Does it matter: Sorting Masters & Changed Load Orders in an existing game?

[Kuldebar]

It seems rather counter-intuitive to me that switching from BOSS to LOOT in an existing game would be 100% safe and advisable.

 

Additionally, it seems also contrary that out of order masters are deemed as "non-issue" in our LOOT Modded World after all those years of being informed otherwise.

 

So, I'd like to hear what people have to say about such things.

 

If load order matters at all, then it must have some impact on how your existing game will "play" when such changes take place.

 

Records that weren't having an impact before will now have their edits in effect and vice-versa. LOOT and BOSS load ordering differs dramatically from what I have seen.So, stating no "ill" effect isn't capturing the crucial point: that there will be "an effect" that might be hard to predict. It seems rather cavalier to me to dismiss such changes as not having some risks in an existing save game.

 

Having such things change in an active game can cause weirdness in the form of glitches, albeit momentary. Will it break a game? Probably not, will it contribute to glitchiness and object displacement, etc...yeah probably.Changing mod load order is akin to disabling ESP files or adding new ESP's.

 

Terrain edits come to mind, the landscape itself can be modified according to which mod now has the priority. Since the game data changes come into effect on your save's next load in, the game will have to adjust to that in one way or the other. I try to avoid unnecessary distortive stress on game experience by doing such things. But, that's just my personal preference.

Edited May 31, 2014 by Kuldebar

[Kelmych]

A lot of the vanilla replacement textures in STEP are in mods with loose resources, and plugin order (vs. MO priority) doesn't have a large effect on which texture "wins". I'm not saying it doesn't affect any textures, but that this isn't where the effect is greatest. LOOT (vs. BOSS) potentially has a bigger effect on resources like sounds and some models (meshes) that are often assigned to an object in plugins. SRB has been working to make sure that the STEP patches will work properly with LOOT when STEP moves to recommending LOOT in the STEP guide. I recently began testing using LOOT to order plugins, and looking with TES5Edit at possible impacts. I haven't seen very many, in part because I previously had a lot of BOSS Userlist rules that manually did what some of the automated analyses in LOOT do. LOOT is certainly not perfect or complete; for example I use the World Map Min_Max Height Pitch Tweak mod which changes a few Worldspace records, and many mods often copy the default values for these records from Skyrim.esm. LOOT doesn't seem to notice this and puts it much lower in the plugin order than it needs to be.

[DocClox]

It seems rather counter-intuitive to me that switching from BOSS to LOOT in an existing game would be 100% safe and advisable.

 

Additionally, it seems also contrary that out of order masters are deemed as "non-issue" in our LOOT Modded World after all those years of being informed otherwise.

 

So, I'd like to hear what people have to say about such things.

OK. Bearing in mind this is purely speculative...

 

Say the game loads a mod called X and that X has masters A, B and C.

 

Now suppose that the load order for A B and C (as sorted by LOOT) is ABC, but that the order appear in the master list is CBA.

 

The questions here are here does X get its master data from? And in what order is that data read?

 

I believe we already know a fair amount of that. The engine loads the masters first, and the mods access that loaded data. The order the masters are loaded is the load order, as determined by LOOT. I would speculate that the engine can't load the data in the order of its own internal master list: where the master lsit order would give confliucting results, the conflicting entries have already been overwritten at this point.

 

So that's my guess at it. For the mod master list to be honoured, the master files would need to be read once for each mod that accessed them (which seems highly unlikely) or else the game would have to keep full copies of the data from each master (which also seems unlikely) or else it would have to accept the data that had already been read using the global load order/

 

But like I say, that's speculation with no real evidence to back it up. And it winds me right up to see all those orange boxes in Wrye Bash as well :)

Edited May 31, 2014 by DocClox