Giving up on Vortex for now

[KarebuS]

 

Tannin, if you're still reading this forum (or if anyone else knows), I was wondering if Vortex's sort button just uses LOOT's masterlist or not.

Basically I'm asking if there's any point in using LOOT if I'm using Vortex's sort function.

 

Please don't let real questions like this get lost in a political diatribe...

Start a new topic for it.

 

Well it was kind of related and Tannin seems to be checking this one often. If no one respones I will.

[simsrw73]

 

I think Tannin deserves a round of applause.

 

[masternetra]

 

 

I think Tannin deserves a round of applause.

 

I agree.

 

*Hands Tannin a few rounds of 5.56mm ammo*

 

[HardwareSc8]

Or, we could install New Calibers and get an actually useful bullet size...

[Arthmoor]

First off, let me just say that I have not used Vortex myself, so if you don't care to hear what I have to say you can stop reading now. Or if you don't play Bethesda games, since those are the only ones I use mod managers for.

It seems to me there are 2 different issues being discussed here yet treated as the same thing. Installation ordering and Plugin ordering. Both accomplish different things, and yes, both are important. Since I exclusively use Wrye Bash I can only relate things how I see them from that perspective.

The installers tab is where your installation ordering is handled. This controls in what order the loose assets will be installed, thus controlling which mods override each other. Things on top get overridden by things installed after them, down to the last one at the bottom of the list. For games up until Skyrim Patch 1.4, this was the go to method of determining which order your assets loaded in and thus what versions of meshes and textures you saw in the game. Switching the order of an archive in the list and then "annealing" the setup would change which ones you saw while playing. This has been a staple feature of every other mod manager made since Wrye Bash first introduced this feature. It's considered basic functionality and is well understood. It's also fast as hell to deal with. Drag n Drop, or use CTRL+Arrows to move things around. This feature is also NOT what most people seem to be concerned with in regard to load order though.

The Mods tab is where sorting your ESMs and ESPs takes place. This controls the order in which records will override each other in the event of conflicts. If you're one of the lucky few, you have no conflicting records and thus can ignore this. The problem is, given the number of repeatedly posted "help me" threads, the lucky few are a tiny minority. Currently the community has a number of ways to address these conflicts, one of which is considered a basic function of all mod managers for Bethesda games. The ability to simply and quickly drag one plugin above or below another and have the underlying plugins.txt file make the adjustment. It's considered so basic a feature that even Bethesda added this ability to SSE and Fallout 4 so that everyone on PC and consoles now has access to a unified UI that everyone can relate to. There are also tools, mainly BOSS for Oblivion and LOOT for everything afterward, that will cut down on the process of resolving conflicts via load order. The only problem of course is that using either of these tools requires rules to be generated by someone, whether it's the user or the list maintainers. It is by no objective measure the easier way to handle this. Plus, LOOT's own author has repeatedly said that LOOT is only the BEGINNING of load order, not the END as Vortex is attempting to make it. I find myself wondering if WrinklyNinja was even consulted on the impact this will cause for LOOT maintainers. Also, there's no guarantee that submissions to the LOOT master lists will be accurate and universally applicable.

This idea that the masses are too dumb to grasp the concept of load order, conflict resolution, and how to deal with it is completely bogus. One need only look as far as the console modding community. XB1 users in particular. Since they have only the game UI to rely on, they've come up with a detailed load ordering template that could be considered analogous to LOOT in some way, but it's all organzied by categories based on what the mods do. Large scale overhauls near the top so they don't stomp little stuff later, villages loading later so their navmeshes will work, that sort of thing. What impressed me once I found out they were doing all this is that they figured nearly all of it out without the help of PC modders - because initially they just got looked down on like retards for being console gamers. It's quite clear though that these people are clever and we could all learn something from them and how they approached this problem of trying to help their fellow gamers figure stuff out. Instead of clamoring for Bethesda to protect them from themselves with some automated feature, they used trial and error to figure things out and come up with solutions. Then some of them turned to those of us in the PC community who were supporting console mods to ask our opinions on how to refine their lists.

I do not believe Vortex to be approaching this properly. Insisting that everyone learn LOOT and how to set sorting rules isn't the way forward. It's the way to irritate people. It certainly isn't something I'm going to shower Tannin with gifts over when the inevitable happens and people show up expecting me to have LOOT rules ready for their consumption when I don't even use LOOT myself. And before the resident Grand Inquisitor shows up to chastise me for my wrongness, I never used BOSS either outside of helping to test it in the early days. I simply do not need it. I sort my mods based entirely on general categories, followed by checking them in xEdit to verify that none step on each other in bad ways, and then I manually adjust what needs it. I dare say that LOOT can't really help me improve this and it's not wrong that I prefer some general category ordering for the mods I use in my games. Ironically, much the same way our fellow console modders are doing it now. We just arrived at the same methods over different lengths of time.

The bottom line here is this. Manual load order sorting is such a basic and fundamental feature that outside of this thread you have loads of people facepalming over and over about the decision to remove it. The masses are not as dumb as you think. This isn't at all like the catastrophe that was BSA unpacking. I don't have to sit down and tell a user asking for help how to craft a proper rule to solve a problem. I can literally say "drag this mod up above that other one" and until Vortex, they never needed to tell me which mod manager they were using. The language is simply that universal. This isn't a matter of refusing to "move on". It's a matter more akin to "it isn't broken, why are we messing with it". Secondarily, manually adjusting the order your mods were installed in to begin with is just as important, but doesn't appear to be the subject of most of the rants here, and of ridicule everywhere else. I argue both are integral things and should be preserved, not hidden away behind 10 UI obfuscation layers, and certainly not pawned off on extension writers.

 

tl;dr: Complexity is not desirable. Simple is actually better in this case.

Anyway, I said it. At least there's no downvote button here so you can't bury me to make me invisible :P

[d81]

Yea, that's pretty much it.

 

The install tab, called "MODS" is neat. So far as I've seen the user is notified of overwrites regardless of install order, and overwrites can be changed at any time. Per-file overwrites are on the way according to Tannin.

 

But I've broken Vortex again, so can't use it right now.

[Arthmoor]

When I referred to the "mods" and "installers" tabs, those are what they're called in Wrye Bash. I do not know if they have the same functional equivalents in Vortex.

 

Also not particularly worried about per-file overwrites since I've never once found such a thing to be useful. Wrye Bash doesn't do that and that's just fine by me and everyone else using it.

[d81]

I don't need per-file overwrites either. The mods tab in Wrye is Plugins in Vortex, the installers tab in Wrye is Mods in Vortex, basically.

[MarchinBunny]

First off, let me just say that I have not used Vortex myself, so if you don't care to hear what I have to say you can stop reading now. Or if you don't play Bethesda games, since those are the only ones I use mod managers for.

 

It seems to me there are 2 different issues being discussed here yet treated as the same thing. Installation ordering and Plugin ordering. Both accomplish different things, and yes, both are important. Since I exclusively use Wrye Bash I can only relate things how I see them from that perspective.

 

The installers tab is where your installation ordering is handled. This controls in what order the loose assets will be installed, thus controlling which mods override each other. Things on top get overridden by things installed after them, down to the last one at the bottom of the list. For games up until Skyrim Patch 1.4, this was the go to method of determining which order your assets loaded in and thus what versions of meshes and textures you saw in the game. Switching the order of an archive in the list and then "annealing" the setup would change which ones you saw while playing. This has been a staple feature of every other mod manager made since Wrye Bash first introduced this feature. It's considered basic functionality and is well understood. It's also fast as hell to deal with. Drag n Drop, or use CTRL+Arrows to move things around. This feature is also NOT what most people seem to be concerned with in regard to load order though.

 

The Mods tab is where sorting your ESMs and ESPs takes place. This controls the order in which records will override each other in the event of conflicts. If you're one of the lucky few, you have no conflicting records and thus can ignore this. The problem is, given the number of repeatedly posted "help me" threads, the lucky few are a tiny minority. Currently the community has a number of ways to address these conflicts, one of which is considered a basic function of all mod managers for Bethesda games. The ability to simply and quickly drag one plugin above or below another and have the underlying plugins.txt file make the adjustment. It's considered so basic a feature that even Bethesda added this ability to SSE and Fallout 4 so that everyone on PC and consoles now has access to a unified UI that everyone can relate to. There are also tools, mainly BOSS for Oblivion and LOOT for everything afterward, that will cut down on the process of resolving conflicts via load order. The only problem of course is that using either of these tools requires rules to be generated by someone, whether it's the user or the list maintainers. It is by no objective measure the easier way to handle this. Plus, LOOT's own author has repeatedly said that LOOT is only the BEGINNING of load order, not the END as Vortex is attempting to make it. I find myself wondering if WrinklyNinja was even consulted on the impact this will cause for LOOT maintainers. Also, there's no guarantee that submissions to the LOOT master lists will be accurate and universally applicable.

 

This idea that the masses are too dumb to grasp the concept of load order, conflict resolution, and how to deal with it is completely bogus. One need only look as far as the console modding community. XB1 users in particular. Since they have only the game UI to rely on, they've come up with a detailed load ordering template that could be considered analogous to LOOT in some way, but it's all organzied by categories based on what the mods do. Large scale overhauls near the top so they don't stomp little stuff later, villages loading later so their navmeshes will work, that sort of thing. What impressed me once I found out they were doing all this is that they figured nearly all of it out without the help of PC modders - because initially they just got looked down on like retards for being console gamers. It's quite clear though that these people are clever and we could all learn something from them and how they approached this problem of trying to help their fellow gamers figure stuff out. Instead of clamoring for Bethesda to protect them from themselves with some automated feature, they used trial and error to figure things out and come up with solutions. Then some of them turned to those of us in the PC community who were supporting console mods to ask our opinions on how to refine their lists.

 

I do not believe Vortex to be approaching this properly. Insisting that everyone learn LOOT and how to set sorting rules isn't the way forward. It's the way to irritate people. It certainly isn't something I'm going to shower Tannin with gifts over when the inevitable happens and people show up expecting me to have LOOT rules ready for their consumption when I don't even use LOOT myself. And before the resident Grand Inquisitor shows up to chastise me for my wrongness, I never used BOSS either outside of helping to test it in the early days. I simply do not need it. I sort my mods based entirely on general categories, followed by checking them in xEdit to verify that none step on each other in bad ways, and then I manually adjust what needs it. I dare say that LOOT can't really help me improve this and it's not wrong that I prefer some general category ordering for the mods I use in my games. Ironically, much the same way our fellow console modders are doing it now. We just arrived at the same methods over different lengths of time.

 

The bottom line here is this. Manual load order sorting is such a basic and fundamental feature that outside of this thread you have loads of people facepalming over and over about the decision to remove it. The masses are not as dumb as you think. This isn't at all like the catastrophe that was BSA unpacking. I don't have to sit down and tell a user asking for help how to craft a proper rule to solve a problem. I can literally say "drag this mod up above that other one" and until Vortex, they never needed to tell me which mod manager they were using. The language is simply that universal. This isn't a matter of refusing to "move on". It's a matter more akin to "it isn't broken, why are we messing with it". Secondarily, manually adjusting the order your mods were installed in to begin with is just as important, but doesn't appear to be the subject of most of the rants here, and of ridicule everywhere else. I argue both are integral things and should be preserved, not hidden away behind 10 UI obfuscation layers, and certainly not pawned off on extension writers.

 

tl;dr: Complexity is not desirable. Simple is actually better in this case.

Anyway, I said it. At least there's no downvote button here so you can't bury me to make me invisible :tongue:

 

The issue is again, creating rules isn't as hard as you are making it out to be. It's not really anymore tougher to do than dragging and dropping. You can literally do everything you could previously it's just done a little different. And I cannot stress this enough. Why is everyone complaining about this when Vortex has the capability for extensions? If you really want to do it the old way, no one is going to stop you. An extension is likely going to be made by someone at some point and probably fairly quickly. So why keep complaining about it? This has been answered over and over and over again. It's like everyone wants to put their own input into the argument by just saying the same exact thing the last person did who had already been answered.

 

You say things are not being approached properly and yet he literally created a software that can be customized. Seriously, do any of you hear yourselves? It's not like he is forcing you, he himself is just not going to do it. He doesn't care if someone else does though. Go ahead and make the extension. Jeez, it's like a lot of you don't have ears or something.

[Tannin42]

Tannin, if you're still reading this forum (or if anyone else knows), I was wondering if Vortex's sort button just uses LOOT's masterlist or not.

Basically I'm asking if there's any point in using LOOT if I'm using Vortex's sort function.

Ideally, no. Vortex uses the loot algorithm and its masterlist for sorting so it should always generate the same load order as the regular LOOT

application (assuming the same version of course).