NMM ---> Vortex

[Grestorn]

Modding Bethesda games is in no way easy. There are many things to understand and many things to do wrong. Countless unstable Skyrim mod installations are telling this story.

 

Vortex is aimed at making it as easy as possible. It's not foolproof for sure, but it's doing a much better job than NMM.

 

I don't know what problems you have, but Vortex certainly doesn't uninstall anything just by itself. Your problem lies somewhere else and you're just blaming Vortex as the easiest target without looking into your problem further. What does "uninstall" mean in this case, anyway? Installing a mod, including .esl's, is just creating a link from the original file into the data directory.

 

And honestly, even though I'm not an expert in .esl's myself, I've read up about that subject, and it seems to me they're much more problematic to handle than they're a help. So why bother with them in the first place. I don't think Vortex handles .esl any different than any other mod file, by the way, but Tannin himself has to describe whether he has special handling of esl files. LOOT handles .esl properly, and so should Vortex, because it uses LOOT. So if you have issues with it, talk to the LOOT people.

[HadToRegister]

I am starting to hate Vortex. How do I make it see my DOWNLOADED BUT NOT UNINSTALLED mods? The import from NMM only works if the mods are installed.

 

I'm assuming you meant "DOWNLOADED BUT NOT INSTALLED" mods.

 

DO what I did, I just copied the contents of my old mod folder (the one with the actual zip, 7z, and rar files) to my D:\Games\Fallout 4\Downloads folder

I made a D:\Games\ folder for all my mod downloads, so I have

 

D:\Games\Fallout 4\Download\

D:\Games\Fallout 4\Mods\

 

etc, then I copied my Fallout 4 mods from the NMM folder to D:\Games\Fallout 4\Downloads\ folder

Then, when I install the mods, from the downloads folder, Vortex puts them in the D:\Games\Fallout 4\Mods folder where they're linked to my Steam\steamapps\common\Fallout 4\Data directory.

[Deleted55545892User]

Modding Bethesda games is in no way easy. There are many things to understand and many things to do wrong. Countless unstable Skyrim mod installations are telling this story.

 

Vortex is aimed at making it as easy as possible. It's not foolproof for sure, but it's doing a much better job than NMM.

 

I don't know what problems you have, but Vortex certainly doesn't uninstall anything just by itself. Your problem lies somewhere else and you're just blaming Vortex as the easiest target without looking into your problem further. What does "uninstall" mean in this case, anyway? Installing a mod, including .esl's, is just creating a link from the original file into the data directory.

 

And honestly, even though I'm not an expert in .esl's myself, I've read up about that subject, and it seems to me they're much more problematic to handle than they're a help. So why bother with them in the first place. I don't think Vortex handles .esl any different than any other mod file, by the way, but Tannin himself has to describe whether he has special handling of esl files. LOOT handles .esl properly, and so should Vortex, because it uses LOOT. So if you have issues with it, talk to the LOOT people.

 

It is fundamentally easy. A lot of people here I'm sure have worked on things that require teams and months of work. That's not easy. This is just games. And not even really that. Just file management. And it's tedious at worst, not hard. Even the things that require a learning curve are pretty straightforward and automated (DynDOLOD, etc). I think anyone making it complicated is overthinking it.. be it designers or users. I really have nothing but disdain for this group. People who take fun things and become gatekeepers, building all kinds of roadblocks to casual users that were never necessary. Making it all seem more serious than it is. This is why I praise Beth.net for cutting through some of the

modding community's B.S. I hope they eventually make it irrelevant. Then we can get to just talking about mods.. and not tools.

 

You may be right about ESL. It's becoming more trouble than it's worth. But the benefit is that they don't count on overall plugin limit (or at least, you're not going to reach it.. I think it's around a 3000 limit, if you use ESL for small plugins). I can easily surpass the 250 limit with esps.. and I barely do anything radical to my games. A lot of my modding philosophy is mostly "Vanilla plus" type of stuff.

 

I never said anything about having a problem with LOOT. I don't know where you got that. I praised it.. as the only truly necessary third party tool to me. It's also the only thing I wish console users could use.

[Zanderat]

I am liking Vortex much better now. My complaint above about my downloaded but not installed mods not showing, was somehow fixed. I did nothing. But today when logging into Vortex all my missing mods were there. Weird.

[Grestorn]

 

You may be right about ESL. It's becoming more trouble than it's worth. But the benefit is that they don't count on overall plugin limit (or at least, you're not going to reach it.. I think it's around a 3000 limit, if you use ESL for small plugins). I can easily surpass the 250 limit with esps.. and I barely do anything radical to my games. A lot of my modding philosophy is mostly "Vanilla plus" type of stuff.

 

I never said anything about having a problem with LOOT. I don't know where you got that. I praised it.. as the only truly necessary third party tool to me. It's also the only thing I wish console users could use.

 

 

Well, I understand well enough that many plugins just modify existing records without introducing new ones themselves - so they take a slot (plugin index) even though they don't make any use of the index. These plugins are the prefect candidates for .esl. But I'd just merge those patches and modifying plugins, if I'd come too close to the max mod-index.

 

You complained about Vortex (it's worse in your opinion than NMM) and I got the impression that you're not happy with its handling of esl files. Because that's the main difference between Vortex and NMM: Vortex automatically sorts while with NMM you have to close the tool, sort externally and reopen it. It doesn't even recognize if an external tool has changed the sorting while it's opened. In short: It's utterly bullshitty to use.

 

Of course, if you think that you can do a better job with sorting than Loot, than you might not like Vortex. But this issue has been discussed in great length, and in my point of view, anyone who thinks that the options to influence the sorting are not suitable and that manual sorting is a better way, are just not getting the whole picture.

[Tannin42]

 

It is fundamentally easy. A lot of people here I'm sure have worked on things that require teams and months of work. That's not easy. This is just games. And not even really that. Just file management. And it's tedious at worst, not hard. Even the things that require a learning curve are pretty straightforward and automated (DynDOLOD, etc). I think anyone making it complicated is overthinking it.. be it designers or users. I really have nothing but disdain for this group. People who take fun things and become gatekeepers, building all kinds of roadblocks to casual users that were never necessary. Making it all seem more serious than it is. This is why I praise Beth.net for cutting through some of the

modding community's B.S. I hope they eventually make it irrelevant. Then we can get to just talking about mods.. and not tools.

 

Hrmm, it really depends on what kind of mods you're managing. Beth.net is relatively simple because it's targeted at simple mods that replace/add a few textures, items and so on and small installations.

But complex mod setups with 255 plugins are in no way simple.

Take for example leveled lists. Beth.net doesn't solve this problem at all. Running LOOT doesn't do anything about it. Currently even Vortex can't fix it directly, you need external tools. If you're happy with not having leveled lists merged you're fine but that doesn't make the problem simple.

 

Load ordering becomes relatively simple with LOOT but there are limitations, LOOT won't know your custom plugins, nor very new ones and even for the rest it depends to a degree on knowledgeable users to maintain the masterlist. How can you "have disdain" for the people who actually make the effort to understand the engine to fix those problems for the rest?

 

ESLs are automatically loaded last in the load order (0xFE) but can still replace records from plugins loaded "after" them and "official" esls work differently than custom esls.

 

Animations need to be converted into the correct format before you can use them in-game. Yes FNIS automates this, still doesn't hurt for users to have a basic understanding of how it works, how it fails and what to do when it does.

 

Broken or incorrectly installed mods can crash your game, stop quests from proceeding, damage your savegames in a way you can't continue at some point, simply because you've ordered mods incorrectly, loaded plugins in the wrong order or combined mods that are incompatible (without the compatibility patch).

 

And lets not even start on skse plugins that store additional data in files outside the savegame.

 

None of that is simple, people trying to understand these things and advising for best practices to avoid problems aren't overthinking it, the engine is fragile and complicated.

You may be successful ignoring this complexity for your choice of mods, but trust me when I tell you: That's luck on your part, not a general truth.

 

And it's not the people thinking/advising about this complexity that are making things serious and ruin peoples fun, most players take their 200 hour playthroughs with 250 mods rather serious to begin with.

 

Besides: Complex mods as well as tools like dyndolod, fnis, skse, xedit, ..., tools that make modding simpler or possible in the first place are developed by people too. People who had to learn how things work first, from reverse-engineering and sharing knowledge with others - who apparently also took modding serious enough to spend serious time on it.

People who may leave the community at some point, hopefully to be replaced by other knowledgeable users. Do you think the beth.net community or steam workshop, where everyone just subscribes to mods and never thinks about how things work under the hood, communities that don't even have provisions to share knowledge, produce a single dev able to do that? How would they?

 

Those are pure consumer communities. I have no problem with people being pure consumers but you have to understand that the more complex mods wouldn't exist and will die out eventually without the communities that go deeper. Mods don't magically materialize, neither does the knowledge to create them.

We need these communities and we need them to be in contact with consumers because most creators were consumers at some point and may not even have known that they could be a creator, or that they may like it, if they hadn't been in contact with other creators.