Is there a reason MO closes when launching Skyrim?

[Aelius28]

I'm mildly annoyed, especially when testing out mods, about the fact that MO closes itself whenever I have it launch Skyrim. It seems I can tell it to not close MO when launching, but I'm reluctant to do so without knowing if it's safe. Is there any particular reason why the default setting is to have MO close when launching Skyrim, or is it perfectly okay to have it stay open?

 

Thanks.

[WilliamImm]

I assume this is to save memory, so that Skyrim is less likely to fail due to out-of-memory errors.

[Aelius28]

I thought the 3.1 GB memory limit was a limit to how much memory Skyrim itself can use. Mod Organizer contributes to that 3.1 GB limit?

[GSDFan]

It is safe to do that for testing. I do it all the time. That option closes the GUI only, the rest of MO is still active, to free up your system memory if you don't have a lot to spare.

[Tannin]

MO can't reliably determine if an application is still accessing its virtual file system. You may have noticed that if you run - say - boss from MO, the UI gets locked and unlocked after boss quits (refreshing all data files that outside applications might have changed like the plugin list).

However, when you start skse from MO and skse starts skyrim then MO unlocks the UI almost immediately because the application it started has finished (skse), while skyrim still accesses the vfs.

Any changes the game might make to the vfs (i.e. skse plugins writing logs) MO will not know about. The other way around, changes you make in (enable/disable mods) will not affect the game (while changes on hdd, like deleting files will, obviously).

 

To avoid confusion (esp. for new users) I opted for MO shutting down by default so you either run MO or the game, thus you don't have to know how the two might interact.

 

It's fairly safe to toggle MO closing as long as you are aware of what I wrote in the first paragraph (which is why I wrote it before answering the question :P )