Back to Metro Exodus after a long process first attempting to restore my Vortex setup... and then later my system, which I broke in the process. Not long after I was singing its praises, Vortex bugged out and straight-up nuked vital files in its appdata/roaming folder and killed my massive, convoluted FO4 mod setup. I had a system backup that was bad... fortunately the data on it was generally good and I was able to tediously reverse engineer it to restore my modding setup in its entirety on a fresh install of W10. Everything is working again... and it only took a week of banging my head against the wall! My god, what a nightmare that was. Cest la vie when you play around with things that aren't meant to be played with
Apparently Vortex has a nasty bug that can happen when you're removing files deployed in the game folder, such as when removing a bad/corrupted texture from a pack, like I was. Normally, Vortex will detect this and ask if you want to keep the changes. If you say yes, it will update the deployment manifest and mod staging folder to replicate the state of your game folder with all of its hardlinks. This time, when it was doing that, it fudged all of that data... detected conflicts were lost, along with the thousands of conflict rules in play. It no longer has the information to purge or deploy the links. Very bad news. The system for keeping track of the relationship between profile data, staging folder, and game folder are verrrry delicate and must be maintained in an intricate, logical sequence. When that sequence is broken, that's basically it. It just has too many interlocking parts to just throw something up that's all good and have it work. It's possible if you have access to the deepest inner working, but you really need to understand how it all ties together. Even the devs would have difficulty. Everything has to happen in a specific order. After just one misstep, it can be hard to go back a step... if the information about where it's at is lost, it can't always go back, even if the information about where it was is intact... because there's no way for it to determine the here-to-there in that situation... it has no way of figuring out what parts of the sequence need to be done to get from broken back to good. It's very state-dependent.
I dunno exactly how it all actually works, but that's the gist. It's part of why people tend to have a lot of problems copying a Vortex setup over to a new machine. I learned the hard way that it doesn't like being jump-started. Doing that correctly is like building a ship in a bottle. That's why I was hoping to restore the system backup... to guarantee that everything is in place.
I was only able to find one account of the same thing happening... on the github for Vortex. It was determined to be a bug, but it was assumed fixed in later versions due to no response. Seeing it first-hand, there is no 'fixing' that behavior with an update. Once that data is gone, it's gone. There is no backup and no way to reconstruct it. Your Vortex install is essentially broken after this happens. Everything has to go and you can only start from scratch reinstalling all of your mods, re-sorting, and manually designating all of your conflict-winners. Which is crazy to try and do when you're dealing with 100's of mods.
Wish I had kept the log files from after it happened. They really need to see those.
What saved me was a backup I had on the drive. Dropping in the appdata from that to a new install, even with every path correct, didn't work. Something in there isn't pointing to the right place and I have no way of knowing what. But fortunately, since Vortex uses hardlinks, I was able to copy the whole deployed setup from my game folder when everything was in a working state... as those links are practically the actual file... almost like a copy. With all of the texture mods deployed according to the rules, I could archive them and have Vortex call those archives in a new install. This preserves the whole conflict-resolution structure that I had in Vortex as sort of a working fossil. I can no longer change them around, but I can always overwrite with new loose textures where needed. The plugin based mods, I simply reinstalled and allowed Vortex to sort them how they were. The one's I modified for compatibility or just tweaking, I over-wrote with the versions from the old game folder.
Everything else was easy... things in my game folder such as re-shade and enb, I simply copied back over to the new install's game folder. All of my inis and saves, I did nothing with... all of my personal files, including "My Games" are pointed to the D: drive, so I simply had my new Windows install do the same... so right away FO4 and really all of my other games call up the saves and ini's in there by default. All I havce to do is install and Windows gives them those paths automagically. Ez-pz.
From here on in, game folder and vortex folders get their own backup... so that if this ever happens again I can recover only those files from that image. That way I don't have to worry about having a spare drive to deploy a system backup to in order to get them back (they HAVE to be on the system drive, unfortunately, which majorly complicated things... I wiped my system drive and dropped in the backup, which went disastrously and left me with a broken system... but that's another story. Next time I will have another drive to serve only as a sandbox that I can safely dump a system backup into without losing my current system's state!)
ANNNNNYYYWAYY... long story short, always plan ahead when you have big, touchy mod setups that you need to keep intact. I came pretty close to losing everything there! I did actually lose my whole system in the process of attempting recovery. Fortunately that's not a big deal for me, not much on there that's irreplaceable without major hassle... just reinstalling things as the need arises. Everything else is on another drive. And I have the old backup re-imaged and tucked away in case there's any config stuff needed later.
After all of that, I need a palate-cleanse. Every time I fire-up Exodus after a while away, I find myself in awe of its visuals all over again. Right from the start of the game it really takes you for a ride and I love that about it. All I can think as I pour over all of the different touches in the atmosphere is "This is how a post-apocalyptic game is supposed to look." Something I'll carry back when I go back to FO4.
My favorite thing about this game is the thought put into the guns. They show a knowledge of historic firearms far beyond most games. Just all sorts of little details that any knowledgeable person appreciates... most games get basic aspects of how guns actually work wrong and use improper terminology. If you think you know how guns work from video games, you're probably wrong. Pretty early in, you see a higher standard of gun knowledge in this game. You start the 'real' first portion with a 'Kalash' (clearly an AK-47... or maybe 74M? 103? Doesn't matter too much, functionally. Seems like they mix and match a bit) that doesn't have a dust cover. So you've got the captive recoil spring exposed and everything. Looks pretty crazy and adds a lot to the scrappy, touch and go vibe of the situation. Most people would think that's all it is... just a compliment to the unenclosed red-dot mounted on the sight rail crudely-welded on to the receiver. In essence, not a real thing.
But this is actually a real, intended feature of the AK-47 and younger sibling 74. If you have it stripped down and the dust cover is lost or you need to use it with no time to re-fit it, you can pick it up and fire it safely without it... just don't let the bolt carrier catch you! It also allows you to see how it's cycling if you need to diagnose an issue with that. I have seen this first-hand with a semi-auto AK-47 clone. I know people who have owned them and have put my share of rounds through them. They really do fire just as well without a dust cover, though I don't think it's commonly known that you can do that with them. It looks sketchier than it is. You just need eye protection from crap being blown back at you. I wish they had taken it further and had a version that fires without the recoil spring... due to its design with its captive recoil system, you can also fire it that way. The only danger is that the bolt may fly off, depending on the quality of your ammo and wear on the recoil rod
Room for interesting mechanics there. AK-47's are super-interesting guns... they're pretty simple, but there's a lot to them that can be worked into a crafting system.
Just one of many neat touches with the weapons. They look really 'out there' but whoever came up with them actually had their feet on the ground.
I would love to see a gunsmith break down the mechanics of the weapons in the game... they're very cleverly done and a lot of them would probably work on paper. Be interesting to see an educated opinion. I have field-stripped and fired my fair share of firearms at this point in my life, but it's pretty mystifying to me. I just look at them, knowing what I DO know and become fascinated by how those guns might actually work!
It's funny though... it doesn't always translate. Early in the game you are shown a badge with a bullet in it... un-punctured casing and all... because everyone knows that when you fire a gun, the casing travels out through the barrel! Ejection ports are just for show!
