First impressions: aaaaagh

[lethielnyrond]

Hi. I decided, on the strength of Vortex going to beta and after several people telling me what an old stick-in-the-mud I was for still using NMM, to give Vortex a try. I had been dallying with MO2, but was daunted by the lack of a simple procedure for migrating my current modlist to the new manager. Vortex, it seemed, had one.

 

Boy, was I an idiot.

 

I'm halfway through and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. For the information of whomever wrote the migration guide on your page, selecting all my mods in NMM with Ctrl+A and pressing the delete key does not remove them from the NMM directory, it simply puts them all into the Unassigned category and deletes them from my SSE Data directory. Importing the mods into Vortex resulted in a black screen with the portentous words "THERE WERE ERRORS" in red and a link to an incomprehensible text file in which the word "error" does not appear. I don't at this point know what the errors were, or how to fix them, or which of my mods have not been imported and are now deleted from my Data directory. Vortex seems to lack the handy line across the bottom that was so useful in NMM, telling me how many mods, plugins, active plugins, et cetera, I had. It seems to lack lots of other things as well.

 

There was certainly at least one error, and it was mine. I should have gone with MO2, or waited for Vortex to be finished. One or the other. But that''s my own fault. As I said, idiot. Still, at this rate it's going to be just as much effort going back to NMM and painfully rebuilding my game as it is to persevere with this and hopefully master it. And quite obviously I shall not simply be able to carry on with my current playthrough as I had perhaps foolishly hoped. (Although since I'm up to Season Unending again which I hate, this is not as bad as it might be.)

 

Summary of feedback: your documentation needs work. It's incomplete and misleading.

 

More may follow.

 

Lethiel

 

 

[lethielnyrond]

Umm. Also. In resolving mod conflicts, how are cyclic rules even possible? If I tell Vortex to load mod A after mod B, why then does mod B's conflict with mod A not come with "Load before" already selected, if indeed it has to come up at all? I'm going through a list that started out at around sixty or seventy conflicts, and I've committed cyclic rules twice because I didn't realise the same conflict was going to come up twice, once from either end.

 

I'm sorry if I'm being dense, but really, what's up with that?

 

Lethiel

[Tannin42]

Without seeing the import log I'm afraid I can't really say anything on what went wrong there.

 

Regarding the conflict resolution: When you have a rule "mod a loads after mod b" then that implies that mod b loads before mod a, but "implicit" rules are displayed differently from "explicit rules".

I know this is confusing and we will change it when time permits but for now, if there is an implicit rule it will say "No rule" in the drop down but on the right there will be a square i icon that, when you hover over it tells you that there is a rule on the other mod.

 

The technical reason for that is: Rules are more flexible than the dialog implies, the actual rule could be something like "mod a version 2.1 and newer loads after mod b version 1.0 to (not including) 2.0" and then you could have another rule "mod b version 2 and newer loads after mod a". Those rules wouldn't be a cycle because the version ranges make the rules mutually exclusive, so it's not quite as simple as displaying an inverse rule on the other mod.

[Pickysaurus]

I'm halfway through and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. For the information of whomever wrote the migration guide on your page, selecting all my mods in NMM with Ctrl+A and pressing the delete key does not remove them from the NMM directory, it simply puts them all into the Unassigned category and deletes them from my SSE Data directory.

 

 

 

I've looked into this, as I wrote that guide. It seems NMM behaves in a different way when deleting mods from the Category view.

 

I'll update it to reflect this. Thanks for letting us know.

 

Umm. Also. In resolving mod conflicts, how are cyclic rules even possible? If I tell Vortex to load mod A after mod B, why then does mod B's conflict with mod A not come with "Load before" already selected, if indeed it has to come up at all? I'm going through a list that started out at around sixty or seventy conflicts, and I've committed cyclic rules twice because I didn't realise the same conflict was going to come up twice, once from either end.

 

I'm sorry if I'm being dense, but really, what's up with that?

 

Lethiel

 

Cyclic rules for plugins can occur when the individual rules and the LOOT groups conflict.

 

So let's set you have two groups: Landscape Group and Trees Group.

 

Loot will load Landscape before Trees.

 

Then you have Mod A and Mod B. Mod A is in the Landscape Group, Mod B is in the trees group.

 

So you'll load these as

 

Mod A

Mod B

 

Then you add a custom LOOT rule - Mod A must load after Mod B.

 

Now the above arrangement can't happen due to contradictory rules, so you get a cycle.

 

Hopefully that helps clear it up a little.

[Zanderat]

What you are describing is a LOOT issue, not Vortex. The groups feature is relatively new and needs an adjustment to the way you used LOOT/Vortex previously. As is the enforcement of the cyclic errors that occurs between contradictory rules.

[Senutyenool]

 

I'm halfway through and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. For the information of whomever wrote the migration guide on your page, selecting all my mods in NMM with Ctrl+A and pressing the delete key does not remove them from the NMM directory, it simply puts them all into the Unassigned category and deletes them from my SSE Data directory.

 

 

 

I've looked into this, as I wrote that guide. It seems NMM behaves in a different way when deleting mods from the Category view.

 

I'll update it to reflect this. Thanks for letting us know.

 

So, in other words, coming from a coding 'dabbler', you didn't bother to check to see how NMM functions and just 'assumed' that's how it's done......

 

Hmmm, barge pole, meet Vortex.

 

Cheers