General Vortex Feedback Part 1

[panurgy]

I'm not going to get into little details here, just a few comments on using Vortex. I'll do a couple of parts because I'm about to be interrupted. I apologize for front-loading all the negatives. I thought I'd have time to do this in one go.

 

Quick Positives:

If Vortex was broken or terrible to use, I'd have removed it in my first week of use. It's easy to use, usually intuitive, and generally gets the job done. Overrides are a little confusing, but usable and with some improvement could become a killer feature.

 

On to Part 1:

 

I've been using it for about a month now with Fallout 4. I already had a combined manual/NMM setup, but reinstalled from scratch when I removed NMM and installed Vortex. I'm using 172 plugins and 198 mods, according to Vortex, though I've done some manual additions and changes. I'm using 4 profiles with similar mod setups, and profile management is much improved from NMM (much faster and less painful, as easy or easier to setup and switch profiles).

 

Problems Shared with NMM

I never used NMM as intended, instead using it for easier FOMOD installation and load order tweaking. NMM had too many issues, didn't always install mods to the correct directory, didn't always correctly remove mods, and it was difficult to track overrides. Vortex currently shares many of these issues.

 

Installation and Packaging

If mods are archived under a Data directory, install often goes wrong. If a mod follows a format with "Mod Name" -> Data -> Files/Sub-Dirs, install might go wrong. Older versions of NMM had this issue as well. It also seems odd to me that sloppier packaging conventions are preferred over explicit. Regardless, this should be a simple fix.

 

Load Order (aka: Are you kidding me?)

The decision to not provide manual load order control is just plain wrong. LOOT is great for a "rough draft" load order setup, but doesn't cut it when you want to get things exactly right. LOOT sorting has resulted, for example, in Glory changing outfits 3 times so far in my current game. I'll add a completely unrelated mod like "Darker Nights" and LOOT might suddenly switch up everything (after being relatively stable for several consecutive mod installs). The "new" LOOT behavior (with rule-based sorting) is a little whimsical, and will occasionally result in large, somewhat random load order jumps. It won't break the game, but it's terrible if you want control over specific overrides (faces, outfits, gameplay tweaks, etc.).

 

You can't solve this with LOOT's rules. You can try chaining mods together by dependency, but that will often result in the lead/prime mod being moved much further up the load order and pulling others with it--the exact opposite of the desired behavior. Sometimes it works out fine, sometimes it ruins what you're trying to accomplish.

 

Anyway, my opinion a mod organizer that doesn't support explicit, manual load order control is aimed entirely at a novice crowd, and strongly encourages more advanced users to look elsewhere. If that's not your goal, it would be good to reconsider.

 

More (and some positives) coming in part 2...

[Grestorn]

Funny, I never ever had the issue of an installment placed in the wrong directory. Can you give an example for a mod which is installed wrong?

As a matter of fact, a big number of mods are packed that way (mod name->Data-><Data files>). I wouldn't consider that packing wrong or even unusual.

 

If you want to have control over the load order, use sorting groups. They're a fantastic tool to achieve what you're trying to achieve. Plugin order rules are not the right tool for this! They are only meant to resolve issues between two plugins, not to order plugins into "specific overrides" as you put it.

[rmm200]

I will comment that I have had at least one case of a mod packaged as mod name/data/mod files.

Sure enough Vortex installed them as data/data/files.

In that case I contacted the mod author, and he repackaged it without the top data/ level.

I don't actually know which is correct - but I always check my game directory for instances of data/data. In every case, those will be incorrect.

 

Found another instance - and if you move the files where they belong, and delete the second level data/, Vortex does indeed delete the data files from the mod.

What it does not do is delete the folders. I still have a data/Caliente Tools/Bodyslide/ShapeData and SliderSets in the mod, even though the data files are gone.,