Changed file behaviour

[dizietemblesssma]

I just edited an xml file from a mod and then deployed, expecting that I would be informed of an external change by Vortex and then I could accept the newer version.

Instead there was no message. When I looked at the files from Vortex's 'Open in file manager' option I saw that the relevant file was already edited there in what I believe is the staging folder.

Is this supposed to happen without notification? It's not a problem this time as I want this file edited:)

 

diziet

[Tannin42]

Unfortunately this depends on the software you use to edit files.

There are two ways software can modify a file under the hood:

a) You open the file, change its content, done

b) You open a file, read its content to memory, edit in memory, write a new file to a temporary location, then move that temporary file to replace the original.

 

Now variant b is obviously more complicated to develop but also much safer because if anything goes wrong (writing the file for example) the original remains untouched. Even in case of a power outage at the worst possible time, in the b variant you will always have either the valid old file or the valid new file.

 

Now regarding Vortex: the files in the game directory are links to the staging folder. In the variant b, that link gets deleted in the last step and the new file is a completely separate file with different content than the original which still exists in staging. That is what the "external changes" dialog picks up on and offers you to keep the file in staging or the one in the game folder.

In the variant a however, there is just a single file which got modified with a link which continues to point to it.

 

Vortex _could_ detect that a change happened but it wouldn't be able to undo it anyway because there is no copy with the original data. We wouldn't be able to offer you a choice of what to do with the file so we decided to not report it at all because it would just be tedious.

[dizietemblesssma]

Makes sense now, I'm using Notepad++ to edit an xml file from a mod. Clearly it uses variant A. :)

 

cheers

 

diziet