NON Invasive FOMOD installer?

[StormWolf01]

Hi folks! Thanks in advance for taking the time to look at my thread! :smile:

 

Ok, so I'm looking for a FOMOD installer. I've got a couple of mods that I wanna install, and normally I do everything Manually. Because I don't like how mod managers like NMM or Vortex take things too far, and sometimes use their own proprietary folder structures instead of the game folders.

 

Does anybody know of a FOMOD installer, that... just does THAT? Installs FOMOD mods? Without thinking that I need it to do everything else?

 

Thanks again for taking a look. Any leads would GREATLY be appreciated.

 

-Storm

 

PS. Yes, I've used NMM and Vortex in the past. Both of those are the reasons why I went back to doing everything manually.

Edited March 24, 2020 by StormWolf01

[HeyYou]

I think Wrye Bash supports FOMODs. It only does what you tell it to. :D

[BigBizkit]

"Because I don't like how mod managers like NMM or Vortex take things too far, and sometimes use their own proprietary folder structures instead of the game folders."

 

Can you elaborate on that in regard to Vortex? Concerning FOMODs, Vortex will install the folders the mod provides/specifies for the given choices and nothing more/less.

[HeyYou]

"Because I don't like how mod managers like NMM or Vortex take things too far, and sometimes use their own proprietary folder structures instead of the game folders."

 

Can you elaborate on that in regard to Vortex? Concerning FOMODs, Vortex will install the folders the mod provides/specifies for the given choices and nothing more/less.

Yeah, but it installs them in a 'virtual' directory, not to the data folder in the game installation directory.

[StormWolf01]

Heyas Bizkit. Wow, it's been quite a while. Hope that you've been doing well!

HY kinda took the words right out of my brain on that. Along with the copies of files (.baked files) that I've still haven't gotten around to cleaning out from the last time that I had it installed.

Granted, it's not hard to cut n paste files from one place to the next. I do it all the time with my manual installs.

As for elaboration. Well. No offense, but I would prefer not to. I know the can of worms that could possibly open up. I just wanna find something that will do the fomods that are so big that they make my brain smoke. Not go back and forth with opinions and facts about the Nexus' installer.

Like I said, no offense intended. But I just don't wanna go there. Edit- For Clarification... I don't mean that the conversation would go in that direction between just the two of us. Only that I don't want to see a bunch of other people join in, and sidetrack the topic.

Edited March 25, 2020 by StormWolf01

[VIitS]

I haven't truly played in several years, but when I did I used an older version of NMM that installed directly into the Data folder. And like you, I installed most manually and basically just used it as a FOMOD manager/plugins.txt editor. You can still get the old versions from the github (the one I happened to stop on is 0.63.15). For that version, it completely ignores the ESL flag and so won't try and force them to load with ESMs like the last non-github release did, though as a corollary it won't even recognize .esl plugins, which might be a problem if you have any that aren't from the CC*.

 

If you know what you are doing, the main downside to installing directly to the Data folder is when you have multiple overlapping mods that don't use .ba2 archives, and you can always manually extract files from a specific mod should you need to. You don't have profiles that allow swapping between mod setups, but the only need I have felt for that is to more easily create a blank slate when I am modding, and renaming folders/disabling plugins works well enough.

 

*not that people should be using the file extension, an ESL-flagged .esp is better in just about every way, but that is a discussion for another time

[JimmyRJump]

NMM doen't use 'propriety folders'. It installs the mod into the game's proper folders and makes a virtual back-up of what was installed before so that upon uninstall everything that was installed before gets activated again without having to re-install anything.

 

That's one of the reasons I keep using NMM. No hassles.

 

If a FOMOD installs folders outside of where they belong with NMM, this only means that the mod author didn't use the proper folder structure for the game.

[HeyYou]

NMM doen't use 'propriety folders'. It installs the mod into the game's proper folders and makes a virtual back-up of what was installed before so that upon uninstall everything that was installed before gets activated again without having to re-install anything.

 

That's one of the reasons I keep using NMM. No hassles.

 

If a FOMOD installs folders outside of where they belong with NMM, this only means that the mod author didn't use the proper folder structure for the game.

That isn't my understanding of how it works... at least, not in later versions. They way it was explained to me, NMM creates a 'virtual store' for the installed mods, and then creates hard links to the data folder. So, as far as windows is concerned, the files really are in the data folder, as well as the virtual store. That method started when NMM went to using profiles. Making it easier to switch from one profile, to another, on the same game install. No need to move files around, (which can amount to a HUGE number of gb....) just switch out some hard links, and yer done.