Modmanager: Noob helping Noobs

[xiovud]

Alright, first things first, slight introduction. I am no stranger to modding. I have put in literally thousands of hours into modding games like Skyrim, Mass Effect, Fallout, etc. Something that will always annoy me is having to learn a new mod manager's intricacies and how to use accompanying tools, Dragon Age is no exception.

 

I have been wracking my brain trying to figure out why I have been getting mod incompatibilities on Modmanager! Searching for answers online has only gotten me so far. Making sure to run the CharGenMorph Compiler by TerraEx was my first surefire response to fixing issues. I still was showing mod incompatibilities. Now, I only need a bagillion hair and eye morphs because other mods are dependent on having them and I really only need them in the toolset so that those mods can access and use the morphs, but I'm already putting them into my game, might as well have them in the character creator which as I understand it, is the whole reason for the chargen xml file in the first place. So, morph compiler (praise TerraEx), done and done, but all the mods I'm using for resources are still showing as incompatible in Modmanager!?

 

I have spent the better part of a day trying to solve this problem and finally I found the problem, and I thought it best to post it here so that others can be aware/learn. If you are like me, you created your overrides, installed them, ran the morph compiler, and expected everything to be hunky dory, but it still showed the incompatibility. The problem is that when you use Modmanager to generate overrides, it creates a manifest of all the files contained in the override file and then uses that manifest to speed up compatibility checks (makes perfect sense from a developer perspective). The problem is, TerraEx's morph compiler removes the old chargen xml files when its done compiling them, but does not remove the xml file listing in the file manifest. So when you run a compatibility check, it still shows that there is a chargen file in your override even though the compiler deleted it. In order to get that satisfactory view of no mod conflicts, you have to uninstall the override, delete the override file, go into your directory for that specific mod and delete it's individual chargen file, and then generate the override in Modmanager again so that the chargen xml is no longer in the manifest.

 

I'm honestly not sure if those manifests effect the actual running of the game or use of the mods, so you may not need to do this for everything to run correctly if you have already made sure to manually eliminate the conflicts, but if you are like me, you want a big thumbs up from Modmanager before you even attempt to load the game so as to avoid CTDs or some other game or immersion breaking problem. Is it a bit of a pain, yes, is it worth it, ehh maybe, am I going to do it anyway for all of my mod incompatibilities (of which I have several dozen), unfortunately for my brain and patience, yes.

 

Hope this helps some other beginner out there! If you need help, let me know, I've learned a lot the past couple weeks getting this game to the point of being playable and am willing to share my newfound knowledge.

 

Cheers!

 

Xiovud