Simple manual load ordering plz

[soupdragon1234]

I’ll jump in and add my two cents at this point:

 

Now more to the point: I can't remember anyone ever suggesting that they were asking for a "temporary" manual move, but it doesn't really make sense anyway. Either we have the feature or not, if we did implement manual ordering, would you actually want us to enforce (with a timer or something) that it's only temporary? Of course not, so from our perspecitve it doesn't make a difference whether you only want to do it temporarily or not, we'd still have all the drawbacks.

Not really, a temporary move is just that, temporary. The reason is quite simple, you think there may be a conflict between Mod A and Mod B that LOOT doesn’t already handle, or maybe it does but in an incorrect manner, so you manually shuffle around a few mods to test your theory.

Now ok I can hear you say, that’s what Global rules and Groups are for, and that’s fine for a permanent fix after you’ve figured out what the issue is but for a temporary measure its clumsy and tedious.

 

One reason I'm refusing to build in the option is, as Greston said: The moment you start moving plugins manually you have to keep controlling them manually. I think this is part of the same misconception that makes it a surprise that a "load plugin a after plugin b" rule can move plugin b instead of plugin a: LOOT orders the entire list concerning itself only with the rules, not the original position of the plugin. Hence you can't do some changes manually and still use LOOT, it's one or the other.

From my personal perspective its only ever a local condition and never affects LOOT’s load ordering, whenever I re-run LOOT I fully expect it reorder the load order in whatever it thinks it should be and wipe out my temporary sort, and that’s 100% fine. I simply don’t run LOOT until I’m ready to let it do its thing. If I do discover that LOOT made an error or otherwise means it needs permanently overriding then I’ll add a custom rule (Global, Groups, etc) to it.

But I think Dark0ne summed it up perfectly its not something that currently worth spending their time on and I can understand that, even though it is frustrating. No mod manager is perfect i.e. WB which I otherwise use to manually (and temporarily) change my load order stubbornly refuses to support FOMOD so I totally get the we’re-not-interested-in-going-there stance of Vortex.

 

I keep hoping someone will come up with an add-on for Vortex that allow you to do that as its way beyond my abilities currently to write.

[Tannin42]

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.

Arguments? Plural? Maybe I've been reading the wrong posts then because there is only one argument that's been brought up and that's "It's always been this way". That doesn't become multiple arguments just because multiple people are stating it.

If you see other arguments for - let's call it "direct" - ordering, could you repeat them please?

 

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

Because that particular mod could have it's own rules and be referenced by other mods and it can be master of another mod or have another mod as its master.

I can of course ignore individual mods for the automatic sorting but how do I then put them into the sorted block? Let's say I have plugins a through d and plugin c shouldn't be auto sorted.

LOOT generates the order b, d, a for the plugins that do get sorted, but how do I now know where to place plugin c?

I'd either have to force an absolute position (e.g. "plugin c has index 2") - which Vortex already supports. Or it'd have to remember the position relative to the other plugins (e.g. plugin c comes after plugin b), but that's exactly what rules are! That's the only options we have and Vortex supports both. "manual drag&drop" ordering is the same as enforcing absolute indices on all plugins just with a more convenient UI specialised for that scenario.

 

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

 

You can't ignore cyclic interactions, that's just not possible. Not because LOOT can't do it because it's logically not possible.

A cyclic interaction is a logic error of the nature "plugin a has to be after plugin b and at the same time plugin b has to be after plugin a" (possibly indirect with multiple plugins in between or rules derived from groups or masters). It can not be solved without removing one of the rules.

 

I guess what you really mean is you'd like to ignore the preset rules when they conflict with your custom ones, but

a) that's actually not something LOOT supports

b) I don't think is a good idea. Not even NMM, MO (or Wrye Bash afaik) let you put plugins before their masters because it just wouldn't work and the masterlist rules are well curated, I don't think it's a common thing that the masterlist actually contains incorrect rules. And if they did, it would be better to report that instead of everyone setting custom rules to override the offending one.

[UrizenDe]

I guess what you really mean is you'd like to ignore the preset rules when they conflict with your custom ones, but

a) that's actually not something LOOT supports

b) I don't think is a good idea. Not even NMM, MO (or Wrye Bash afaik) let you put plugins before their masters because it just wouldn't work and the masterlist rules are well curated, I don't think it's a common thing that the masterlist actually contains incorrect rules. And if they did, it would be better to report that instead of everyone setting custom rules to override the offending one.

A) Loot maybe doesn´t. But you could override it in the end using WB, NMM, Mod manager of your choice that supports non rule based sorting. Let me give you an example using LAL and RWT. LAL is enforced by loot to load after RWT, reverting a pond controlled by RWT back to vanilla. I don´t want that and rather loose LAL functionality in that area. So I open up WB and drag LAL before RWT. Done. With Vortex I can at best override it using priorities.

B) You can put plugins before their masters ( IIRC WB refuses to build a patch in such a case, but otherwise let´s you do with your load order as you please ), but good luck getting the game to launch :laugh:.

[Grestorn]

Just chnage LAL's or RWT's group and you're done. Those plugins are forced to be in that order because of their standard group, as far as I know.

[Tannin42]

 

I guess what you really mean is you'd like to ignore the preset rules when they conflict with your custom ones, but

a) that's actually not something LOOT supports

b) I don't think is a good idea. Not even NMM, MO (or Wrye Bash afaik) let you put plugins before their masters because it just wouldn't work and the masterlist rules are well curated, I don't think it's a common thing that the masterlist actually contains incorrect rules. And if they did, it would be better to report that instead of everyone setting custom rules to override the offending one.

A) Loot maybe doesn´t. But you could override it in the end using WB, NMM, Mod manager of your choice that supports non rule based sorting. Let me give you an example using LAL and RWT. LAL is enforced by loot to load after RWT, reverting a pond controlled by RWT back to vanilla. I don´t want that and rather loose LAL functionality in that area. So I open up WB and drag LAL before RWT. Done. With Vortex I can at best override it using priorities.

B) You can put plugins before their masters ( IIRC WB refuses to build a patch in such a case, but otherwise let´s you do with your load order as you please ), but good luck getting the game to launch :laugh:.

 

a) yes, but that was my point: manual overriding precludes the use of automatic sorting. The argument I was contradicting was that one could disable automatic sorting for individual plugins in a workable fashion.

 

Regarding LAL vs. RWT: On the contrary, LOOT enforces that RWT loads after LAL. (at least in SSE, I didn't check Oldrim)

The rule for that was introduced in this commit: https://github.com/loot/skyrimse/commit/9c3dce58 by Riwaha, following advice from the Realistic Water mod author with the reason that it avoids water seams.

 

Isn't it nice that you can actually find out why things are the way they are? That it is made public knowledge in a searchable database who, why and when made the load order rule instead of "word of mouth" knowledge that no one really verified and load order advice that's mostly just "this load order works for me, copy it"?

[UrizenDe]

Regarding LAL vs. RWT: On the contrary, LOOT enforces that RWT loads after LAL. (at least in SSE, I didn't check Oldrim)

The rule for that was introduced in this commit: https://github.com/loot/skyrimse/commit/9c3dce58 by Riwaha, following advice from the Realistic Water mod author with the reason that it avoids water seams.

A) I used two easily recognizable mods as an example with a made up LO and B) interesting to see that rule. Funnily though, last time I tried my hands on a modded SSE, LAL was loaded after RWT. ( I always update my masterlist before sorting )

[Tannin42]

 

A) I used two easily recognizable mods as an example with a made up LO and B) interesting to see that rule. Funnily though, last time I tried my hands on a modded SSE, LAL was loaded after RWT. ( I always update my masterlist before sorting )

 

Still, either there is no masterlist rule, then it's very easy to resolve this case, I'd claim easier than with direct drag&drop. Because you know the mods in question and the order in which you want to load them so declaring a rule is literally the most intuitive thing because you're simply declaring your intend. You want LOOT to load RWT to load after LAL so you set a rule that says exactly that, whereas with direct drag&drop you tell the application "I want RWT in the spot #56, behind 55 other plugins and before umpteen others" - With no connection to LAL at all apart from LAL being one of those 55 other plugins.

 

If there is a masterlist rule and it actually states something different from what you want (which is a case that, for all the complaints I got, no one was able to give an example for in ~6 months so I consider it pure theory right now) you'd still be able to find out who set the rule and their rationale.

And if your want is sensible (not something like: "I want my plugins ordered by the cross sum of their characters mapped to numbers") you can get the rule fixed because, to my understanding, the masterlist is supposed to define rules that aren't a matter of preference but actually required for stability and correctness, so the rule being contrary to a sensible wish could probably be considered an error in the masterlist (although I won't speak for the LOOT team on this).

[HeyYou]

Doesn't the mere fact this argument is STILL going on tell you something? This has been a thing since Vortex first released. People are still asking for it. That, to me, implies that people actually want it. So, how much time would you save, by NOT wasting it arguing in this thread, and simply implementing what people want? Seems to me, given the number of responses in this thread, you have already spent more time arguing against it, than you would have spent coding it.

Edited August 29, 2018 by HeyYou

[Zanderat]

Yes. I agree that including LOOT into Vortex is a great idea and time saver. However, as mentioned allowing manual ordering should be an option (you always put a big old warning screen up upon choosing that option). For myself, if make change, say in WB, I know full well that if I rerun LOOT, I will have to replicate that change. I think most people understand that and are used to that concept. LOOT does work pretty well and manual overrides should be minimal, but allowed.

[Tannin42]

Doesn't the mere fact this argument is STILL going on tell you something? This has been a thing since Vortex first released. People are still asking for it. That, to me, implies that people actually want it. So, how much time would you save, by NOT wasting it arguing in this thread, and simply implementing what people want?

 

So, how would you think about it if I spent the next 3 month not working on any gamebryo related things because the modding community for "Game Dev Tycoon" wanted a complex feature and managed to gather 10 people to repeatedly ask for it very stubbornly? Is it really so hard to understand that you can't organize a project like that?

 

 

Seems to me, given the number of responses in this thread, you have already spent more time arguing against it, than you would have spent coding it.

 

If you had read the responses in this thread instead of just looking at the count you would know that I already explained (repeatedly) that coding this feature is only the smallest part of the cost the feature incurs.

You know, I wouldn't have to waste so much time in these discussions if it weren't for people who jump in and start from the beginning again, I've already answered all of this.

 

However, as mentioned allowing manual ordering should be an option

 

 

Same here, I already gave you a lengthy explanation why that doesn't work, you can't just ignore that and act like you still had a point. If you're not going to even take note of the replies I give you, I hope you don't expect me to make the effort again in the future.