ESX selector and stuff

[sirherrbatka]

1. Profiles

There has been a lot of confusion about profiles. Several times people had problems with understanding what they are. That makes me think that maybe I chose the name for this feature poorly. Should we consider renaming it? "Named content stack" maybe? Or just "content stack"? Not sure if these names are much better. Suggestions welcome.

I think that going with "Project stack" as a name would be good. Because that's the purpose of it: to get everything up and running for specific project (mod or TC).

and 0 or more .omwaddon files

…programmers.

[Nomadic1]

1. Profiles

There has been a lot of confusion about profiles. Several times people had problems with understanding what they are. That makes me think that maybe I chose the name for this feature poorly. Should we consider renaming it? "Named content stack" maybe? Or just "content stack"? Not sure if these names are much better. Suggestions welcome.

So that's what those are. I never got that before.

4c. Saving in the editor

We have a problem when we load legacy format files for editing. The editor can not write these formats. Therefore on save a name change occurs, e.g. SomeRandomPlugin.esp -> SomeRandomPlugin.omwaddon. We need to communicate that to the user (and make sure we don't overwrite anything accidentally).
The question here is, should we handle this on load or on save? On load would be cleaner, but you might not always want to save after loading (when loading just for viewing and not for editing) and in this case we would bother the user needlessly.

One way to do it would be to display a warning message in the load dialogue which says that OpenCS cannot save to that format if an .esm or .esp is selected. No popup, no intrusiveness, just simple clear text below the file selection that always reminds the user that there isn't backwards compatibility. New users would notice that it text has appeared, and experienced users would likely ignore it and know about it anyway. If the .esp and .esm file icons and the .omwgame and .omwaddon file icons are different enough, this will help reinforce that distinction.

Likewise, when saving the same warning can be displayed and the option to save as an .esm or .esp is unavailable. The user will again see there is no saving that way and the reason is clear without being intrusive.

I'm sure there are better ways though.

[Zini]

Load/save: Having a message both in the load and save UI makes sense. But that is only a part of it. We also need to change the name of the file (from esx to .omwgame/.omwaddon). The question is when to do that and that is actually the core issue. We aren't really losing compatibility here. As long as you don't use any OpenMW only features, renaming an .omwgame/.omwaddon file to .esx, loading it into the old CS, hitting compile all and saving should do the trick.

Profile renaming: I don't think "Project Stack" would work. Consider you are loading Morrowind.esm, plus a few plugins you like into OpenMW. That doesn't really qualifies as a project.

[sirherrbatka]

Profile renaming: I don't think "Project Stack" would work. Consider you are loading Morrowind.esm, plus a few plugins you like into OpenMW. That doesn't really qualifies as a project.

So maybe we should stick with "profile". Or maybe something descriptive like "Loaded files profile". "Content stack" sounds a bit cryptic imho, while profile is something that at least some users know from applications like Kate. Let's just do things user expect.

[Zini]

The problem with "profile" is that this term is well know, but apparently a sizable amount of people associates it with something different than what we have here. I agree though that "content stack" sounds a bit cryptic to a non-technical user.

[sirherrbatka]

IMHO profile should be kept. Honestly I think that there is absolutly nothing better we can do with it for now… and forever.

Later we can buy WeirdSexy cookies to convince him into doing voince covers for turtorials. It will explain everything better than any name we can invent.

[Gez]

Profile renaming: I don't think "Project Stack" would work. Consider you are loading Morrowind.esm, plus a few plugins you like into OpenMW. That doesn't really qualifies as a project.

"Profile" tends to imply something user-dependent, rather than a resource loadout. "Stack" isn't very intuitive.

"Content Selection" maybe?

[Zini]

That sounds like somewhat of an improvement. I think we can agree that content is a good choice. I am not completely convinced about selection.

[wheybags]

Mod Profile seems most logical to me.

[Zini]

Mod doesn't really fit here, because it also include things like Morrowind.esm.

Content files?
Content list?
Content file list?

Just throwing a few more ideas around. I think "list" is actually pretty good. The word implies a linear order and should be sufficiently non-technical.