Impossible to follow directions?

[HadToRegister]

It's really not comprehensible to me why you would read some reddit post about Vortex to learn how to use it but when Vortex throws a warning notification in red at you, you decide "oh, that's certainly not relevant to me, no need to read those 10 words." and then, shortly after you go "Oh, Vortex doesn't work, completely out of the blue, I should go write a 300 word rant."

 

 

 

"...starting by removing the false promise that both of the two files on offer are configurable as to installation drive and folder"

 

There is no such promise! Where do you get this? Seriously, these kinds of posts drive me nuts. You read "One-click installer. This is the preferred way of installing Vortex." and you interpret that as "We promise that you can pick the installation directory during installation!"?

Ah, my bad then. Shame on me for taking the crystal-clear comment that the installation path can be changed in either the one-click or the custom version literally. I should have somehow intuited what you really meant when you typed that.

 

what I like here, is rather than go to the one source where you can engage with the team behind this, the OP goes to Reddit, of all places. Literally the toilet of the internet, and finds their truth.

Glad you like it. I didn't go toReddit "rather than" (instead of) the "one source, I carefully read every word of "the one source" and encountered instructions that turned out to be false, so I did google searches in adition to the "one source" for the answers. Reddit was only one of the hits I got. Re-read the words in the pretty red box, which I'm sure you will also like, in my screenshot above and tell me how I should have interpreted those words other than "you can change the installation path in either version."

 

 

 

"The installer lets you pick the install location (only affects the application itself)"

 

 

"download and install location default to c: and can be changed via settings in both version)" In this sentence the "Install Location" means the Mod staging folder, because it's lumped with DOWNLOAD LOCATION, and they both default to c:" that's why the earlier part of the sentence said AFFECTS THE APPLICATION ONLY.

 

Never did I assume that both versions could be installed wherever I wanted because there was no description under the Recommended version that said I can change where I installed it

I picked the second download because it explicitly had text IN ITS DESCRIPTION that said I could PICK THE INSTALL LOCATION (ONLY AFFECTS THE APPLICATION ITSELF), nowhere did the description for the Custom Installer lead me to believe I could install the ONE-CLICK (That should've been the giveaway there, ONE CLICK) to any directory I wanted.

 

I knew enough about Vortex to know what was possible under the "Settings" tab, and changing the install location for the program wasn't one of them.

Of course I wasn't getting my Vortex advice from Reddit

 

 

 

[xualas]

If you had actually read it carefully, you would have noticed that the text before the comma and the text after the comma aren't saying the same thing (as I stated in my earlier post). It may not be "crystal-clear" if you merely glance at the words for a quarter second, but you should be able to figure out that the first half says the custom installer is the one you pick for choosing the application's install location. The second half mentions a default "download" location being configurable in settings, which would make zero sense for the program itself, because you would have already downloaded the program and installed it to reach the settings in the first place.

 

Could the wording be better? Yeah, I said as much in my first post.

Were there impossible instructions and/or false promises? No.

[VulcanTourist]

So I have now uninstalled Vortex since the C:\drive is a limited-size SSD **AND** neither my games nor my mods are on that drive.

This is not an irreparable situation, either. Remember those junctions I mentioned earlier? As long as the volumes involved are NTFS partitions and not FAT32, you could relocate the installation directory to the preferred volume and then use a junction - a directory POINTER disguised as a normal directory - to fool Windows and (most) everything else into thinking it still resides on your boot volume. Junctions are really REALLY useful and necessary if you have a boot drive that can't contain everything it ideally should. I suppose you could also use the newer symlinks for this.

 

What the existence of junctions means is that having a boot volume too small to actually contain all your applications DOES NOT MEAN that you must always pick a custom installation target for all your software. Let the installer use whatever default location it likes on the boot volume, and then relocate it and replace its original location with a junction-directory to fool everyone into believing that it is still installed where the installer put it. (This is precisely the trick that at least some "SSD migration" software exploits to manage limited SSD capacity.) The pointer redirection technically introduces an infinitesimally small delay, since the operating system first references the junction and then the file system translates the request to another volume, but I don't believe humans can ever notice it.

 

You'll need something like this to aid you (I can highly recommend this in particular):

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

 

To all concerned here: Less hostility and defensive knee-jerk reactions and more effort to understand poorly stated motives and needs would have lead to a more constructive result here. Some of you need to work in a technical support role for a time and learn that simple ignorance often leads to people getting angry or frustrated, and that the path to a constructive solution requires ignoring that anger and understanding the need and the specific ignorance standing in the way and then resolving the ignorance. Responding in kind to such anger leads to unconstructive results.

[AugustaCalidia]

 

So I have now uninstalled Vortex since the C:\drive is a limited-size SSD **AND** neither my games nor my mods are on that drive.

This is not an irreparable situation, either. Remember those junctions I mentioned earlier? As long as the volumes involved are NTFS partitions and not FAT32, you could relocate the installation directory to the preferred volume and then use a junction - a directory POINTER disguised as a normal directory - to fool Windows and (most) everything else into thinking it still resides on your boot volume. Junctions are really REALLY useful and necessary if you have a boot drive that can't contain everything it ideally should. I suppose you could also use the newer symlinks for this.

 

What the existence of junctions means is that having a boot volume too small to actually contain all your applications DOES NOT MEAN that you must always pick a custom installation target for all your software. Let the installer use whatever default location it likes on the boot volume, and then relocate it and replace its original location with a junction-directory to fool everyone into believing that it is still installed where the installer put it. (This is precisely the trick that at least some "SSD migration" software exploits to manage limited SSD capacity.) The pointer redirection technically introduces an infinitesimally small delay, since the operating system first references the junction and then the file system translates the request to another volume, but I don't believe humans can ever notice it.

 

You'll need something like this to aid you (I can highly recommend this in particular):

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

 

To all concerned here: Less hostility and defensive knee-jerk reactions and more effort to understand poorly stated motives and needs would have lead to a more constructive result here. Some of you need to work in a technical support role for a time and learn that simple ignorance often leads to people getting angry or frustrated, and that the path to a constructive solution requires ignoring that anger and understanding the need and the specific ignorance standing in the way and then resolving the ignorance. Responding in kind to such anger leads to unconstructive results.

 

 

Some questions from Confused in Talos Plaza. Why jump through junction and/or symlink hoops when the Vortex custom installer simply lets you install Vortex wherever you want? Or are you also suggesting that junctions can be successfully used to avoid putting the mod staging folder and the game folder on the same drive partition?

[VulcanTourist]

Some questions from Confused in Talos Plaza. Why jump through junction and/or symlink hoops when the Vortex custom installer simply lets you install Vortex wherever you want? Or are you also suggesting that junctions can be successfully used to avoid putting the mod staging folder and the game folder on the same drive partition?

 

I wasn't necessarily advocating it as a routine, although I am sometimes reluctant to alter installers' default choices out of concern that it might muck up something else later (there have been instances I can't specify now). Rather I was suggesting it as an alternative to uninstalling and reinstalling the software, since no harm is created by that so long as you can remember what you've done later (or see it by way of different Explorer icons).

 

I do love my junctions, though. It gives me the illusion of control over my system and its processes (when in fact it's always in control and leading me into dark alleys for a beatdown).

 

Regarding the mod staging folder, I'm not willing to state anything with authority yet; I am not a Vortex expert. I suppose one could use a junction to pull the same trick with the staging folder, though I might be overlooking complications it would cause.

[Tannin42]

 

So I have now uninstalled Vortex since the C:\drive is a limited-size SSD **AND** neither my games nor my mods are on that drive.

This is not an irreparable situation, either. Remember those junctions I mentioned earlier? As long as the volumes involved are NTFS partitions and not FAT32, you could relocate the installation directory to the preferred volume and then use a junction - a directory POINTER disguised as a normal directory - to fool Windows and (most) everything else into thinking it still resides on your boot volume. Junctions are really REALLY useful and necessary if you have a boot drive that can't contain everything it ideally should. I suppose you could also use the newer symlinks for this.

 

What the existence of junctions means is that having a boot volume too small to actually contain all your applications DOES NOT MEAN that you must always pick a custom installation target for all your software. Let the installer use whatever default location it likes on the boot volume, and then relocate it and replace its original location with a junction-directory to fool everyone into believing that it is still installed where the installer put it. (This is precisely the trick that at least some "SSD migration" software exploits to manage limited SSD capacity.) The pointer redirection technically introduces an infinitesimally small delay, since the operating system first references the junction and then the file system translates the request to another volume, but I don't believe humans can ever notice it.

 

You'll need something like this to aid you (I can highly recommend this in particular):

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

 

To all concerned here: Less hostility and defensive knee-jerk reactions and more effort to understand poorly stated motives and needs would have lead to a more constructive result here. Some of you need to work in a technical support role for a time and learn that simple ignorance often leads to people getting angry or frustrated, and that the path to a constructive solution requires ignoring that anger and understanding the need and the specific ignorance standing in the way and then resolving the ignorance. Responding in kind to such anger leads to unconstructive results.

 

 

Actually I would advice against using junction points on the Vortex installation. For reasons I don't know it seems like Node.js (the framework Vortex is built upon) has trouble loading modules via junction points. Vortex starts but many of the extensions will just not work with obscure error messages.

 

On topic: I've changed the file descriptions for the downloads - is this now more understandable?

[VulcanTourist]

Actually I would advice against using junction points on the Vortex installation. For reasons I don't know it seems like Node.js (the framework Vortex is built upon) has trouble loading modules via junction points. Vortex starts but many of the extensions will just not work with obscure error messages.

I have no experience with Node.js, but it's merely a JavaScript library/framework, right? I can't anticipate why junctions would affect it. I expect trouble with things like backup/sync software, some of which is blind to junctions and shouldn't be. 7-Zip is also blind to them and shouldn't be; if you try to compress a file structure containing a junction, it will follow the pointer and compress whatever it finds on another volume as if the junction doesn't exist, instead of just recording the pointer. Added to my mental list, but how do I even know when an application has been developed with it?

[HadToRegister]

Text has been updated for the Vortex Download Options...

 

NOTE: In the first option it says "Download and Install Locations for mods can be changed within Vortex at any time after installation."

[oblivionfan52]

I've followed this thread without commenting. The new wording is better (it was a bit confusing) but shouldn't they both say Download and Install locations for mods can be changed within Vortex at any time after installation.

for consistency.