Vortex or MO2 in 2020?

[DoctorKaizeld]

For many of the issues people are stating that involve NMM they don't look at MO2, especially the sorting issue...that's what LOOT is for. Yeah, Vortex has it built in, but you can access loot from MO2. It works for me. Plus, I'm a big fan of the virtual file directory which leaves my core SSE files untouched.

Finally (and this is personal), I detest tiles on my desktop. I can see perfectly fine without those big ugly things in front of me. Modern UI has its detractors.

Votex uses virtual files as well... no idea what tiles you are talking about...

[HadToRegister]

 

For many of the issues people are stating that involve NMM they don't look at MO2, especially the sorting issue...that's what LOOT is for. Yeah, Vortex has it built in, but you can access loot from MO2. It works for me. Plus, I'm a big fan of the virtual file directory which leaves my core SSE files untouched.

Finally (and this is personal), I detest tiles on my desktop. I can see perfectly fine without those big ugly things in front of me. Modern UI has its detractors.

Votex uses virtual files as well... no idea what tiles you are talking about...

 

 

 

He's talking about the TODO list, that can be turned OFF

Most people like to complain about Vortex without learning what's optional or can be turned off/on

 

 

 

 

 

[VulcanTourist]

Lemme share some observations that I posted to Reddit this month:

 

 

My decision boiled down to one difference: how each "virtualizes". As you know, MO* uses its own virtual filesystem, not unlike say TrueCrypt, to "hide" your entire modding effort completely isolated from the actual game directories. That's great, but its really only great for people who are, for whatever reason, completely paranoid about leaving the game folders pristine and untrammeled 100% of the time, no exceptions.

The consequence of this "paranoia", however, is that everything that relies upon your modding in any fashion must be executed by and through MO* so that it can activate its virtual filesystem and make files appear to be where they actually are not.
I don't like the extra frustration this causes me, and I'm not especially worried about the game directories being pristine 100% of the time. I want to play the game modded, and it's truly rare that I need to even start the vanilla game. I don't muck around behind my mod manager's back (Vortex) much, so all I need is a separate mod-free profile in Vortex and the Purge button if I ever need to clean up even my modded one temporarily.

The way that Vortex handles things is more pragmatic and less paranoid: it uses NTFS filesystem hardlinks (Google that) to create duplicate pointers - NOT copied files - to all the staged mod files into the approriate locations in the game directories. Vortex knows about and manages these hardlinks, and you can "see" them yourself if you have a tool like Link Shell Extension (been using it for 20 years!) That Purge button I mentioned removes all the hardlinks if needed, and they only reappear when you next Deploy.

Because of the hardlinks, which appear like normal files to everything, both the game, SKSE64, and every tool you might have will all work exactly as intended, no extra trickery required.

I just prefer that methodology to the way that MO* has done it. As for user interfaces and the rest of the functionality, I would expect that it's functionally identical, especially because the same man is responsible for the design of both! If anything I expect that Vortex might be what improves more in the near future because of Tannin's involvement in it and no longer MO*.

 

The difference is staging and deployment strategy: Mod Organizer 2 is fully psycho-paranoid about leaving the game directories untouched, while Vortex takes a more pragmatic approach using a filesystem feature.

Mod Organizer uses a strategy that "hides" the deployed files in an isolated directory structure that mirrors what it would be if the mod files were overlaid into the game. In order to run the game with mods - or any modding tools - MO2 must be used as a parent to spawn/run the game or tools, in the same way that SKSE spawns/runs the game (SKSE itself is what must be run through MO2). In doing so, MO2 patches these processes in memory to make the isolated staging directory appear to overlay or be part of the actual game directories. Failing to use MO2 to spawn the game or tools means that they won't see a modded game.

Vortex deploys mod files using NTFS "hardlinks". Hardlinks are filesystem pointers to actual file contents. Normally a file's contents only has a single pointer, thus displaying a single file in Windows Explorer. However, with NTFS partitions (not FAT32 nor exFAT) it's actually possible to have more than a single pointer to the same file contents! This has the same practical effect as copying the file, but without duplicating the storage required. Deleting a single hardlink does not delete the file contents unless it's the last remaining link to those contents. Vortex also has a "staging" directory, but it actually "deploys" mods into the game directories using these hardlinks, which point back to files in the staging area. Deploying takes far less time than making copies of the files and takes up no more storage space than MO2's strategy. The pragmatic difference is that SKSE, the game, and all tools and utilities can be run normally, without being dependent upon Vortex to create an illusion of files located where they are not; the magic is in the filesystem, not Vortex. If a pristine game is required, a separate mod-free profile can be created or the Purge command used to remove all the mod hardlinks.

I'm not even going to comment on Nexus Mod Manager. It's an obsolete abomination that should die in a fire.

Edited October 12, 2020 by VulcanTourist

[Sherade]

Ah seems like the favour has shifted to Vortex compared to a few years back. I've used NMM, vortex and MO2 before and did enjoy using vortex the most. Vortex it is. But doesn't matter to me either way as I always screw my build up like a pleb in the end and figured that reinstalling is just quicker than having to find out the source of the issue after searching for a bit online.

Edited October 21, 2020 by Sherade

[VulcanTourist]

Ah seems like the favour has shifted to Vortex compared to a few years back. I've used NMM, vortex and MO2 before and did enjoy using vortex the most. Vortex it is. But doesn't matter to me either way as I always screw my build up like a pleb in the end and figured that reinstalling is just quicker than having to find out the source of the issue after searching for a bit online.

I don't think the favor was ever any different from the first release of Vortex:

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/ivtok8/growl_200_more_bears_update/g5zi0g0/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

 

I did the numbers for the past couple of months on Friday.

It's now 69% Vortex, 14% NMM, 16% MO2, 1% others. Seemingly the NMM userbase is gradually dwindling and people switch to either MO2 or Vortex depending on preference.

https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/9220308-the-uphill-battle-that-vortex-faces/page-2&do=findComment&comment=86193138

There are other reasons Vortex has this reputation of being buggy:

- One problem is that it had a huge number of users right out of the gate. Other mod managers grew their userbase over time and so when they were still very buggy only few users (in absolute numbers) would report it. With Vortex any bug that affects 1% of the user lead to dozens of reports on different platforms making everything look more serious than it was.

- Also NMM had the tendency of suppressing errors, that would then only appear in a log, if at all. Sometimes that's ok and the error doesn't actually affect users, that's true for many of the Vortex error messages as well. But sometimes they have long-term effects that would then break things when the user uninstalls a mod, updates NMM or when we try to migrate NMM -> Vortex.

Both MO and Vortex in particular are built such that any unexpected behavior gets reported. This does invoke the impression that they have more bugs than NMM when really they are just more visible - and get fixed.

- Finally my insistence on not running Vortex as admin is part of the problem. At this point I'm putting security over convenience which leads to a lot of error reports that are actually problems with the system setup but because Vortex reports them (whereas NMM was run as admin and thereby caused the problems instead of running into them) they're attributed to Vortex.

- Electron-based applications in general have a bad reputation with a lot of people, mostly undeserved.

 

 

 

Those quotes are from Robin Scott and Tannin, so you can't get more authoritative responses than those. So... it was always the more popular choice from its inception and after a fashion it suffered for it, from mischaracterizations by both elitists and idiots. Those two vocal minorities have been trying to poison the well ever since.

Edited October 21, 2020 by VulcanTourist

[DoctorKaizeld]

Vortex was always the most popular since release

[methusalem666]

I won't say anything about previous posts because I'm not going to start any unnecessary "what's better" war.

I started modding by manually installing Fallout 3 mods, which of course has its pitfalls. Then I tried NMM, which was also my first manager. But most of my games were destroyed when NMM installed translations (not from an English-speaking country). If you constantly have to reinstall your complete load order, it is frustrating and you can do it again manually. It's not much worse.

Anyone who can get along with Vortex should use it, after all, the same programmer is behind it. I tried it once but I am very familiar with MO2, I only modify Bethesda games anyway, and MO2 has been doing this perfectly for me for several years. Vortex just couldn't catch me, it was pretty new back then.

And the folks who took MO2 over from Tannin are doing a great job of updating it on a regular basis.

And I just live from the point of view: never change a winning team.

[N7R]

I still prefer MO2. I love the virtual file system it uses and very quick profile swapping, the virtual file explorer is pretty great too. Plus MO2 still get updates/support from those who took over the tool so its not a 'dead' tool. One of my favorite features is the colored separators too, really lets me organize my mods for each game neatly down to their priority order.

 

The only time I'd quit using MO2 and look for another mod manager when it comes to bethesda games is if MO2 was directly sabotaged or couldn't support as newer game but I have no doubt when I new bethesda game released the team would update it to work with it just fine.

[ABSofficial]

Similar situation as OP. Been a while. It's easy to see why initially people are hard to switch, or resistant to change. Coming from the days of Daggerfall and Morrowind, I've been modding ES games for almost 20 years and we all started in far worse conditions than MO2 but it just pales with antiquity compared to Vortex, and it doesn't look like Vortex will become deprecated any time soon.

 

Objectively speaking: LOOT built in. Natively supported by Nexus. Somehow knows about version discrepancies that MO2 doesn't. Also knows how to handle redundant filename issues. Infographic that visualizes circular dependencies as well and allows you to break them with relative ease. Will suggest load orders with incredibly intelligent accuracy. Can drag and drop modularized multi-mod zip files into the downloader and Vortex handles all of it 100% reliably within seconds and a couple of clicks instead of a half an hour of dealing with outdated UX and a click-fest. Probably less intuitive to the non programmer, but more Skyrim modders who are just installing other people's mods aren't programmers or actual modders. Allows you to manage the overwriting of specific files in a mod that MO2 doesn't. The list goes on.

 

The only reason why I started to try MO2 was after coming back and reading into the STEP guide - which is a great guide but their suggestion to start installing old software is based on resistance to change.

 

You don't need BethINI if you know what you're doing. It's a good tool to use maybe once just to see what it does, or get a better explanation of which ini settings do what. You should know what to do if you read the STEP guide - then you don't need any of the chain of 3rd party software to use with MO2 that they are suggesting. Just establish a good weather+ENB+ini setting you like and then go from there. If you care more about stability and playing the game heavilty modded 100% through without addressing every potential script failure in the game that will cause a crash, just keep your ugrids at 5 unless you are doing ONLY screenarchery (it has nothing to do with vram, fps or other performance issues in 2020). Vortex will handle the rest and take you to new heights effortlessly. I might also be saying this because I have an RTX3080 and... well... this card is just stupid.

 

The only "3rd party" software I recommend is a LODgen of sorts like DynDOLOD.

 

Cheers

[nexuskomrad]

 

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For many of the issues people are stating that involve NMM they don't look at MO2, especially the sorting issue...that's what LOOT is for. Yeah, Vortex has it built in, but you can access loot from MO2. It works for me. Plus, I'm a big fan of the virtual file directory which leaves my core SSE files untouched.

Finally (and this is personal), I detest tiles on my desktop. I can see perfectly fine without those big ugly things in front of me. Modern UI has its detractors.

Votex uses virtual files as well... no idea what tiles you are talking about...

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He's talking about the TODO list, that can be turned OFF

Most people like to complain about Vortex without learning what's optional or can be turned off/on

 

 

 

 

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Those tiles remind me of Microsoftâs âMetroâ interface , which I think was the default in Window 8. They were going for a mobile device look on a non-mobile device :)z

 

Iâm getting ready to do a fresh install o Skyrim. This thread has convinced me to switch from MO2 to Vortex.

 

While there are some good tips here about turning on VFS and turning off the tiles, if someone has link to a Web page or even better youtube video on getting started with Vortex, I'd appreciate it.

 

I've done a lot of cleanup on DLC BSA files, removing ITM's and such. In MO2 I made modules out the them, and then loaded them first. Is that hard to do in Vortex?