Best way of organising OpenMW load order using a mod manager.

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Candiety
Posts: 12
Joined: 15 Feb 2018, 13:52

Best way of organising OpenMW load order using a mod manager.

Post by Candiety »

First off, I love OpenMW's way of handling morrowind mods using the openmw.cfg file, it makes things very efficient. FTR, I know to use the one located in documents and not program files. I modded morrowind when I first played it on 2003, so I have some experience. However, I am by no means adept with load orders, and when I first tried to use OpenMW (with mods) I encountered a few problems with getting mods to work, due entirely to load order. The problems were even apparent with mods as simple as the Dark Brother attack mod, and Passive Cliffracers!

I eventually solved the above problems using the only method I could think of/get to work. However, I have a feeling that it's not the easiest way of doing things, and is possible problematic. There is surely a better/easier/more reliable way of doing things.

FTR, I am on Windows 7 64bit/OpenMW 0.43.0 and whilst many people might find it easier to manually arrange, I quite simply do not have the more in-depth knowledge of how a mod effects a game to be able to do that myself (although I can to a certain degree). Ideally I need the help of load order software

Anyway, here is my method:
  1. I placed the mlox folder in c:\mlox, with all the necessary mlox files.
  2. I searched my OpenMW data folder (C:\Openmw DataFiles) for any .ESP/.ESM files that I was actively using, then copied them to c:\mlox
  3. I went to C:\Morrowind\Data Files and copied the morowind/bloodmoon/tribunal .ESM files to c:\mlox in the same fashion.
  4. I opened c:\mlox\mlox.exe. It recognised and loaded all of the installed plugins and then proposed a new load order.
  5. I then Opened OpenMW Launcher, created a new profile, and manually rearranged the OpenMW plugins with the new load order proposed by mlox.
Is this a viable (or even working) method to use, or is there a better way? I've done a lot of searching and I'm yet to find a working solution. I can also see a few issues with this.

1. It is very cumbersome to copy all of my actively used esp/esm files to the c:\mlox directory, and then place them all in the same directory, when they are not ordered in the same kind of folder structure in the OpwnMW Data Files directory. Some are in different folders, etc. I hoped this wouldn't matter, but would it?
2.The meshes/textures/other files/folders are missing using this method, but I figured this would (hopefully) not matter either. Would mlox only really need to read the .esm.esp files, or could I see issues here?
3. Manually rearranging the OpenMW Data files load order to match Mlox's 'proposed' load order takes a lot of time, and it's easy to make a mistake.

So how do other people do it, and possibly most importantly, are there any obvious problems with the way that I am doing it here? Surely there is a half decent method by now.

Also, is there a way to make mlox recognise the plugins located within Openmw DataFiles, even though they are in different sub folders/etc?

Thanks for any help, and I would really appreciate some help with this. I'm fairly adept at using computers, but my knowledge of some of the intraspecies concerning modding/etc has a limit.

Thanks again!
luthis
Posts: 6
Joined: 21 Feb 2018, 19:45

Re: Best way of organising OpenMW load order using a mod manager.

Post by luthis »

I was looking for the answer to this question because I'm basically using the same method as you!
I don't bother with copying out files, I just put mlox in Morrowind folder, enable mods in the vanilla launcher, run mlox to get the order, and edit the openmw config file directly.

As far as I am aware, no one has built a tool yet for OpenMW mod sorting, but thinking about it, it should be quite simple. You could use the lists that other sorting software has already generated and just write the correct order to the config file. I might do it myself.

I've never worked out how Morrowind stores it's load order but I imagine it's probably just a list in a config file somewhere just like OpenMW, so you could find that file and copy the mlox sorted list into the OpenMW config file and cut out the manual sorting. That's probably the easiest option.
Candiety
Posts: 12
Joined: 15 Feb 2018, 13:52

Re: Best way of organising OpenMW load order using a mod manager.

Post by Candiety »

^I'm not too techy, so didn't fully understand, but was this thread trying to address what you are describing? viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2751

Also, can you please help me understand your method. My OpenMW folder is completely separate from my Vanilla morrowind one, and I don't think morrowind would recognise the folder structures due to the handy way that OpenMW uses openmw.cfg.
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