Mod Organizer 2 Discussion and Feedback

[TechAngel85]

Mod Organizer 2 is now in alpha, which is the 64-bit version of MO featuring support for Fallout 4. Testers are welcome and encouraged!

 

Download the Alpha here: https://github.com/TanninOne/modorganizer/releases

 

This is not a bug report topic! Please report bugs to the GitHub issue tracker.

Thought I'd start this thread for the discussion of MO2 instead of filling the Fallout Support topic with unrelated posts.

[SirTwist]

I love mod organizer, but with Mod Organizer 2, I am finding myself at odds with it. I have done a couple things that helps, the only thing I can't seem to get to work is LOOT. I am not having any luck running LOOT through MO 2, but I may need to just take some time, and perhaps move things around myself. Here is what I have working, for me. I have Bodyslide x64 working, with a number of presets. The actual adding of mods works. And downloading mods works. After a couple of crashes, it seems to not want to work. I'm going to try a couple of things, and if it continues not to work, then I may move everything I can out of where I have MO 2 at, then delete, and continue to make due with the dreaded nexus mod manager.

[GrantSP]

  On 1/14/2016 at 10:21 AM, SirTwist said:

I love mod organizer, but with Mod Organizer 2, I am finding myself at odds with it. I have done a couple things that helps, the only thing I can't seem to get to work is LOOT. I am not having any luck running LOOT through MO 2, but I may need to just take some time, and perhaps move things around myself. Here is what I have working, for me. I have Bodyslide x64 working, with a number of presets. The actual adding of mods works. And downloading mods works. After a couple of crashes, it seems to not want to work. I'm going to try a couple of things, and if it continues not to work, then I may move everything I can out of where I have MO 2 at, then delete, and continue to make due with the dreaded nexus mod manager.

Welcome to STEP @SirTwist

 

MO2 is in an early alpha development stage and as such it shouldn't be used as your general game manager. If you wish to assist with the development then please do so, keeping in mind that it only handles 64bit applications at this stage.

[Dragon02022003]

  On 1/14/2016 at 10:21 AM, SirTwist said:

I love mod organizer, but with Mod Organizer 2, I am finding myself at odds with it. I have done a couple things that helps, the only thing I can't seem to get to work is LOOT. I am not having any luck running LOOT through MO 2, but I may need to just take some time, and perhaps move things around myself. Here is what I have working, for me. I have Bodyslide x64 working, with a number of presets. The actual adding of mods works. And downloading mods works. After a couple of crashes, it seems to not want to work. I'm going to try a couple of things, and if it continues not to work, then I may move everything I can out of where I have MO 2 at, then delete, and continue to make due with the dreaded nexus mod manager.

I had the same problem at first and what I had to was make Bodyslidex64, Bodyslide, LOOT run as administrator to allow them to work all the time. Bodyslide will still freeze from time to time though. 

Edited January 14, 2016 by Dragon02022003

[exploiteddna]

well im glad to see others are even getting to use other tools like bodyslide and loot.. ive not even gotten that far. i suppose i could try to use those tools through MO, but when I cant even get the game to work, it seems pointless to worry about anything else, I continue to love MO.. in the form we are all familiar with, it is by far the best manager ever made (aside from wrye, which does a great job at its strengths).. I dearly miss using MO.. modding without it is just not the same. hopefully we can get out of this alpha phase sooner rather than later

[GSDFan]

Has anyone had any luck with FO4Edit? It locks up on me saying, [random plugin] start processing, and I have to close FO4Edit, which then crashes MO.

[Kelmych]

Noone that I'm aware of has had success in using FO4Edit with MO 2 yet.

[SirTwist]

Thank you for the welcome, GrantSP. I had previously made Bodyslide to work by setting it to run as administrator. It works fine even now. I think I am going to have to retry loot, as admin. I haven't given up on Tannin or Mod Organizer. Just going to wait a little while longer until it's a little further along in it's development. As a mod enthusiast, I have used, in the past, NMM (for beginners IMO, and other games I don't care about the data folder, etc.,) FOMM (which is for a tad more advanced users, and it's a decent manager,) then found, fell in love with, and even use currently, Mod Organizer. Thanks to Cal from Dirty Weasel Media and Gopher, I would not be playing either Skyrim or Fallout a whole lot. I know Tannin is working on it the best he can. I am, of course, using the older, 32-bit, version of MO for Skyrim. But I will wait patiently for the next release of MO 2, and read before trying to use it. The only other problem, and this has been mentioned by others, that I have is the one about having everything in the appdata folder. That is not a good place to put stuff. It's not safe. But I also see where Tannin has addressed it.

[Tannin]

  On 1/11/2016 at 11:20 PM, GrantSP said:

Downloads and mods in AppData, surely not. This seems more like the initial trial to see how the UI finds the INIs etc and the actual location of these folders will be set properly in a later build. At least that is what I'm hoping, otherwise that is a really bad idea for the default location of those folders.

What other folder would you suggest? I don't specify appdata directly, i call an api to retrieve a writable location. What other folder can i rely on to exist being writable with user permissions on windows?

[TechAngel85]

I'd suggest allowing the user to choose and only fall upon a predetermined location as a backup if the user doesn't make a choice. The user's My Documents folder would be better. It's where Skyrim stores the user editable data like the INIs and makes more sense.

[Tannin]

  On 1/15/2016 at 2:13 PM, TechAngel85 said:

I'd suggest allowing the user to choose and only fall upon a predetermined location as a backup if the user doesn't make a choice.

That's pretty much what has been implemented. You can choose the location through settings, are even reminded to do so after creating the instance and if you fail to, data is stored in a location that I can rely on to work.

 

  On 1/15/2016 at 2:13 PM, TechAngel85 said:

The user's My Documents folder would be better. It's where Skyrim stores the user editable data like the INIs and makes more sense.

No, sorry, but My Documents is just wrong. Skyrim/Fallout4 shouldn't be storing their ini files and save games there either. Microsoft has guidelines on where to store files, storing application settings in My Documents violates them.

My Documents is for user managed documents like audio files, text files, pictures, ...

User-Managed means: They don't change unless the user actively edits them (i.e. in word, photoshop, ...) My Documents is in a visible location so you can easily find files when you want to send them to friends or something.

 

AppData is intended for application managed files which a user will usually not touch directly and may break the program if he does so. This applies to MOs ini files, its profiles, its mods, its cache. Unless you really know what you're doing you should not be touching any of those outside MO, hence a hidden location is a good thing. And if you do know what you're doing, finding appdata won't be a hurdle.

 

And I'm fairly certain you will find on your own system that most applications that aren't from the win98 era agree with me...

[TechAngel85]

Not saying AppData is wrong. It's just a concern for the everyday users. Most modders are potentially in the"power user" category, though. As long as MO has in-app ways of managing things like the downloaded mods and profiles (which it does), I don't see too much of an issue with the AppData folder.

 

It's just a change from what we've been used to for so long that it came as a bit of a surprise.

 

I personally offload this from my C drive for space reasons, so I'm glad to here it can be customized.

[z929669]

Appdata\Local or Appdata\Roaming seem the appropriate place to have user/app assets stored, IMO. It is predictable and aligned with many programs.

[Kelmych]

The biggest problem I see with Appdata is that it is a hidden folder. As Tannin mentions it's a reasonable place for application managed data that users will rarely directly access (configuration data, etc.). It doesn't seem appropriate to me for a downloads folder which I expect users will regularly access (e.g., remove old versions). Of course as Tannin says, there aren't a lot of good choices.

[Neovalen]

Downloads maybe to the users Download folder?

[Tannin]

You can manage your downloads through MO (delete them, hide them for the moment, ...) and MO will correctly remove the associated meta data. We can talk about improving the UI of the download tab (though I would prefer an issue) but I don't want people to feel the need to delete downloads by hand in explorer because THEN I have to consider "manual users" if I want to change anything in how I name or organize the download folder or how I store the meta data.

 

Maybe it would help if i add small "open in file manager" to various tabs (saves, downloads, profiles) ?

 

> It's just a change from what we've been used to for so long that it came as a bit of a surprise.

 

I understand, but there were just too many users having trouble with file permissions. Next release won't even offer portable mode if the MO directory isn't writable. I think this will fix a considerable chunk of support requests which is why I think it's worth it.

 

> I personally offload this from my C drive for space reasons, so I'm glad to here it can be customized.

 

You actually have several options. You can use MO's own path settings to move the individual directories in each instance individually. Windows allows you to move the AppData/Local directory as a whole. Or you can have AppData/Local/Modorganizer as a link/reparse point/junction point/whatever you call it to a different drive.