Simple manual load ordering plz

[Arthmoor]

We listen to arguments because we're reasonable people but we're not going to be coerced into making a change we don't believe in.

Uh huh. If you had actually listened to everyone who brought this up, you'd have found the arguments to be perfectly sound. Nobody is trying to coerce you into anything. That's terminology used by someone who made up their mind beforehad and refused to reconsider even in the face of good arguments. You don't get to be the judge of what is or isn't a good argument.

 

This argument is completely off, and I'm pretty sure you know that if you really listen into your heart.

Nope. It's a perfectly valid argument. VR being on an incompatible code branch is reason enough to bar support for it. I don't have access to it. I can't validate anything on it. I am not willing to take the word of others on this.

 

As Tannin has said, modding was never about official support.

To be blunt, I don't think he knows what modding is or was about. I don't think anyone does. Modding is whatever you want it to be, but it has limits, and people need to accept that. Not doing so only leads to problems.

 

You yourself have started to mod Skyrim long before Bethesda started to sanction it officially.

You have me confused with crazy people then. I never tried to mod Skyrim before the CK existed. I'm sorry, but only a fool attempts to modify a Bethesda game without official tools. The first 6 months of modding for Skyrim were a disaster because of tools like TESSnip being pushed out there by people who didn't know what had been changed in Skyrim's engine. I spent that time on more Oblivion mods instead. Mod managers are supposed to work WITH the games, not against them. Which IMO includes easy management of the load order for games where that's relevant.

 

Actually, when Bethesda started to implement modding officially by means of the Creation Club, most people shunned that idea.

I have no idea what compels you to drag this even further out into left field by bringing up the CC, but no, "most" people have not shunned the idea. Quite the opposite is true. I'll leave it at that.

 

The matter of the fact is, that the only thing Skyrim VR doesn't support, is the official way of modding, i.e. the Creation Club.

Negative. It doesn't properly support SSE mods, and it definitely won't work with LE mods. Why? Again, because it's a different code branch. It wasn't designed to handle the mods you guys are throwing at it. When people like me point this out, the VR community responds with insults and personal attacks. Then they complain when we respond to that by telling them they're on their own and won't get any help from us and try to make it out like we fired the first shot. Apparently daring to speak the truth about the precious is not allowed.

 

The Creation Kit itself works just fine, as do all the other tools.

On the games for which it exists, this is absolutely true. There is no CK for VR. That alone should be a big hint.

 

And the code base is only slightly older than the latest Skyrim SE, but that's hardly relevant for any mod. The problems that affect both Alternate Life and SkyUI are caused by the differences in VR itself and its UI, not by the fact that it's a slightly older code base.

You have no idea how significant those differences are though. Enough so that USSEP doesn't work. LAL doesn't work. SkyUI doesn't work. 3 of the most popular SSE mods right off the bat, knocked out by differences in the engine. Limits. Accept them. They exist.

 

All this makes it even harder for me to understand why you shun this new way of playing this game and the people who enjoy it.

The VR community would be largely to blame for that. I was indifferent until the insults and personal attacks began, now I have no desire to interact with them at all. Which is fine. Saves me the money anyway. VR isn't a cheap hobby and it would have been a ludicrous thing to buy for one game anyway.

 

What I just don't get, is that you shun all of us players who just want to get an enjoyable experience.

See above. Your community brought it upon themselves.

 

Even though it wouldn't be that much of an effort to support us. Actually, I'd even consider to try to fix the problems myself, given a few tips and pointers from your side.

You grossly underestimate the problem then because it would take nothing short of a dedicated version of each mod in question to get the job done, and I'm in no position to do that even if the VR community had been the friendliest bunch of people on the internet.

 

You've set an example and now the SkyUI guys can always point at you to justify their position. Now, what we've ended up with, is a split up gaming community.

Ever considered that perhaps they saw how I got treated and says "nope, screw that"? The split is entirely VR's own fault for being so aggressive.

 

BTW, I'd like to point out that it's only the Skyrim VR people who have been such jackasses. The Fallout VR community appears to understand that mods for regular FO4 aren't going to work and they haven't even asked for the patch to get ported despite it being around longer than Skyrim VR. They get it. Why don't you?

Now since I don't want to waste any more of Tannin's time with this in this thread, if you wish to continue this discussion about VR, let's take it to PMs, ok?

[Grestorn]

@Arthmoor:

I don't know which people have been offending you. You say the "Skyrim VR" community is to be blamed, and since I'm part of that community, you blame me as well.

In my time on this planet, the ONE thing I've learned, that it's never a good idea to judge a group of people as a whole based on a few outstanding members of that group.

I accept that you're offended in such a big way that you have no intention to reach out again. It's understandable, however sad for the big non-offending VR community.

 

What I just don't get are your continuous claims that VR is not modding compatible. It's just wrong. Plainly wrong, and the fact are there for everyone to see:

- The CK works just fine (the one for SSE)

- Practically all mods work fine - including USSEP. It has to be adapted in some small areas, otherwise it would revert some changes that have been made for the VR specifically, but for this, there's already a fix out there. No problem.

- Almost all of your own mods work, with the notable exception of LAL. CRF works, Skyshards works, Paarthurnax works, RfyL works, Volkihar works and of course all you village mods are working. The only mod I've never tried (because I'm afraid it might cause too many problems, even in the base game) was Open Cities.

- The huge game altering mods, like the one from Enai Sision are all working fine (with a small UI patch to fix the perk limit that was introduced with the VR version). Currently I've got 251 active mods (and 167 .esp/m files). All the small issues that caused problems with mods, like the special "VR introduction" level that got autoloaded, have long be solved.

 

So why are you insisting that VR doesn't support modding when that's what we're doing for hours over hours now?

 

I understand that mods like LAL require some work to be adapted to VR, because of its very nature of tapping into the very basic game startup quests, which are obviously altered for VR.

 

SkyUI for SSE is no longer OpenSource, as it used to be, otherwise people would probably already have adapted it. With some tricks and hacks, most of it is actually already working with the VR, but there are some quirks here and there, which look like they should be fixable.

 

 

it's just the way it is, I guess, and I'm just sad that some people caused so much confrontation and anger with the creative people. I can understand the frustration on both sides, but getting personal and offensive is never a good way to resolve a conflict.

 

 

@Back to topic:

 

How would you integrate the auto sorting together with manual sorting, Arthmoor? And how would you explain that to the user? And what sort order problem is there, which can only be solved with manual sorting but not the mechanisms that LOOT already provide today?

[Arthmoor]

[VR snip - take it to PMs please]

@Back to topic:

How would you integrate the auto sorting together with manual sorting, Arthmoor? And how would you explain that to the user? And what sort order problem is there, which can only be solved with manual sorting but not the mechanisms that LOOT already provide today?

Well, I'm not really proficient enough to know how it would get done, but I see no reason why there can't be a manual method to sort load order on top of asking LOOT to do it for you. Tannin has simply expressed that he just doesn't want to do it. Period. Which isn't an acceptable argument to a lot of people, but that's his decision to make. Doesn't mean we can't still bring it up from time to time, but hey.

As far as what problems can't be solved by LOOT, special cases of mods needing to go exactly between each other, or a mod that definitely needs to "load last" (like my Dawnguard Map Markers mod for example) are difficult at best to wrangle when all you can tell LOOT is "load it after this one". Ok, so it loaded after X, but then LOOT stuck Y and Z after it and I don't want that. Then A, B, C, D, and E came along later and disrupted it all again. Whereas a manual sort it's a one and done operation. Drag that s*** to the bottom. End of operation. Seconds vs hours figuring out how to trick LOOT.

[Grestorn]

Was there supposed to be a PM or do you want me to write a PM to you?

 

 

Anyway: What Tannin said, is that auto-sorting will immediately make any manual sorting done before worthless. LOOT doesn't care about the previous order, it reorders everything just the way it likes. So the only option would be to disable auto-sorting altogether when the user wants to use manual-sorting.

 

About your examples: You know that there are plugin groups, which make it really easy to place a plugin at the bottom? Without any manual rules? And to put a plugin between two other plugins is just two simple rules (A before B and B before C).

 

I don't see why you have a problem that LOOT might sort other, unrelated mods in between A, B and C. It's not like it would cause a problem to have a mod, which changes completely unrelated records, in between those mods, would it?

 

The problem with manual sorting is, that you forfeit to use auto-sorting once you chose to do it manually. And there's really just no good reason for that.

[Zanderat]

I still don't get why you can't have LOOT to auto-sort and then allow a manual override for a particular plugin.

[Grestorn]

Because, as soon as you auto-sort again (which is bound to happen), your manual override will be lost. LOOT doesn't support to pin a single mod (other by using a fixed mod-index), which really doesn't make much sense anyway. Pin where? Pin to what?

 

It's the same with NMM too, by the way. You're free to sort the plugins as you want... but as soon as you choose to auto-sort, all your previous manual sorting isn't taken into account at all, and the plugins are completely rearranged. So it's an illusion that you can use manual- and auto-sorting at the same time with NMM.

[Zanderat]

Not "pin" a mod. Just enforce a custom rule and disregard the cyclic interaction nonsense. Whoever said LOOT couldn't be improved or modified?

[UrizenDe]

The problem with manual sorting is, that you forfeit to use auto-sorting once you chose to do it manually. And there's really just no good reason for that.

 

Yes there is.When you have a couple of mods that overlap in their edits and you want to find a for you working load order. Tannins solution works very well when you already know where which mod goes and loot has a proper masterlist. When it doesn´t, you get something like this: LAL -> Realistic Water Two -> Warzones ( The way loot ordered this until a couple months ago ). RWT and WZ will impede LAL functionality and WZ will visually break RWT. The sad thing here is: All these mods were available for Oldrim where I bet a rule exists that LAL loads after RWT which loads after WZ. But for SSE? Nope. I trusted the sorting of LOOT only to be greeted by a broken White River near where a Warzone was. I realized what I had to do, so I dragged RWT in its proper place and was done with it. This is where rules are handy. But now picture you have 10 mods that could be responsible for this. And it isn´t clear what mod does what in detail. When you are left to experiment to find that one loadorder that works for you. Good luck creating and resetting rules for every possible combination. Or editing global priority.

[Arthmoor]

Was there supposed to be a PM or do you want me to write a PM to you?

If you want to continue the VR discussion, feel free to PM me, but I have nothing really to add to it at this point.

 

The problem with manual sorting is, that you forfeit to use auto-sorting once you chose to do it manually. And there's really just no good reason for that.

Tell that to all the NMM, Wrye Bash, and MO users over the years who have been using LOOT and doing manual sorting to adjust things afterward. IT's been perfectly normal to have access to both ways of doing things, right up to some of them including LOOT APIs in their code.

 

I see things from the opposite view - there was no good reason to leave out manual sorting.

[HadToRegister]

All they need to do to settle it once and for all is to post a poll if people want or don't want it.