How solid is Vortex at this point?

[Guest deleted34304850]

no, by answering you directly and honestly, i wanted you to better frame your question.

 

if you're just going to flame people who are trying to make sense of something nonsensical then fine - get on with it - or - give a little more than "solid".

 

For example, have you tried to do what you have stated, and if so did you hit issues? or are you waiting for some sort of inspired answer along the lines of "you're going to be 100% fine it will do what you want with zero issues"? if its the latter, then that isnt going to be an honest answer, which wouldnt help you one bit.

 

so, rather than kicking off because you asked a vague question and received vague responses, go away and think about what you want to do, and try to do it, then come back and tell us how you're going, and if you have an issue, we can help you with that.

 

or, don't. your call.

[blitzen]

I don't really care what you wanted. You are nuts. You are still stuck on everything being in the title. There is plenty of information about exactly what I am asking. If you are too lazy to read it, stay out of this topic.

[Guest deleted34304850]

ok good luck. I hope you find vortex is equal to your challenge.

[HadToRegister]

I'm having some problems with NMM now after years of reliable installing. It has become very, very slow and it's not installing all the files it should. My SSE folder contains 193 GB and 277,649 files. I'm pretty sure I had more mods installed in LE without having problems, but it may be time to do an intelligent re-install of SSE at some point when I'm ready to play it again (which may not be until some of the large mods in development are released). Is Vortex going to be able to handle an install with 500+ plugins (lots of mod merging)? How does it compare to NMM in performance? Is it robust?

 

 

NMM was a junk car long before Vortex came along.

 

As other people in the thread said, your initial post sounds like you're wanting to MIGRATE your current install from NMM to Vortex, and people have been warning you about that.

The Staff has mentioned, as Augusta pointed out, if you want to switch over, you're better off starting with a brand new install because NMM corrupts the files that vortex needs to import your mod setup.

 

For one, you're asking for any mod manager you use, to manage a completely ridiculous amount of loose (277,000 ) files, along with 197 gigs of Mod Data.

For perspective...277,000 is over a quarter of a million files.

 

Perhaps you should stop expecting ANY mod manager to handle such an insanely ridiculous amount of files, even windows EXPLORER.EXE chokes at that many files.

 

EXAMPLE....try and drag and drop 277,000 files from one folder to another hard drive in windows.

Go make a sandwich while that happens.

 

Using NMM allowed you to use this insane amount of mods and files because NMM doesn't DO anything, and lets you install 277,000 loose files without complaining about it.

That's the thing. NMM doesn't say ANYTHING.

 

 

[blitzen]

I had a larger installation with Skyrim LE that I was managing with NMM. It had well over 500 plugins. I don't remember exactly how many at this point. It could have been 650 or 700. I didn't have any problems with it. It did get a little slow during mod installation, but not unreasonably so. I also know that there are others with similar installations. So you may express shock and dismay at its size, but I'm guessing that you haven't actually tried it. NMM is just a file manager. It does that quite well. It moves files around. It tells you if a file you are installing will overwrite another file, and keeps track of overwrites so that they can be reversed when a mod is uninstalled. Simple. I also use Wrye Bash and SSEEdit, along with a number of other useful tools. I use a standalone merge tool. I've been doing this for years.

 

I don't know why people are having reading comprehension issues. I specifically stated that I was planning a fresh installation, and did not at all say that I had plans on using the current installation with a new manager. But, again, I'm asking a simple question that I have rephrased in a post other than the original. It's become almost fascinating to see these responses that don't really answer the question I asked. I don't think any of the people that have responded really know. Instead, there is a combination of unsolicited advice and editorializing. And I am not entirely surprised by this, based on my past experiences with the Nexus forums. We will see if the Nexus community can collectively manage to answer what is ultimately a simple question. It may be that there aren't enough people using Vortex at this point.

[DSPiron]

As far as I can say, Vortex has been pretty solid, and I don't think any of my approx. 250 mods have failed to install.

But I also haven't checked to see if this is so, and I'm not sure where to begin. They all appear to be there when I open F4Edit.

 

I also haven't tried to install a truckload of mods all at once, and I don't think many people have.

 

I have swapped profiles and games without any issues, at least as a far as I know.

[AugustaCalidia]

@blitzen

 

In response to your original post, whose dubious clarity you sought to defend by attacking various respondents, the answer is - very solid.

[Rattledagger]

My SSE folder contains 193 GB and 277,649 files.

 

My guess is very few posting to these forums uses Vortex with so many loose files. While I've not played with so many mods, I have done some benchmarks in an older Vortex-version with roughly 500k loose files mostly in classic Skyrim, so I'm (blissfully) ignorant of how things would work with merging of plugins etc. As for moving from NMM to Vortex, personally I've never tried the Vortex import from NMM, so I would recommend to copy the mod-archives from NMM's /mods/-folder to Vortex /downloads/game_name/-folder.

 

Since you're not familiar with Vortex, the normal steps for managing mods in Vortex are:

1: Download mods, either through Vortex or manually.

2: Install mods.

3: Enable mods (and possibly later on disable some mods).

4: Handle loose file conflicts.

5: Handle plugin load order.

6: Play game.

 

Two settings can have a big impact on how fast things goes, this is the settings "Deploy Mods when Enabled" (also called auto-deployment) and "Run FNIS on Deployment Event". In theory if the second is active (also called FNIS integration), only "when necessary" FNIS will re-run when you deploy. In practice this often runs too frequently and since FNIS can take 1+ minute to run you can waste lots of time if FNIS runs on Deployment Event. So I would strongly recommend to disable this, at least until you've done all other setup and is ready to run the game and only needs to run FNIS once, for so disable FNIS integration again.

 

 

If auto-deployment is active, every time you enable one (or many mods at once), or disable one (or more) mods in step 3, Vortex will Deploy.

Every time you "resolve" a file conflict in step 4, Vortex needs to Deploy, but even with auto-deployment turned on Vortex will instead ask you to Deploy.

 

What happens when you Deploy are:

a: Vortex checks all files in your data-directory and in case a file should be hard-linked file (meaning installed by Vortex) but is not hard-linked any longer, Vortex will ask you what to do with these files with "broken" hard-links.

b: Vortex builds based on rules created under 4 the list of files that should be added (or removed) from data-directory.

c: Vortex adds the not yet present files and removes files for any disabled/uninstalled mods.

d: Vortex runs FNIS, if enabled running FNIS on Deployment Event.

 

Impact of the various steps:

1: My guess is this isn't commonly known, but at least if you adds mod-archives manually to the Vortex /downloads/name_of_game/-directory, Vortex will actually check any new archives if the archives includes a file called info.xml and if such file is present the contents of this file is used to change mod-name (under Mods-tab). This means, if you example moves 50 GB of mod-archives from NMM to Vortex, Vortex will use many minutes reading all these archives where disk-usage is maxed-out. Until Vortex has finished reading all the mod-archives doing anything else, like installing a mod, will likely go very slowly, since Vortex is busy reading all the mod-archives. Thankfully this is a once-off process, at least until you've downloaded many new mods manually and adds them to Vortex /downloads/name_of_game/-directory.

 

2: Installing files. I'm not aware of any bugs in v0.17.7 that impact this process. Meaning you can easily select 100+ mods in Vortex and quickly have Vortex install all of them for you. Limitation, if a mod includes FOMOD or other type of installer, Vortex will pause the install-queue waiting for your user input. Another limitation is Vortex does not show which mods are already in the installation-queue and if you make the mistake of adding same mod to installation-queue multiple times it's possible you'll get a message about "mod already installed" where you need to choose another installation-directory (or really cancel installation since mod already installed). AFAIK the only mods Vortex can't correctly install is mods using BAIN or some other type of installer, or mods that is packed in such a way you'll always supposed to manually install the mod, but when again AFAIK neither can NMM so... If you need to manually install a mod, add a new directory under "mod staging folder" and put the files here.

 

3: It is possible on mods-tab to combine step 2 and 3, where you can example add 100+ mods to "enable" queue and they're automatically enabled as they're installed.

In case auto-deployment is active, with install + enable this means after 1st. mod is installed, it's automatically enabled and this trigger Deployment.

After 2nd. mod installed ==> auto-enabled ==> Deploy again.

...

After 100 mod installed ==> auto-enabled ==> Deploy again.

It should be fairly obvious, since Deploying can take some time, and due to step a this will take longer and longer the more files you already have in /data/-directory, I would strongly recommend to disable auto-deployment before you install many mods.

4: This is basically waiting on user-input, since in Vortex you must handle all loose file conflicts (just like in NMM you had to answer yes or no for "overwriting" files). If you have more than 100+ total mods having conflicts things does slow-down somewhat, but even with 200 total mods having conflicts this slow-down is around 1 second extra time to save your new rules to resolve a conflict. To make a choice of which mod should win a conflict you'll routinely use 10+ seconds so this impact is minimal.

5: Handling plugin order itself isn't expensive, the hard part is to decide which plugin should be moved (if necessary). Still one important fact is, if you've not already done this before, you MUST DEPLOY before handling plugin order.

6: Vortex has no impact on game-start if you're using hard-link deployment (the default and the highly recommended method). In theory you can download USVFS and use this, but some things isn't currently supported and USVFS will have a huge impact on game startup-times.

Benchmarks:

1: Never benchmarked, but if you manually add 50 GB worth of mod-archives and downloads is on an old slow hd Vortex using half an hour first time would likely not be too far from the truth. If SSD things should go significantly faster.

2: Ultimate Skyrim is one mod-collection for original Skyrim containing roughly 300 mods total. Of these, over 200 are not using fomod or any other kind of installers. Vortex can easily install these 200+ mods in 11 minutes to hd, would expect slightly faster to ssd.

3: Enabling/disabling mods are a fast operation - as long as you don't Deploy.

4: This is user-input so is more a function of how many conflicting mods you have than Vortex.

5: Again user-input, in case you need to change the original LOOT order.

The costly part, Deployment. This includes Deployment after step 4 is finished, or when you switches profiles.

I have one benchmark of Ultimate Skyrim on SSD, using 288 mods (since a few of the mods wasn't available any longer). With auto-deployment disabled, after handling step 4 it took 14 seconds to deploy the roughly 30k files.

If instead switched from a blank profile to a profile with Ultimate Skyrim active, this took 20 seconds.

To start the game, Vortex used 21 seconds.

To Switch back to a blank profile, Vortex used 9 seconds.

With roughly 500k loose files, the numbers are on SSD, where re-booted between tests (except for immediate re-play):

Switch from blank profile to profile with roughly 500k loose files: 125 seconds

Play game: 78 seconds

Immediatley re-play game: 58 seconds.

Purge (meaning remove all mod-files + mod-directories from /data/-directory): 128 seconds.

Just for fun ran the same 500k loose files in MO2:

Play game: 204 seconds

Immediately re-play game: 189 seconds.

Since you don't need to Deploy again in Vortex if you want to play the game multiple times with the same mod-setup, Vortex actually manages to beat MO2, despite Deploying took roughly 2 minutes.

tl;dr:

Vortex will read any manually downloaded mod-archives once and can use long time on this (if many large acrhives).

I would strongly recommend disabling auto-deployment for such large number of files.

Unless you need to run a tool (or game), don't Deploy until you're finished with step 4.

With roughly 500k files Deploy takes roughly 2 minutes on SSD.

If you're unlucky enough and is stuck on HD, starting to save-up for SSD is recommended.

Edited March 17, 2019 by Rattledagger

[HadToRegister]

Is Vortex going to be able to handle an install with 500+ plugins (lots of mod merging)? How does it compare to NMM in performance? Is it robust?

 

 

Is Vortex going to be able to handle an install with 500+ plugins (lots of mod merging)?

Nobody knows, because it hasn't been done yet, so try it and let us know

 

How does it compare to NMM in performance?

NMM = Vespa

Vortex = Lamborghini

 

Is it robust?

As robust as a fine wine, or a great spaghetti sauce.

[blitzen]

@blitzen

 

In response to your original post, whose dubious clarity you sought to defend by attacking various respondents, the answer is - very solid.

 

No troll, that's not what happened. Some people too lazy to read the actual text replied to a title that is not intended to convey full information. It's remarkable that they didn't have enough time to actually read the post, yet they had enough time to type responses.

Edited March 17, 2019 by blitzen