Giving up on Vortex for now

[Oblitus]

 

 

 

But I need to understand the requirement first, because I know that people get used to doing things a certain way. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. But I'm the tool maker, I'm here to provide the best solution for an actual problem, so I have to ask: Are you sure it's a nail? Because to me it looks like a screw and I can do better than "hammer" for that problem.

 

 

You know, hammering a screw works better than screwing a nail. So I'd prefer to have a hammer over a screwdriver if I have to choose one.

 

 

I don't disagree, all I'm asking is: "What's your problem" and the answer I get is "I want a hammer, I've always used a hammer, I won't touch anything but a hammer".

It's not answering the question you see?

 

Nope. You are saying "nails do not exist, so our toolbox will only contain a screwdriver, if you think you've seen a nail you are wrong."

[Tannin42]

Ooh this looks interesting, Vortex has adopted the way LOOT does things ?

 

Good news, its about time people started taking time out to understand it better, then maybe its masterlists will get a bit more audience participation in populating it where necessary, and it will get as good as BOSS used to be for specific groups of mod ordering requirements.

 

LOOT already does a pretty good job of looking at a mods records and deciding which needs to go later than others, its masterlist is slowly growing, and for personal refinement it has Priorities and Load After methods of rearranging things the same every time .. although maybe LOOT does this a little better in that you can Drag n Drop a plugin onto another plugins card ..

 

Can the same be done in Vortex ?

Yes, the plugin page for gamebryo games in vortex acts essentially as a UI for loot. Of course the workflow is slightly different, we don't have a two-column layout like loot.

But yeah, I my hope is that more users will embrace loot and work with it instead of against it.

[Deleted3897072User]

Before this thead turns into a mutual incomprehension fest, there is a simple solution for people who want to use Vortex and still do manual load ordering. It doesn't require any software changes at all. Interested?

 

You just launch Vortex and NMM at the same time, use Vortex to do all the installing and enabling, let it do what it likes with the load order, then drag-and-drop the plugins around in the NMM plugins tab. The changes are instant and Vortex updates its plugin window to reflect your changes.

 

Job done.

[Tannin42]

Before this thead turns into a mutual incomprehension fest, there is a simple solution for people who want to use Vortex and still do manual load ordering. It doesn't require any software changes at all. Interested?

 

You just launch Vortex and NMM at the same time, use Vortex to do all the installing and enabling, let it do what it likes with the load order, then drag-and-drop the plugins around in the NMM plugins tab. The changes are instant and Vortex updates its plugin window to reflect your changes.

 

Job done.

If you're doing that, don't forget to disable autosorting in Vortex because you'll probably want to control when it does sort.

[Deleted133263User]

 

Ooh this looks interesting, Vortex has adopted the way LOOT does things ?

 

Good news, its about time people started taking time out to understand it better, then maybe its masterlists will get a bit more audience participation in populating it where necessary, and it will get as good as BOSS used to be for specific groups of mod ordering requirements.

 

LOOT already does a pretty good job of looking at a mods records and deciding which needs to go later than others, its masterlist is slowly growing, and for personal refinement it has Priorities and Load After methods of rearranging things the same every time .. although maybe LOOT does this a little better in that you can Drag n Drop a plugin onto another plugins card ..

 

Can the same be done in Vortex ?

Yes, the plugin page for gamebryo games in vortex acts essentially as a UI for loot. Of course the workflow is slightly different, we don't have a two-column layout like loot.

But yeah, I my hope is that more users will embrace loot and work with it instead of against it.

 

 

Excellent, I wish I was not on night shift currently and I managed to grab a copy of the alpha ..

 

 

Maybe you could do with (when documentation is released) a few pointers to what to expect from Vortex by pointing people at ..

 

1. The relevant part of the FAQ

 

and

 

2. LOOTs sorting algorythm

 

I swear most people do not even realise how much LOOT does in the blink of an eye for them

 

And if everyone starts contributing meta data feedback like they used to on the old Bethesda forums for updating the masterlist the community will benefit massively.

 

Typically they would need to give sound technical reasons for why one plugin should follow another, which is mostly in the realm of a mod author to do, but more expert community members quite often did the same for BOSS's masterlist, and also provide things like ITMs and UDRs for cleaning notes, and any other notes pertinent to LOOT presenting the user with information on their Load Order.

 

Since it was released though and took over from BOSS, LOOT has been resisted slightly, for reasons anyone who understands it cannot figure out. Maybe its words like meta in the presentation which put people off, when really its not as complicated as they think it may be, if only they would just venture forth a little more and experience it for a while.

 

As Wrinkly says (and until the masterlist for any specific supported game starts to mature), on its own LOOT does a pretty damned good ball park sorting for the majority of people, which is the main goal. Otherwise it has tools to refine things in the form of the masterlist, priority data, and load after data which are all user adjustable.

[Deleted133263User]

Before this thead turns into a mutual incomprehension fest, there is a simple solution for people who want to use Vortex and still do manual load ordering. It doesn't require any software changes at all. Interested?

 

You just launch Vortex and NMM at the same time, use Vortex to do all the installing and enabling, let it do what it likes with the load order, then drag-and-drop the plugins around in the NMM plugins tab. The changes are instant and Vortex updates its plugin window to reflect your changes.

 

Job done.

 

.. or they could drop the no longer supported NMM

 

And use Wrye Bash instead for the same purpose (they are still going to need a Bashed Patch anyway) :P

[HellKnightX88]

I've been using LOOT and custom rules set up after examining the mods in xEdit for a good while now and I'm generally happy with it. For my day to day usage I can't really give you a better reason than it's a "nice to have".

 

I definitelly understand the need to have it load at a specific ID spot in your load order for testing purposes since you use batch files to automate tests to an extent but if you're at the point where you're testing your mods that way then writing a quick script that's functionally similar to a simplified sed command from unix to replace specific text in your batch ffile with the actual ID index passed as a parameter shouldn't be hard. Just thinking out loud.

 

Something that would turn:

 

player.additem MOD_ID_1_000001 1

player.additem MOD_ID_1_000002 1

player.additem MOD_ID_2_000001 1

player.additem MOD_ID_2_000002 1

 

To:

 

player.additem FA000001 1

player.additem FA000002 1

player.additem FC000001 1

player.additem FC000002 1

[MarchinBunny]

I am not surprised honestly that some people are against this.

 

There are quite a few people in this communty who don't like the idea of things getting easier.

Edited February 2, 2018 by Brabbit1987

[Qwinn]

Yep, that's how Vortex is working so far, with the drag plugin on another to load after thing.

 

I'm trying to give it a fair shot, though I miss doing it manually. Have only installed about 30 mods so far, will see how it handles 150 this weekend.

Edited February 2, 2018 by Qwinn

[AL12]

I think that the choice of adopting the same method as loot for plugin ordering is a good idea as it could obviously help with the masterlists and most people don't want to bother with the plugin ordering. I also understand that for mod creators and more advanced users a direct way of ordering the plugins via drag and drop is much more immediate and taking into account that this has been offered in basically all previous mod managers available it really feels like a step back for them. I think that adding that option for the people that want it as an extension (disabled by default maybe) is really the best approach here.

What I'm more concerned about is not plugin ordering but mod ordering instead. The conflict resolution system seems like a step up from the old NMM where only install order mattered, on a theoretical standpoint at least. For a short mod list this way of handling conflicts seems pretty reasonable but I ask myself what of the case of very large mod lists with more than 300 mods, 100-150 of which are texture mods. I for one have 5-6 big texture overhauls and hundreds of smaller more focused replacers. Now for each mod the user has now to manually set rules for each conflict? A texture replacer could be adding 30 files and those files could have conflicts with 5 different mods I would have to manually add 5 rules for that mod if I want it to win the conflicts. Then when you have 500 mods with all the rules setup and need to add a mod how are you supposed to remember all the other rules you setup? It really does not seem like something that scales well.

Now MO offered ordering based on sequential positioning of the mods changeable by drag and drop, conflict would be decided instantly with a very clear visual method. The reason for not adopting such a method was because people used the system simply to "group" mods together and organize them. Well with 500 mods they had better be organizing them. Anyone that understands the conflict system of Mo will "group" mods because of course it will help with conflict resolution if you group all the texture mods together and don't keep them all over the place. Newbies could fail to understand this and just use the mods pane of MO to organize their mods in groups disregarding conflicts (although anyone who watched a tutorial or has a smudge of common sense would realize that the lightning bolts mean something...).
But the flaw that you (Tannin) pointed out is correct, sequential ordering is not the right way to "display" the mods to the user. In MO the list of active mods is also the load order (deploy order if you want), and that can lead to error (if people are stupid but we are).
Sequential ordering is not the problem, it just needs to not coincide with the modlist view. It could be accessed by a conflict resolution button or something, and it could be an alternative to the rules system already in place.

I don't see the rules system to be scalable to hundreds of mods and the sequential ordering is just a very fast, immediate and intuitive way of handling conflicts.

Edit: By the way @d81 Mod Organizer 2 is not dead, Tannin left the project to work on Vortex but he allowed the community to keep working on it and a fixed working 2.1 version was released on nexus in December. There are still some bugs but most of them are already fixed in the discord dev builds. Tannin did a great job before leaving and it was just a matter of fixing and finishing things.

Edited February 2, 2018 by al12rs