Vortex deployed plugins not taking effect in game (and fix?)

[earthdude]

I've been building a large mod list for Fallout 4 (latest version: 1.10.163). In the last day or so, I noticed that things that I thought would have taken effect weren't taking effect. It wasn't until I loaded a quest mod that wasn't starting that I started to investigate.

 

First, I checked Fallout4/Data to make sure the plugins were actually deployed. They were.

 

After loading my build in FO4Edit, I noticed on the initial screen where you select mods that a whole group of the mods at the end of the list had date/time entries and no plugins.txt entry. That was super weird; I never had that before with FO4 or a mega-modded SSE. I went and found plugins.txt (<user>\appdata\local\Fallout4) and discovered that the time stamp was from around 24 hours before. Despite the fact that I had added and deployed mods multiple times during that timeframe, plugins.txt was never updated. No message from Vortex either. I did check the permission on plugins.txt, it was NOT Read-Only.

 

I fixed (so far anyway) the problem by... drum roll, please.... turning the computer off and on again. Plugins.txt now gets a new timestamp every time I deploy. Most importantly the mods I added are now present in game.

 

The real question is... Why did this happen in the first place? Was there some glitched in plug-in limit (I can't remember exactly in my case, ~343 registered mods-half light-tagged ESPs out of almost 400)? And why didn't Vortex recognize that it wasn't actually updating plugins.txt? That was the bizarre thing: as far as Vortex was concerned, everything was working normally.

 

Any insight into this would be appreciated. And hopefully, this will help someone with a similar problem in the future.

[Pickysaurus]

The plugins.txt is updated every time you enable or disable a plugin in Vortex. I can only imagine a weird permission problem prevented this. Restarting the PC will remove any "locks" on the files from other applications.

 

You should be able to see the list getting updated when you toggle mods (by opening the txt file after each change).

[earthdude]

If there is a weird lock from another application, wouldn't you would think that Vortex would get an error trying to write the file?

[Pickysaurus]

It could be that Vortex silently errors in these cases. I'm not sure.

[Zanderat]

I get an error if I try to deploy when Wrye BASH (for example) is open.

[Tannin42]

> If there is a weird lock from another application, wouldn't you would think that Vortex would get an error trying to write the file?

 

Vortex does get an error but it doesn't know why the file is locked, it could just be your Anti-virus deciding it needs to scan the file right now and the next attempt to write may work just fine. If Vortex reported these kind of "file busy" errors it would run the risk of spamming you with them and become completely unusable.

A reasonably developed application only needs to keep the file locked for an instant when updating it.

Keeping a file in an exclusive lock over a longer period of time is either a bug or you _want_ to suppress other applications from accessing it.

But if we report this situation then _we_ get the bug reports, even though Vortex is the victim. If WB and Vortex running together prevent you from writing the plugins.txt there is at least a 50/50 chance the ones who can actually do something about it get the report...

 

The unfortunate truth is that when an application reports an error users perceive that as a problem in the application reporting the error ("kill the messenger!"), that's why we have to be careful about what we do report. Usually Vortex is fairly chatty about problems it encounters, in this case we found it to be way to common for the plugins.txt to be locked or write protected in a situation where we can't do anything about it.

 

Although generally, having multiple applications open that think they control the load order doesn't really make sense.

[earthdude]

In my case, the only other application that would access plugins.txt would be Fallout4 (or FO4Edit).

 

I do not use any other program that would *control* load order. I guess I'm wondering if there's some way I can figure out when plugins.txt isn't being updated short of having to have that directory open all the time to make sure it's actually being written.

[SirupyCarp00NBG]

Hi... Don't mean to butt into your issue report, but I now find myself in a similar struggle with Vortex... I have been using Nexus, and Vortex for a few months, to set up Fallout 4, and although there have been a few "hickups" along the way, have not had any insurmountable problems, thus far...

I recently discovered that, despite excellent anti-virus and malware programs, my PC was rife with both, so I had to do a factory reset, wiping my system back to "like-new"... I only installed FO4 with access to Bethesda and to Nexus MODs, so that I could get "clean" access, without interference, until I got the game set up the way I want it...

As I happily went back into the files, downloading the MODs that I already had tested and knew that they worked well, I stopped to install the ones that I had, and found that Vortex had begun installing MODs without my prompting it to do so, and had stopped working, entirely...

I closed Nexus and Vortex, restarted my PC and went back to download again, only to find a request from Vortex, to "Authorize" it to access Nexus... When I clicked "YES", I got a huge red box that reads:

 

"Sorry, there has been a problem authenticating your request. Your request may have timed out if it has been more than 5 minutes since you tried to authenticate.

Please restart the application and start the login procedure again. If you keep receiving this error then please contact [email protected]"

I have deleted, and reinstalled both Nexus and Vortex, but continue to receive this error response, and most of the downloads that I have installed are inoperative, or incomplete, rendering them useless...

Help me, please...