Nitpick & Mod Organizer

[Kelmych]

Is Nitpick completely obsolete or only partially? See below.

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Is nitpick been included in the patches? If so' date=' it should be removed from them. Reason being is MO users do not need that mod because MO includes those fixes within the program itself. MO will actually popup a warning if you have it installed and activated.[/quote']

Does Mod Organizer provide fixes for both of the problems that Nitpick fixes? I can see how it fixes the limit on total number of plugins, including both active and disabled plugins, but I don't see anywhere on the MO description page where it mentions raising the character limit on string values in INI files.

[TechAngel85]

Is nitpick been included in the patches? If so' date=' it should be removed from them. Reason being is MO users do not need that mod because MO includes those fixes within the program itself. MO will actually popup a warning if you have it installed and activated.[/quote']

Does Mod Organizer provide fixes for both of the problems that Nitpick fixes? I can see how it fixes the limit on total number of plugins' date=' including both active and disabled plugins, but I don't see anywhere on the MO description page where it mentions raising the character limit on string values in INI files.[/quote']

This would be a question for the MO team. MO uses its own internal INIs per profile and not the game INIs. So it's very possible that MO has icluded both fixes.

[deathneko11]

If memory serves, wolverine and tannin have both stated that nitpick is no longer necessary with MO.

[GSDFan]

Tannin has stated in the past that what Nitpick has to offer is included in MO and if you use Nitpick comparability issues will be likely.

 

Reference post.

[deathneko11]

Nice, my memory is not fried after all :p

[Tannin]

MO fixes the number of characters in the ini by similar means as nitpick (hence they collide).

 

To be honest, I wasn't even aware of this 508 esp/esm limit. It's easy enough to fix manually in MO but could someone point me to a discussion of this issue?

[Uhuru]

MO fixes the number of characters in the ini by similar means as nitpick (hence they collide).

 

To be honest, I wasn't even aware of this 508 esp/esm limit. It's easy enough to fix manually in MO but could someone point me to a discussion of this issue?

 

 

Surprised you don't know about this but it's a Game Engine Limit that's been always there since Oblivion

A Mod Limit? Ohh, $@&%!

 

This Nexus Thread discusses it but no one has ever found a fix and only merging plugins helps.

 

Find a solution and you'll become the Modding God above all others?!!

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The Limit here is 255 ESM and/or ESP files not 508

 

As Skyrim.ESM and Update.ESP are always required the practical limit is 253.

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Just thought as I posted 508 is to specific and rereading your post it's a character limit you're referring to searching for just ESP limit misled me.

[Tannin]

I know about the limit of 256 active es* (esp, esm and ess). I doubt this can be fixed, it's enrooted way too deep in the engine (fixing that ini limit is already the darkest hack I've done in over 20 years of programming)

 

I was wondering about the limit of 508 es* (no matter if active or inactive) nitpick claims to fix.

[Uhuru]

Sorry for my confusing the issue. These are the discussions I found on Bethesda Skyrim forum. I searched for just;

Skyrim 508 limit

This appears to be only affecting Skyrim and the consensus is the engine is too old and showing it.

 

[Rel] Nitpick

 

Max ESPs Active (Can it be removed?)

 

Thrashing, thread #1

 

[RELz/WIPz] Unofficial Skyrim Patch - Thread #18

 

Is There a Limit to How Many Mods I Can Run?

 

[WIP/RELZ] Unofficial Skyrim Patch - Thread #7

 

[uPDATE] BSAs and You

 

I have read opinions stating if as is widely believed Bethesda started Fallout 4 after Skyrim it must use the Skyrim engine not a new "next-gen" one.

This makes no sense even if they had no design specs at all, 64unlikely as that is they knew it was coming and would definitely be 64-bit.

That alone combined with age of Skyrim engine makes it commercial suicide to continue using Skyrim engine. It has no future.

[EssArrBee]

The Skyrim engine is DX9 while the new consoles and every modern graphics card supports DX11 so don't be worried that Fallout 4 is using the Skyrim engine. They will at the very least have to update the engine to 64-bit and at best print out the source code for the Skyrim engine take to a dumpster out back, cover it in kerosene, and light that motherf**ker on fire.

 

One thing to to take into consideration is that the engine may been theoretically able to handle 256 plugins, but like Gamebryo, in real life it only handles a lower amount before stability issues arise. Gamebryo really only handles around 140 before stuff starts going bonkers, textures and meshes go missing, physics bugs, navmesh errors everywhere...

 

I know many people have gotten near or at the 256 limit, but I can't think of one person that actually had a stable game at that level. Can anyone confirm that they play hours on end with 256 plugins? Maybe we should start looking for the true limit and tell people that even though Nitpick and MO can help with their fixes, doesn't mean you can run out and install 200+ plugins and play all day.

[Tannin]

The Skyrim engine consists of several parts. The graphics engine and scripting engines are fairly new and at least the scripting engine is 64-bit ready, I doubt that stuff will be rewritten for Fallout 4.

Which is bad for us because the scripting engine is what's causing most headaches with Skyrim.

 

The data storage system (esp, esm, ess, bsa) is ancient since it's mostly the same since Morrowind. Again, there is no indication yet Fallout 4 will drop it since it is a tried system.

This however is the part that enforces the 256 plugin limit and it's probably not 64-bit ready.

 

The question is: Do we want the low-level stuff to be replaced? Who's to say a new engine would be moddable at all? And even if it is, we would loose all the knowledge and tools that have been built up since Morrowind.

Script Extenders? Have to write from scratch. All the unique functionality from wrye bash? useless. TESxEdit? nope.

 

It's very possibel that, if Fallout 4 uses a whole new engine, we wouldn't see complex mods (beyond texture replacers and quests) for the first 3-5 years after release. If at all.

[deathneko11]

Tannin I can see where you are going with this but to be honest I cannot abide with the modding community if it is going to grow stale due to the reasons and implications that you have stated. I honestly think that if we were to continue with the same tools due to using the same or a similar engine then the modding community WILL grow stale, because of so many limitations that we have to put up with when we are trying to create something new for our games. If the engine were to upgrade, yes it would take some years to get the ball rolling to catch up with it with new script extenders, mod packages and installers, new creation kit, etc but the benefits would far outweight the cost of doing so because it would give the modding community a chance to grow.

[Tannin]

It's also a good opportunity for a modding community to die.

 

A more modern engine is almost guaranteed to be more complex thus harder to mod and harder to produce content on par with the base game.

One good example for this is the Neverwinter Nights series:

NWN had a simple engine an extremely easy editor and today there are almost 6000 quest mods. That is playable content, not nude mods or saturation-increased textures which is 90% of the skyrim mods. You could probably play 2 hours of nwn modules every day for the rest of your life. Or you could stick to the highly rated stuff and be done in ten years.

 

NWN2 had a more complex engine (terrain) and thus a more difficult editor. But most of all the base game was fully voiced and so every user-made mod felt low-quality unless the mod author had a professional sound studio at home. The result: only around 450 user-made quest mods which on average are shorter and more buggy.

And this is still more playable content than is available for skyrim (380 mods categorized as quests or adventure) or Dragon Age, which was touted by Bioware as the spiritual successor to NWN (53 quest mods)

 

When NWN was current, Bioware was the unchallenged "moddable game company" (more than twice the number of quest mods than morrowind has mods in all categories combined), they gave that away by building more complex engines without improving their modding tools to the same degree. Probably lost their whole community to rpgmaker or something.

 

If the next Bethesda game turns out to be harder to mod, the community MAY choose to rise to the challenge. Or they switch to a different game/engine. Or they stick with Skyrim for the next 10 years.

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More on topic:

Nitpick seems to fix (or at least it has at some point fixed) 3 issues:

1) character limit on ini entries, particularly the limit on the archive list

2) fixed a limit of 508 esp/esms in the data folder (no matter whether they are active or inactive)

3) superfluous attempts to read from ini files that don't exist

 

MO does 1 and 3 out of the box.

2 is not automatically fixed but Settings->Workarounds->Hide inactive ESPs/ESMs does exactly the same as nitpick (as far as I understood it).

 

So there you have it: I claim Nitpick is not necessary if you have MO. ;)