FOMOD Designer - Open Beta

[Ganda]

FOMOD Designer

 

A visual editor to quickly create FOMOD installers for Nexus based mods.

 

I'd like to introduce the FOMOD Designer to everyone. It has been in development for a few months now and since I'm not going to meet my goal to finish it by summer's end I decided to release in STEP as a sort of Open Beta. The missing core parts are the Node Wizards (the "newbie part") and the Full Installer Preview (kind of self-explanatory). Once these parts are finished and major bugs are ironed out this will be released to the Nexus and /r/skyrimmods.

 

Continue reading below for more information and post because I'd love to hear your feedback on this. Special thanks to hishutup for putting up with me and my insistent requests to test broken builds throughout these months.

 

Happy modding!

 

Links:

• Source Code;
• Latest Stable Version;
• Bleeding Edge Build;
• Issue Tracker;
• Changelog;
• Documentation.

Main Features:

• No need to know XML - Use a simple node tree and/or the node wizards to navigate, create and modify your installer without having to know a single bit of XML syntax;
• No need to know FOMOD by heart - The possible children nodes and all the options to customize each node are all laid out for you. The wizards include a small description to help you out at the top;
• Includes all the features from FOMOD Validator - Validate and check for possible errors when loading and saving;
• Faster and simpler workflow - With a very simple node tree to transverse instead of bulky documents you can save a lot of time and dedicate more to your content;
• Don't get lost in your own installer - With the ability to rename repeatable nodes (like the Pattern node) in-app with little to no interference in the final output you will no longer spend unnecessary time looking for the right tag to edit;
• Don't want it? Hide it - Spent lots of time in something you're not sure you want to keep? Hide it instead of deleting it, the node and its children are still fully editable but won't show up in the output, saving you the time of recreating everything later;
• Preview your work - Whether you want to preview how the xml will look like or which files a certain install step will install, it has you covered;
• Default them! - Let's face it, everyone uses Explicit Installation Steps even though the default value is Ascending. Worry no more, there is an option for that;
• Forgot the flags? - Auto-completers are included for flag labels and values, never mistype another flag;
• Forget the path - No more need to guess at paths and path separators, all path fields have a little button to the right that will open a dialog to point to the file directly;
• Hotkeys everywhere - Pretty much all actions have hotkeys associated with them, speed up that workflow;
• Not a fan of hotkeys? - Don't worry, we got your back, every action is stored in an easy to access menu, at the top or by right-clicking;
• Customize - Almost everything in this app is customizable, check the Settings menu!

 

TODO:

• Finish the damn Wizards!
• Improve the documentation (I suck at this part)
• Start the Full Installer Preview

In Case Of Brokenness:

 

Please, PLEASE post your specific issues, enhancement, recommendations and this sort of thing in the issue tracker and keep this thread for discussion and general feedback. The reasoning behind this is that in the issue tracker I can provide a template for you to fill in with the necessary info instead of the stupidly common "It doesn't work!!!".

Edited August 21, 2016 by Ganda

[Neovalen]

Now this looks awesome. Will need to give it a go. :)

[TechAngel85]

Yep, nice to see this is open now. I just couldn't find the time with real life to get to doing a full test during the closed beta.

[Guest]

Will try in a few weeks, and credit Ganda of course if all goes well. Been wanting something like this for ages as I don't like bugging certain people (^) and it feels less cheap Frankensteining their code for future use. I guess I could learn it manually but I have enough things to get to grips with as it is. Awesome work anyway!

[TechAngel85]

I think this will be easier to learn than the actual scripting. I'm old school and will probably still do a lot of my scripting by hand (someone has to stay in practice ::), but this is great for mod authors like SparrowPrince  and kryptopyr who know a enough to get by, but not quite enough to do the complicated, more advanced scripting that I've helped them with in the past. I believe this tool to be compatible of creating these more advanced FOMODs for this user base and more. This tool should find a good home in the community once it's out of beta.

[Guest]

I understand quite a bit of how it works from looking at it, but it just seems like something I won't have time to learn fully. I guess the other thing is that lines of code are about the most unappealing thing to me visually. I respect coding, but it certainly is not my sort of cake.

 

By the way, was there not a simpler tool for creating FOMOD packages back in the day? Pretty sure I used to use it to package my downloaded Fallout mods. This looks much better, but it is strange to me why there was never anything past Fallout 3 from what I remember. It's like these packaging tools just died a horrible death until now.

Edited August 22, 2016 by Guest

[Ganda]

Sorry for not replying earlier it has been a rough few days.

 

Afaik there was only FOMM which people have repeatedly told me was broken :/ But there has been a resurgence in these last few months, there are a LOT of new fomod editors with varying degrees of efficacy (hishy told me they mostly suck so I dunno :/)

 

Glad you guys liked it :p Be sure to leave some feedback after using it!