[Feature request] Install mods in root directory

[DarkDominion]

Like if there's a .dll in the top of the archive, it's in all likelyhood to be installed into the game's base directory.

Not true, in Skyrim and Fallout 4 there are .dlls in the DATA folder ( think SKSE or F4SE ) , and .dlls in the GAME folder

[Grestorn]

There are not .dlls in the Data directory itself. There MAY be .dlls in subdirectories of data (like "plugins" or "skse"), but not in Data itself.

[XJDHDR]

@Tannin42
With all due respect, I have some issues with your complaints.
Also, I have a question: What plans do you have to allow the installation of mods into the root directory (including non-ENBs)? It's fine if you don't like my suggestions but the problem is that if there are no alternative proposals, there can be no progress.

a) It's an entirely bethesda-games specific solution, for other games it might produce incorrect results and so we'd have an entirely separate code path for the bethesda games and we'd still have no solution for other games or for enbs and all the mods that don't have a data directory in them.

d) It messes up the responsibilities between installation and deployment. That's actually the reason it's so hard to reimplement fomod support compatible with NMM because NMM did that.
Vortex tries to resolve all the differences between mod installers during the install phase so that the installed mods end up in a normalized format (e.g. a texture mod would have a texture directory at the root, not somewhere below). This way all other parts of vortex can assume on mods having a certain format. With your solution any part of vortex that wants to look at the content of a mod then also needs to account for how the author may have structured it. This makes a lot of advanced features harder, more expensive and more error prone to implement.

I have an idea that solves both of these problems: Vortex should be Installing all mods in such a way that they are Deployed to the game's Root directory, not a sub-directory like Data. And this would apply to every game, not just Bethesda's (with rational exceptions, namely games where mods are installed outside the game's root folder but these would be the exception). The biggest problem I can see with this is the amount of work to change Vortex's code to do this. I would argue that Vortex should have been coded to install in this manner from the start, it's better to make these sort of changes when Vortex is still in beta and this is the only way I can think of that will allow Vortex to install mods to the root folder without any of those special rules you complained about in Point D.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong but the second half of point A strongly implies that my initial suggestion is useless unless it solves every problem and accounts for every single situation Vortex encounters.

Finally, the main problem I see with point D is that, as far as I can see, you have already messed up the distinction between installing and deploying mods. I tested World of Tanks by having Vortex install QuickyBaby's mod pack as well as this mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/worldoftanks/mods/2458 . Vortex installed the mods by exacting the contents of the two archives into their own folders without any modifications. When I deployed them, the two mods were deployed to two completely different locations. QuickyBaby's pack was deployed to the root folder whereas the crew icon mod was deployed to "<root folder>/res_mods/<game version>". In fact, even the current ENB handling mess up this distinction by saying "deploy mods to the Data folder UNLESS it is an ENB then deploy it to Root instead". It's all well and good wanting point D (and I do mostly agree with you wanting Vortex to work this way) but I don't see this point being adhered to in practice.

 

This also brings up an important question: Is it really Vortex's responsibility to fix badly packaged mods?

And on a side note, while you're talking about mods with patch/optional directories: Are you planning on re-implementing the BAIN archive support that was present in Mod Organizer?

b) Just because a mod contains a data directory doesn't mean the author intended it to go to the root level. Your solution makes an assumption that's going to be right in at least 99% of the cases I'll admit but it could still break mods that worked before. There are more than 150k mods for the bethesda games alone just on nexusmods, more if you take mods that have only been uploaded to other pages and each mod could have different file variants (patches, optionals).
I have seen mods that contain stuff like "data\my awesome mod\data\textures\tex.dds". That mod would currently install correctly in MO/NMM/Vortex because they dig for the first directory with recognized names (textures in this case) and skip past "data\my awesome mod\data". Your solution would break that because it assumes "data on the top level -> install to root".

No it won't. Again, my suggestion is an addition to the current rules, not a replacement. In your example, my suggestion would do everything Vortex currently does except that what gets Installed is the second Data folder rather than the contents of the 2nd Data folder.

c) a lot of mods are packaged in such a way that they contain screenshots or a readme on the root level and a data directory, or a readme/screenshot/options directory plus data directory. Right now, afaik, all mod managers (MO/NMM/Vortex) will deploy only the stuff relevant to the game. With your solutions all those mods would start adding junk to the game root directory.

This problem has already been brought up and replied to:

One solution I can think of is to copy what Wrye Bash does in this case: add an option to either skip or put any readmes and screenshots into a dedicated Docs or Images folder when installing a mod rather than placing them where the mod's author put them. As a bonus, this would also prevent the Data folder from getting cluttered with those files.

What is the difference between all of those files cluttering the Data folder versus some of them cluttering the Root folder? And is there a problem with sweeping these files into their own dedicated folder which makes it worse than cluttering the Data folder?