Managing the Load Order...

[Ghatto]

I'll just preface my post with a disclaimer that I haven't tried Vortex yet, but am still interested to. This discussion though, just put the fear in me. I think something that nobody has managed to air in their frustrations much here is that for a lot of us who have gone through the 'baptism of fire' of building a massively modded game and having it turned into a nightmare of troubleshooting, we've learned a lot about applying tricks and methods that work just for ourselves. We did so by learning new programs and methods that introduced radical new ways of approaching modding and (most importantly) taught us how to do advanced things. Things that we grow dependent on because they are the perfect mix of knowing exactly what we're doing while also getting the game to run properly. I'm not surprised to see something that works counter to how we've finally managed to 'work it all out' rub us the wrong way. Human nature I suppose.

 

In my case, (and I'm sure others too). I played my first modded games with NMM and it was great, until it all came crashing down - mostly because I didn't know what I was doing. So when I tried again and NMM looked like it wouldn't cut it: the lord and saviour Mod Organizer appeared. So much more complicated but if you just paid attention then you'd gain so much more stability and control. Learning and following excellent instructions on STEP and in the forums here added to this and employed the use of even more granular control over our modlists. LOOT, Wrye Bash, DDSopt, xEdit, Merge Plugins and more built on it even further and added new ideologies and new rules to follow for having an optimum experience.

 

Of course though having to do that does get fatiguing so naturally, when Vortex was announced I was HYPE. I mean seriously, hiring Tannin - the maker of MO. We would get the spiffyness and ease of use of NMM combined with the absolute power of MO while having it as the de-facto mod manager of the most prolific mod depository on the internet! If only those tools I mentioned above could also be integrated somehow - a man can dream!

 

Now it's out and I want to try it but I'm in the middle of my New Vegas playthrough and I do not want to mess with it. So I gobble up everyone's impressions and, well... so many comments about how it doesn't do this thing I like or that thing I like; all things that Mod Organizer does; all things that Tannin demonstrated before. I do understand that it's Alpha - unfinished, and that developers work hard and can't just add every little feature people ask for (especially when embarking on a new project.) It just paints a rather disappointing picture I suppose; the new shiny program can't do what the old busted program did and dispels the illusion that this program will truly be the future for every modder.

 

As I read this feedback I'm left wanting to understand the rhetoric of the developers. I have seen some explanations and also many people pushing back against them. It's a start either way but I do admit it does appear rather lacking. Arguing for the case of improving LOOT for the sake of everyone does sound good, but it also doesn't sound like a good reason to not have a simply drag and drop mod order. I would like to really come to understand the developers vision for having these process work together in Vortex to make it a great modern replacement (or at least alternative) for MO. Personally the kinds of pipe dreams I hoped for Vortex was basically everything MO did but easier to navigate, with some basic functions just built in, like patching and merging and file readers - but hey I suppose that's at the behest of the developers who made those tools. Right now, after reading and watching some YouTube demonstrations, Vortex just gives me the feeling of a shiner NMM and well that just a bit ehhh?

 

But I will eventually try it. I want it to succeed. Having an easy to approach mod manager with hopefully way less splintering of tools is the kind of future I look forward to.

[Tannin42]

As I read this feedback I'm left wanting to understand the rhetoric of the developers. I have seen some explanations and also many people pushing back against them. It's a start either way but I do admit it does appear rather lacking. Arguing for the case of improving LOOT for the sake of everyone does sound good, but it also doesn't sound like a good reason to not have a simply drag and drop mod order. I would like to really come to understand the developers vision for having these process work together in Vortex to make it a great modern replacement (or at least alternative) for MO. Personally the kinds of pipe dreams I hoped for Vortex was basically everything MO did but easier to navigate, with some basic functions just built in, like patching and merging and file readers - but hey I suppose that's at the behest of the developers who made those tools. Right now, after reading and watching some YouTube demonstrations, Vortex just gives me the feeling of a shiner NMM and well that just a bit ehhh?

 

A few things:

- Vortex is designed to be the replacement for NMM. Of course we're trying to identify and incorporate what's great about alternatives (be it MO, Wrye Bash, Steam Workshop or whatever) but first and foremost it has to be a better NMM.

- The primary reason we were careful with releasing screenshots and videos during development was exactly because we made a few radical design decisions and wanted people to try them instead of judging based on screenshots.

 

The reason we don't "simply" allow drag&drop mod or plugin load order (based on context I assume you mean plugin load order) is because there is nothing simple about that. For one thing you can't use rule-based and direct manual ordering at the same time, you either set rules and let the sorter do the rest or you set the load order directly (via drag&drop or whatever) and not touch the sort because it would throw away all your manual adjustments.

So offering direct ordering wouldn't be an extension or improvement to what we have now, it would be a parallel approach to do the same thing.

And if we did that (offer a second approach) we would have the cost of developing (*) and mantaining it, we would have to explain it in our documentation, tutorials and videos. When you try to help a user you have to first ask him how he's managing his plugins (or mods) and then give individual instructions based on that.

 

(*) and developing and maintaining direct load order management isn't quite as simple and cheap as people seem to think. The drag&drop control isn't the problem, but people would still expect it to enforce correct order between esm/master esps, esls (creation club and custom) and esps. Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE now have 5 groups of plugins that have to be loaded in a specific order and, if previous investigation by mod authors is correct, setting one plugin as a master of an esl will move it to another group.

It's some work, not impossible but also not negligible, and I'd just much rather invest the time on other features.

That's all it is, there is no attempt to patronise users or force them into a certain way of doing things, we just implemented one way of solving the problem, a way that works fine for beginners and advanced users and we don't want to impose the cost (immediate and indirect) of implementing a second officially supported one.

 

But as I've said before: I consider extensibility the biggest strength of Vortex and I have little doubt that others will eventually provide an extension for direct load order management, it just won't be in the core application. But Vortex is out publicly for less than a week, there is no proper documentation for the API yet, give it a bit of time.

[MarchinBunny]

I'll just preface my post with a disclaimer that I haven't tried Vortex yet, but am still interested to. This discussion though, just put the fear in me. I think something that nobody has managed to air in their frustrations much here is that for a lot of us who have gone through the 'baptism of fire' of building a massively modded game and having it turned into a nightmare of troubleshooting, we've learned a lot about applying tricks and methods that work just for ourselves. We did so by learning new programs and methods that introduced radical new ways of approaching modding and (most importantly) taught us how to do advanced things. Things that we grow dependent on because they are the perfect mix of knowing exactly what we're doing while also getting the game to run properly. I'm not surprised to see something that works counter to how we've finally managed to 'work it all out' rub us the wrong way. Human nature I suppose.

 

 

 

A lot of features are just not available yet because it's an alpha. You need to remember that this isn't a full release. This isn't even a beta. If your concern is about load order, Vortex gives you the tools to sort your load order just fine. It's just done a bit differently. You still have the controls you need.

In my case, (and I'm sure others too). I played my first modded games with NMM and it was great, until it all came crashing down - mostly because I didn't know what I was doing. So when I tried again and NMM looked like it wouldn't cut it: the lord and saviour Mod Organizer appeared. So much more complicated but if you just paid attention then you'd gain so much more stability and control. Learning and following excellent instructions on STEP and in the forums here added to this and employed the use of even more granular control over our modlists. LOOT, Wrye Bash, DDSopt, xEdit, Merge Plugins and more built on it even further and added new ideologies and new rules to follow for having an optimum experience.

 

Technically speaking if you know what you are doing NMM works fine, MO just had additional features to allow much more detailed control over things, but you can get an equally stable game using either manager regardless. The STEP guide teaches you how to use LOOT essentially and uses the rules system to sort, which is the exact system Vortex uses. So if you have been following the STEP guide you should already know how to use Vortex's method of load order. It might not be going into a list to just drag and drop the plugin, but you still can tell where each plugin needs to go pretty easily. It honestly shouldn't take anyone all that long to do if they are not sorting plugins that don't need sorting.

Of course though having to do that does get fatiguing so naturally, when Vortex was announced I was HYPE. I mean seriously, hiring Tannin - the maker of MO. We would get the spiffyness and ease of use of NMM combined with the absolute power of MO while having it as the de-facto mod manager of the most prolific mod depository on the internet! If only those tools I mentioned above could also be integrated somehow - a man can dream!

 

 

That's literally what he did with LOOT.

Now it's out and I want to try it but I'm in the middle of my New Vegas playthrough and I do not want to mess with it. So I gobble up everyone's impressions and, well... so many comments about how it doesn't do this thing I like or that thing I like; all things that Mod Organizer does; all things that Tannin demonstrated before. I do understand that it's Alpha - unfinished, and that developers work hard and can't just add every little feature people ask for (especially when embarking on a new project.) It just paints a rather disappointing picture I suppose; the new shiny program can't do what the old busted program did and dispels the illusion that this program will truly be the future for every modder.

 

 

The reason it's not doing it the old way is simply that it doesn't need to. If you go on about trying to include every feature everyone wants just because they don't want to use the method that already exists in the software, then that means more time is being spent on features that aren't improving the software for everyone, but a select few who can't seem to move on. But not only that, Vortex is built with customization in mind. This means if these people really want this feature, they can quite literally develop an extension themselves. Why waste time developing a feature that really isn't needed for the core functionality of the software, when others can do it?

As I read this feedback I'm left wanting to understand the rhetoric of the developers. I have seen some explanations and also many people pushing back against them. It's a start either way but I do admit it does appear rather lacking. Arguing for the case of improving LOOT for the sake of everyone does sound good, but it also doesn't sound like a good reason to not have a simply drag and drop mod order.

 

Because it's literally not needed. This isn't like a situation where you can't sort your load order manually. You can. You just can't do it in the exact manner as you could previously. But why does that matter so much when all you have to do is create a rule and it does the same exact thing? People keep wanting to understand, but Tannin has explained this repeatedly over and over again but they don't seem to want to accept his explanation or either that, they don't seem to understand what he says.

 

 

I would like to really come to understand the developers vision for having these process work together in Vortex to make it a great modern replacement (or at least alternative) for MO. Personally the kinds of pipe dreams I hoped for Vortex was basically everything MO did but easier to navigate, with some basic functions just built in, like patching and merging and file readers - but hey I suppose that's at the behest of the developers who made those tools. Right now, after reading and watching some YouTube demonstrations, Vortex just gives me the feeling of a shiner NMM and well that just a bit ehhh?

 

Again, it's an alpha. A lot of the features that were in MO are planned for Vortex, and more. Of course, it's not anything like MO yet. Of course, it doesn't have those features yet. It's planned though and you just need to be patient. The only feature I know of that Tannin has said isn't going to be worked on is this load order drag and drop situation and with very good reason. Because no one has come here and gave a decent enough explanation for why it's absolutely needed. Keyword needed. Not want, but need. He is the only person working on the software at the moment, and he has said, he wants to work on other features that are more important.

 

Edit: Lol plus, all the reasons above that Tannin commented.

Edited February 20, 2018 by Brabbit1987

[ozoak]

Got it. So people aren't allowed to want things, only need them. And they don't get to determine what they need? And if they want things they are being unreasonable or dense?

FWIW the need equation can be viewed from the two perspectives. When developing software there comes a point where a developer needs to address wants of users, regardless of how the developer views those wants. The fact that many people keep requesting drag and drop load ordering should be all we really need to see.

 

I'm with Ghatto - the current (yes yes, alpha release, lets beat that drum again) iteration of Vortex just...doesn't appeal. I get it, the Rules allow you to achieve the same end result as drag and drop might, and it's not a bad thing to rely on LOOT, and you can break a mod loadout by messing with an order, but as far as usability the Rules implementation doesn't look as user friendly as drag and drop. It feels archaic, ie retrograde development. The Rules on load order seems like a decent concept, but could not a drag and drop mechanism be used to create those rules?

 

Like Ghatto I haven't installed it yet to even try, because it's uninspiring, but from what I can determine from looking at usage videos, if in say a simple scenario where I have 21 armour mods and I need to make sure 1 loads after the preceding 20th, I am supposed to open that 1 mod and set 20 'load after' rules? If true, then that is demonstrably more work than dragging 1 file after 20 in a list. If not true then it only highlights something else: Nexus should do a 'how things work in Vortex' video explaining it, because other videos are not doing it justice?

[MarchinBunny]

Got it. So people aren't allowed to want things, only need them. And they don't get to determine what they need? And if they want things they are being unreasonable or dense?

FWIW the need equation can be viewed from the two perspectives. When developing software there comes a point where a developer needs to address wants of users, regardless of how the developer views those wants. The fact that many people keep requesting drag and drop load ordering should be all we really need to see.

 

 

I think you are not really understanding what was meant by that. Wanting something is fine. The issue is you already have a method to sort load order. It's one thing if a person has a suggestion/want for a function that you cannot do but would be useful, and it's another thing to want something you can already do, but rather have a different way to do it.

 

Also, your thought process on software development is a bit wonky. What users want isn't always what the developer wants and I think that is very important to understand because this applies to all software to some degree. No developer will implement every single thing a group of people starts clamoring for if it doesn't fit within their development timeline and what they are looking to accomplish. When it comes to software, usually you only start implementing things that were outside of the scope of development when development is complete.

 

But not only that, when it comes to software like this you should be happy Tannin created it so it can allow extensions. This means he himself doesn't have to do something everyone else wants because anyone else can do it. You just have to have some patience.

 

 

I'm with Ghatto - the current (yes yes, alpha release, lets beat that drum again) iteration of Vortex just...doesn't appeal. I get it, the Rules allow you to achieve the same end result as drag and drop might, and it's not a bad thing to rely on LOOT, and you can break a mod loadout by messing with an order, but as far as usability the Rules implementation doesn't look as user friendly as drag and drop. It feels archaic, ie retrograde development. The Rules on load order seems like a decent concept, but could not a drag and drop mechanism be used to create those rules?

 

 

See, he has quite literally talked about this and why you can't do both. I get there are multiple threads on the issue, but I really wish people would read a bit into this first on multiple threads before asking the same question over and over again. Anyway, Tannin goes over the problem with doing drag and drop in this thread here toward the beginning.

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/6360211-ideas-how-to-resolve-the-manual-load-orderforced-lootmeta-rules-problem/

Edit: I do believe there was another thread where he went into a bit more detail, but I can't remember which one. But the gist of it is that doing drag and drop isn't giving the manager enough context to what the user is trying to do. What was that move the user just did? Was it to set a priority? Was it to set after or before? Was the user even trying to create a rule?

 

Now, on the other hand, Vortex does have a visual drag and drop functionality to create rules. There is a little dependency icon after all plugins that you can drag and drop to another plugin icon and it will pop up asking what rule you want to create between those two plugins.

Like Ghatto I haven't installed it yet to even try, because it's uninspiring, but from what I can determine from looking at usage videos, if in say a simple scenario where I have 21 armour mods and I need to make sure 1 loads after the preceding 20th, I am supposed to open that 1 mod and set 20 'load after' rules? If true, then that is demonstrably more work than dragging 1 file after 20 in a list. If not true then it only highlights something else: Nexus should do a 'how things work in Vortex' video explaining it, because other videos are not doing it justice?

 

 

No, you just set a priority for that plugin to make sure it always is loaded last. If you need to set a plugin to take precedence over all others, you just set a priority. 1 rule required.

 

Edit: Alternatively you can select that dependency icon and click edit and checkmark all 20 mods a mod needs to come after and it will create all 20 rules. Removing the rules is just as easy as doing the same and unchecking them.

Edited February 21, 2018 by Brabbit1987

[Ghatto]

Thank you muchly for your reply Tannin.

 

 

A few things:

- Vortex is designed to be the replacement for NMM. Of course we're trying to identify and incorporate what's great about alternatives (be it MO, Wrye Bash, Steam Workshop or whatever) but first and foremost it has to be a better NMM.

 

Yeah I have come to understand this. I think my (and others) trepidation may be related to my experience of switching from NMM to MO; As we learned about it's benefits we came to the conclusion that indeed there was one true manager, that there was no point in using NMM or having a replacement for it, because MO was that replacement.

That's not at all true, but I'm not surprised I started to think that way when MO's solutions to certain problems just made it such a go-to at the time. So hearing about Vortex I imagined that same experience: this will be the one! I realise that is foolish, although I can't think of much else in life disappointments that didn't have unrealistic expectations as the cause.

 

So offering direct ordering wouldn't be an extension or improvement to what we have now, it would be a parallel approach to do the same thing.

 

Thanks for explaining your rhetoric. I quoted this line though, because honestly, that kinda sounds like what people are asking for. Simply two ways to do the same thing because they may preference one or the other for whatever reason. However I do accept that it's an unreasonable amount of extra development and support for you to be working on 2 solutions to the same problem.

 

 

(*) and developing and maintaining direct load order management isn't quite as simple and cheap as people seem to think. The drag&drop control isn't the problem, but people would still expect it to enforce correct order between esm/master esps, esls (creation club and custom) and esps. Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE now have 5 groups of plugins that have to be loaded in a specific order and, if previous investigation by mod authors is correct, setting one plugin as a master of an esl will move it to another group.

 

Ah my apologies. I'm completely ignorant of these complication as I simply haven't played SSE or Fallout 4 yet. I support that you should prioritise making modding the latest games a stable and easy experience.

 

 

But as I've said before: I consider extensibility the biggest strength of Vortex and I have little doubt that others will eventually provide an extension for direct load order management, it just won't be in the core application. But Vortex is out publicly for less than a week, there is no proper documentation for the API yet, give it a bit of time.

 

I greatly look forward to it. With the spirit of modding so strong in this place I find it no surprise that the next step is modding the mod managers.

 

 

So if you have been following the STEP guide you should already know how to use Vortex's method of load order. It might not be going into a list to just drag and drop the plugin, but you still can tell where each plugin needs to go pretty easily. It honestly shouldn't take anyone all that long to do if they are not sorting plugins that don't need sorting.

 

Correct. I do understand that process. Admittedly though, the only LOOT rules I've actually made are the ones specified in STEP. All the rest I've all done manually with drag and drop. Why I did that I think is at the heart of this discussion: mod testing, troubleshooting and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). As I added non-STEP mods and tried to troubleshoot problems I found being able to easily quit the game, move a mod, and start it again to see if that fixed it was just so nice and easy. The WYSIWYG approach in MO by just seeing you load order and then, via click and drag, just putting the mod exactly where I think it should go, is just straight up comforting. I do see many people complaining that they can't or haven't discovered how to make sure that even after the LOOT rules are applied, that the mods always be shown in the order specified; that does sound like it may need improving - Alpha feedback after all.

 

After that, I needed to understand Merging Mods and had to adopt Mator's approach of 'categorise, contiguous, and don't just blindly follow LOOT'. Eventually I settled for running LOOT, making some rules, and the doing everything else manually.

 

 

That's literally what he did with LOOT.

Oh and I love it. It makes me very excited to try this manager knowing I'll never have to run LOOT separately to get the results I need.

 

 

Because it's literally not needed. This isn't like a situation where you can't sort your load order manually. You can. You just can't do it in the exact manner as you could previously. But why does that matter so much when all you have to do is create a rule and it does the same exact thing?

Hmm. It sounds like more or less an issue of what verbs and nouns are used. Silly I know, but I think those who really cling to click and drag don't consider the act of sorting your load order as like running it through a counting machine, but instead an actual picking up each puzzle piece with your own hands and then putting it in a very specific location. I suppose we don't feel as comfortable telling the program where to put a mod as we do putting it there ourselves.

 

Because no one has come here and gave a decent enough explanation for why it's absolutely needed. Keyword needed. Not want, but need. He is the only person working on the software at the moment, and he has said, he wants to work on other features that are more important.

 

Yeah I get it. I don't want to give the impression that I'm entitled to what I want, and I understand it's needs>wants. That said, I think it's getting to be a sign of this hobby maturing in some ways. These programs aren't just little .net tools picked from cracker sites or Limewire any more. The way Vortex has been anticipated and presented now reminds me of how it compares to the bigwigs, like MS Office, or Steam... yeah I feel even I had built up Vortex to be the 'Steam of Mods'; the big guy that does it all and everybody uses it. We've reached a point with these types of programs that we now know what it can do, so then discussion shifts to it doing what we all want it to do. But that is unfair to Tannin, he's not a million monkeys on a million typewriters. I do hope we all respect though that we've kinda reached a bit of a critical mass, and that reactions like this could be a sign that Vortex may have shoes too big to fill.

 

But hey uhh... i'll reserve judgement until I try it!

 

EDIT:

Edit: Alternatively you can select that dependency icon and click edit and checkmark all 20 mods a mod needs to come after and it will create all 20 rules. Removing the rules is just as easy as doing the same and unchecking them.

 

 

Holy s***. That makes this sound so much better than previously considered. Perhaps a good thing to eventually add would be a 'cascading rule dialog'. Like select the mods, click on the dependency and then open a dialog that within itself has drag-and-drop for just those selected mods. Then the user can order them and once confirmed it will create a set of rules keeping that particular set in a locked order. I'd imagine such an implementation should at lest alleviate the concerns of those who have that 'custom ordered set of 20 armour mods' et. al.

[Tannin42]

Yeah I have come to understand this. I think my (and others) trepidation may be related to my experience of switching from NMM to MO; As we learned about it's benefits we came to the conclusion that indeed there was one true manager, that there was no point in using NMM or having a replacement for it, because MO was that replacement.

That's not at all true, but I'm not surprised I started to think that way when MO's solutions to certain problems just made it such a go-to at the time. So hearing about Vortex I imagined that same experience: this will be the one! I realise that is foolish, although I can't think of much else in life disappointments that didn't have unrealistic expectations as the cause.

I understand that, and trust me: I'm still proud of MO. But the reality is still that MO has a share of the userbase of around 5%, a large number of users found it to be to complicated for them.

Wrye Bash? Approximately half that. The rest is NMM and manual installs.

 

On the other hand: SkyUI for Skyrim has been subscribed through steam workshop by more than 1.1 million users, meaning there are at least twice as many users getting this one mod through steam workshop right now as

the last version of MO has unique downloads over the last 2.5 years.

The "unofficial FO4 patch" has more than 800k downloads through bethesda.net for PC alone.

What this means is that the big modding tools today aren't Wrye Bash, MO and NMM, they are NMM, Steam Workshop and Bethesda.net. The majority of users want simple one-click mod installation and

don't need more.

 

That doesn't mean we aspire to be more like Workshop, I just want to show how, when you look at the cold numbers, it paints a very different picture of how people mod compared to discussions in the forums here.

 

When building Vortex we started from a UI that we thinc can is usable for beginners without intimidating them and then "hide" more complex features in there.

Vortex has a lot of stuff, I'd argue it has almost all features of MO and with extensions and further development I'm sure we will close the gap (and then some), but on the surface it's a much simpler tool.

[MarchinBunny]

 

Yeah I have come to understand this. I think my (and others) trepidation may be related to my experience of switching from NMM to MO; As we learned about it's benefits we came to the conclusion that indeed there was one true manager, that there was no point in using NMM or having a replacement for it, because MO was that replacement.

That's not at all true, but I'm not surprised I started to think that way when MO's solutions to certain problems just made it such a go-to at the time. So hearing about Vortex I imagined that same experience: this will be the one! I realise that is foolish, although I can't think of much else in life disappointments that didn't have unrealistic expectations as the cause.

I understand that, and trust me: I'm still proud of MO. But the reality is still that MO has a share of the userbase of around 5%, a large number of users found it to be to complicated for them.

Wrye Bash? Approximately half that. The rest is NMM and manual installs.

 

On the other hand: SkyUI for Skyrim has been subscribed through steam workshop by more than 1.1 million users, meaning there are at least twice as many users getting this one mod through steam workshop right now as

the last version of MO has unique downloads over the last 2.5 years.

The "unofficial FO4 patch" has more than 800k downloads through bethesda.net for PC alone.

What this means is that the big modding tools today aren't Wrye Bash, MO and NMM, they are NMM, Steam Workshop and Bethesda.net. The majority of users want simple one-click mod installation and

don't need more.

 

That doesn't mean we aspire to be more like Workshop, I just want to show how, when you look at the cold numbers, it paints a very different picture of how people mod compared to discussions in the forums here.

 

When building Vortex we started from a UI that we thinc can is usable for beginners without intimidating them and then "hide" more complex features in there.

Vortex has a lot of stuff, I'd argue it has almost all features of MO and with extensions and further development I'm sure we will close the gap (and then some), but on the surface it's a much simpler tool.

 

Wow, I had no idea the numbers were quite like that. I had assumed this was going to occur, I just didn't know it had already. From my time being a part of the modded Minecraft community and paying attention to other trends in modding elsewhere, I noticed what people want is something they can just click, install, and play. I love modding and I actually love doing it the complicated way. It's fun to me, I spend more time modding Skyrim than playing probably. But I would look at the current trend and wonder, why isn't Nexus doing this too?

 

As I have been a part of this community and reading the forums, I realized there is quite a bubble here. Not just with the users, but many mod developers too. It's sort of like how a civilization ignores everyone else around them. They decide staying the same is the best thing, while everyone else progresses and improves their lives. They insist it's better to learn how to do these things yourself, but I don't think they realize how big of a barrier to entry that causes. Not everyone who games has the technical know-how or want to learn to do a load order manually just to play a modded game. But it is insisted again and again, this is the correct way to do it, and if you can't do it this way then you shouldn't be modding. Or the least you can do is read my mods description. While this is true, it's probably best to always read the descriptions of mods, I think one should only expect many people will not. A lot of people don't even read the big letter sign "Order Here" at fast food locations. I feel like software development in large part is trying to tackle these things and trying to predict how people will use it and how they won't.

 

Anyway, I love the Nexus. I want to see the Nexus progress and become even better and I am glad the developer for Vortex is someone who is looking toward the future to do just that. The future of modding looks bright :3.

[Dukoth]

please put in an option for manual sorting, this rules system is un-intuitive and just feels wrong, I've been troubleshooting my load orders for 10 years and I dont need you taking control away from me and telling me how to do it

[Arcanant]

I just want to put my 2 cents here, I am a super noob modder and not a programmer so take my word for what it is.

I love Vortex so far, it is amazing, fast. The profiling system actually WORKS which is very usefull to me!

My only problem was (and is) load order management. I was able to work it around by editing manually the plugins.txt at C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Fallout4
But that wasn't enough since I needed to edit loadorder.txt as well generated by vortex again placed at C:\Users\Me\AppData\Local\Fallout4

I had numerous problems because of how messed the loadorder.txt was even with dependencies applied by me(which was a huge hassle for a huge load order like mine). It didn't even load all the esps and esls and I was hitting my way at the wall thinking that I did something wrong after having a CTD everytime I loaded my game. I almost gave up on modding in general and the game too, seriously. I figured that the load order was messed up after trying to merge some esps using merge plugins, it usually loads the plugins.txt but apparently it prioritized the loadorder.txt after all which I didn't know and I found the source of my problems. Now I can enjoy the game again.

What I want to say is, since the 1 click installation for every single mod is not fully factional atm (because more data is needed to be gathered by all users so it can actually happen one day) it is useful to have an optional loadorder manual management. Though I don't personally mind since I found this workaround, maybe people can do the same for themselves till it all works out. Again thank you all for your amazing work!