus. Such things take time... a lot of time.
And sometimes you try something, test it, and as a result, you throw it into the dumpster, because it wont work.

Software-development is time consuming as hell. Its not just coding. In fact, thats, what take the leas amount of the time. Its everying around the lines of code.

MysteriousGuy wrote: Seeing what Tannin was able to do with MO makes me fully believe he is more then capable to easily create amazing mod manager. Its complexity or 64-bit doesn't matter so much - he is the man for the job.

What doesn't feel right is nexus itself. Being game modding site you would expect they would promote and share information about their main modding tool - Vortex.
Instead it was kept in secrecy for months. Check news how many times they shared any information about Vortex this year. Then check how many of those posts actually speak about Vortex. Most of them are just recruitment posts.
Seems focus was moved more to the side projects (Web site redesign) or development was facing issues leading to delay (no info about why everything is so delayed because nexus is all shiny and beautiful).

Ignoring what it feels like and back to what we do know is - it's over a year now that Tannin was recruited for this job. That's one year of people waiting for new mod manager or at least some information about its functionality and looks. A week ago new site design was announced and then they said we are finally getting an update about vortex this week.
This week they tell us we will get nothing (not even a screenshot because imagine if people say they don't like it, and everyone has to like it when its finished) but we have to wait for 2 months now to get something.

Do we get an update in 2 months that now we have to wait a year for an update?

Makes me wonder how was Tannin able to build fully functional mod organizer in such a short time when he was working all alone, but its not the case now when he has whole team around him.

When Tannin first released MO it was simply the VFS system with a text file on how to enable it. The MO you see today took him over 5 years of work to get where it is now. It's stupid to even compare the two.

Would you rather wait 5 years? Hmm.

Seems focus was moved more to the side projects (Web site redesign)

The website isn't a side-project, it's the main project. Without the website, there is no Vortex, but without Vortex (or NMM) there's still a website. Ergo, Vortex would be the "side project".

However, development of the website and development of Vortex are parallel, rather than one delaying the other. Tannin works on Vortex, the web development team work on the website, and the only time they intersect is when Tannin needs more functionality in the web API which the web developers need to do.

[Ethreon]

In response to post #54935088.

seancdaug wrote:

If you've achieved that functionality, please let us know, so this can end. Otherwise you will continue to get angry posts from grumpy users who are stuck with a buggy MO2.

NMM's inability to properly manage mod priorities is, shall we say, a uniquely NMM problem. It's a question of how well the mod manager tracks files, not virtualization per se. Wrye Bash doesn't virtualize at all, and it's damned good about both managing conflicts, reordering, and uninstallation.

And what info should they share? "Oh hey guys, we added 3 more code blocks to the manager". "Oh hey guys, we added 2 more icons"

You got your news. It's most likely coming around Jan. You already had your news with Tannin in regards to functionality and features. You had all the info you needed.

[sopmac45]

Thank you so much for all of your hard work. It is really very annoying to see how some people in this thread are assuming that Vortex will not have what they expect, or criticizing before it is out, the way it will work or saying I won't use it if it does not have this and that ... as usual, there will be always people applying only negative energy to new implementations.

 

There is a group of 30 testing Vortex and Tannin is an experienced one, so there is a crew chosen by the owners of this site that I am very sure are also as experienced as a lot of people in this thread that are just complaining; why we do not simply wait for Vortex to be out and trust what Tannin is doing rather than saying negative things ?

 

Thank you Dark0ne for letting us know where are we at with Vortex. Take your time and I am very sure that Vortex will be much better than NMM. People have the tendency to stick to their comfort blanket instead trying new things and that is a normal behavior for us humans, but at the same time, we need to understand that nothing is forever, anything that begins, must end, one way or another, so NMM will pass away and Vortex will born as the old site is practically gone and we already have a new one and btw, I do like it better than the other.

 

Let's be positive and wait for the new "baby" to arise, test it and see what happens.

Thanks again guys.

[ff7legend]

The biggest concern I have by far is the migration of one's mods/installation from NMM to Vortex. Let's not forget the utter disaster NMM 0.63.1 caused many a user, including the majority of the SOT Team a ways back. How will migrating everything from NMM to Vortex actually work? We really don't need a repeat of what happened in the aftermath of NMM 0.63.1 & the playing of Russian Roulette when it came to switching Profiles. I never used the Profiles feature since it literally was a disaster just waiting to happen.

[MajestyExpelior]

Great news!! Now we need TES VI ...

[ContessaR]

In response to post #54933313. #54933668, #54934468 are all replies on the same post.

sdsd8452 wrote: I think putting files directly into data folder won't be a big deal.

Cuz modern Bethesda games keeps original files BA2-packed.

Data folder will not be corrupted by mods unless they replaced the original files such as Skyrim - Textures0.bsa or Fallout4 - Meshes0.ba2.

ThatDirtyShisno wrote: Vortex's virtualization sounds like a nice compromise between NMM and MO and it overall seems like it'll be the best of both worlds.

VaultBoyAM wrote: It's not putting files directly into the data folder, they're links. This means that if you uninstall a mod that was winning a mod conflict, it won't leave a hole where the file was, instead the mod that was losing the conflict will take its place, and you can uninstall/reinstall mods in peace.

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.

[MysteriousGuy]

In response to post #54935243. #54935523, #54947223, #54947753, #54954958, #54955858 are all replies on the same post.

MysteriousGuy wrote: "Not long now!"

We are talking 2 months minimum here. It was months in development already. Makes me wonder how was Tannin able to build fully functional mod organizer in such a short time when he was working all alone, but its not the case now when he has whole team around him.

So after months of waiting for something, you cant even provide a screenshot to public? Really?

fluxxdog wrote: Yes really.

lunsmann wrote: Perhaps it was purely due to MO only needing to support ONE game. Vortex (like NMM) will be supporting many different games.

All I want is for FNIS to install and work out of the box (like it does in NMM). MO is a pain in the arse with FNIS, and abandoned almost straight away.

SharraShimada wrote:

In response to post #54935243. #54935523, #54947223 are all replies on the same post.

MysteriousGuy wrote: "Not long now!"

We are talking 2 months minimum here. It was months in development already. Makes me wonder how was Tannin able to build fully functional mod organizer in such a short time when he was working all alone, but its not the case now when he has whole team around him.

So after months of waiting for something, you cant even provide a screenshot to public? Really?

fluxxdog wrote: Yes really.

lunsmann wrote: Perhaps it was purely due to MO only needing to support ONE game. Vortex (like NMM) will be supporting many different games.

All I want is for FNIS to install and work out of the box (like it does in NMM). MO is a pain in the arse with FNIS, and abandoned almost straight away.

Tannin made MO alone back in the days, when he had the time. And it was only 32 bit. Developing such a tool with full 64 bit support is a completely different thing.
Thats why MO2 never was what Tannin was expecting from it.

And now, it takes time, because its a team. Tanning cant work all alone, doing things like he wants them to be all by himself. Everything has to be first an idea, moves to a meeting, and later there will be a consensus. Such things take time... a lot of time.
And sometimes you try something, test it, and as a result, you throw it into the dumpster, because it wont work.

Software-development is time consuming as hell. Its not just coding. In fact, thats, what take the leas amount of the time. Its everying around the lines of code.

MysteriousGuy wrote: Seeing what Tannin was able to do with MO makes me fully believe he is more then capable to easily create amazing mod manager. Its complexity or 64-bit doesn't matter so much - he is the man for the job.

What doesn't feel right is nexus itself. Being game modding site you would expect they would promote and share information about their main modding tool - Vortex.
Instead it was kept in secrecy for months. Check news how many times they shared any information about Vortex this year. Then check how many of those posts actually speak about Vortex. Most of them are just recruitment posts.
Seems focus was moved more to the side projects (Web site redesign) or development was facing issues leading to delay (no info about why everything is so delayed because nexus is all shiny and beautiful).

Ignoring what it feels like and back to what we do know is - it's over a year now that Tannin was recruited for this job. That's one year of people waiting for new mod manager or at least some information about its functionality and looks. A week ago new site design was announced and then they said we are finally getting an update about vortex this week.
This week they tell us we will get nothing (not even a screenshot because imagine if people say they don't like it, and everyone has to like it when its finished) but we have to wait for 2 months now to get something.

Do we get an update in 2 months that now we have to wait a year for an update?

Dark0ne wrote:

Makes me wonder how was Tannin able to build fully functional mod organizer in such a short time when he was working all alone, but its not the case now when he has whole team around him.

When Tannin first released MO it was simply the VFS system with a text file on how to enable it. The MO you see today took him over 5 years of work to get where it is now. It's stupid to even compare the two.

Would you rather wait 5 years? Hmm.

Seems focus was moved more to the side projects (Web site redesign)

The website isn't a side-project, it's the main project. Without the website, there is no Vortex, but without Vortex (or NMM) there's still a website. Ergo, Vortex would be the "side project".

However, development of the website and development of Vortex are parallel, rather than one delaying the other. Tannin works on Vortex, the web development team work on the website, and the only time they intersect is when Tannin needs more functionality in the web API which the web developers need to do.

I would wait 5 years knowing that it will take 5 years for it to be finished rather than check for updates regularly only to get a notice that i have to wait for a notice that will tell me to wait for another notice.

[mindmonkey]

In response to post #54957218.

ff7legend wrote: The biggest concern I have by far is the migration of one's mods/installation from NMM to Vortex. Let's not forget the utter disaster NMM 0.63.1 caused many a user, including the majority of the SOT Team a ways back. How will migrating everything from NMM to Vortex actually work? We really don't need a repeat of what happened in the aftermath of NMM 0.63.1 & the playing of Russian Roulette when it came to switching Profiles. I never used the Profiles feature since it literally was a disaster just waiting to happen.

That's actually my biggest question. While I can't wait to setup Vortex and get my mods over there I wonder if I can just continue my playthrough on the new manager (provided the necessary mods are installed)...? And could I install and use Vortex parallel to NMM with the same installation of vanilla skyrim?