Playing a little FO4. Well, I was, for a bit. Kinda 'in a mood' about it though.
I'm at a point with this mod setup where I'm really happy with it, looks-wise and balancing-wise. Every time I fire up the game and see this bleak foggy atmosphere with this mix of sickly and pretty colors, I'm there and I'm just jazzed for the FO4 exploration experience. For years of playing this game, there would be things about it that bothered me, whether from a game design standpoint, or an aesthetic sensibilities one. It also just has a lot of uncomfortable clunk. Over the past couple of years, I have built, torched, and rebuilt several 'platform' setups that mostly focus on visuals, feel, and core gameplay. Not necessarily drastically altering the game into something different or adding entirely new elements, as many enjoy doing. That stuff is cool, and I've played around with it plenty. But ultimately all I want is a good exploration experience that looks and feels like Fallout. Everything else is extra, so the bulk of the work I do is refinement and just trying to broaden my technical understanding of the game, so that I can go right in and fix things as I see fit. It's been a joy to be on this progression. I feel like I've really done something with it and it makes playing the game a radically different experience from playing any other game. It's my thing now, and I know so much more about video games because of this cool experience I've put together for myself.
Thing is... FO4 and Skyrim are holding my storage hostage. Skyrim stays on my system NVME drive because yes... when Skyrim is loading tons of textures and ESPECIALLY parsing a lot of script data, a faster drive along with uncoupling the loading screen from any frame limiting does make it load much quicker... like several minutes versus 15 seconds. 15 seconds is long-ish the way I'm running things, and I'm running close to 500 mods. You'd be surprised at how quickly that game will load when you decouple vsync from the loading screens and pop the installation onto a fast drive. I can't remember the exact reason, but I'm betting it has something to do with the fact that the scripting system queues up everything on a frame-to-frame basis, which would include tasks related to loading. If it has a lot to get through, it takes a very long time at 60FPS. At 3-400, it is a good couple of orders of magnitude quicker to resolve everything.
FO4 goes on the secondary SATA SSD. Similar reasons. You just don't wanna be loading those games off of HDD's heavily modded when you can help it. It's not just loading screens... these do dynamic worldspaces the old ways... their whole pre-loading and visibility system isn't fancy and will induce nasty stutter when it has to ding the hard drive for ~20 seconds just to call the next cell cluster in. You'll wind up just about crossing the whole cell before the stutter stops... and then you enter a new one and start it all over. It was never optimized for such large chunks of texture and script data and bogs down juggling it. This is why sometimes hardware improves performance in some areas, while other things can't be improved, no matter how much memory or processing oomph you throw at it. People say this stuff is somewhat irrelevant on PC now... and the reason for that is because most games are better optimized when it comes to memory usage and storage. Bethesda games just aren't and if you REALLY want to screw around with them, you need to accept that and find a way to address it, just do everything you can to mitigate it... because it will determine what you can and can't do, even if you already have a 3090.
My big issue with these setups is how everything is stored and put together. I manage it all with an app called Vortex. It's a pretty powerful mod manager with everything from backups to profiles for different games (or as many as you like for the same game - entire mod setups that can be fully tucked away and rolled-out on command, just about as big and complicated as is possible to begin with,) integration for all modding tools... you can pretty much do everything modding-related from within Vortex at this point and it really enables you to do more than anyone could effectively organize by working directly, or coding .bat files for pulling/deploying mod files and keeping an 'index' as I used to do before taking the plunge on letting a mod manager hold my hand. I'm betting very few modders today would have a clue how to safely do a big setup completely manually, from within explorer, because things like Vortex and MO2 are so good that it's unimaginable. They're worth trusting, mostly. How good is your average person with Windows hardlinks and permissions these days? Probably not as good as Vortex is... and Vortex can virtualize too.
The problem is how it keeps track of the whole setup. It's tied into your OS files in a way that makes it fully dependent on present OS states. So if you try to move it to another PC manually, it just doesn't work. Even just pulling a manual back up of the apps files will not work and you can just lose the whole index it uses to track the states of all of the mod files, which it keeps stored separately and then manages through hardlinks, symlinks, or a virtual environment. This 'index' (or really 'index of indexes') becomes orphaned by internal flags not lining up and YOU can't modify those at all. Some of this stuff really is in a totally black box, packed away in your user files. You truly can't mess with it, even if you find it and change permissions to alter it. The actual manifest data it keeps for all of the running states it maintains isn't able to be accessed, understood, or altered by anything but Vortex's code. It's dependent on the moment of time it's made/changed, and the state of the rest of your OS as of that point.
So with that stuff in mind... what I have now are two games set up with ~500 mods, with intricate rules for sorting, many of them altered and mixed together, that are locked in place with no easy way to transfer or store away.
The thing is, a lot of it is just foundational... like textures/meshes, fixes in the worldspace, changes to gameplay that are probably compatible with everything. What I would like to do is compress them into archives for the game to deal with. Right now, it's all loose files, as that's really the only way to get everything in the correct order... you have to bust open archived mods if you only want some of their changes, or you want to alter them yourself, as I have done with a lot of my mods. This makes the whole set up easy to change, but hard to move. If it was ever lost, it'd just be gone. I'd have to pull a whole system backup in. It's about the data in the mods themselves. I'll explain.
Vortex DOES have features for doing all of this in app. You can save your whole setup as a 'collection'. Vortex is directly synced up with the entire Nexus Mods archive, so if you're only using Nexus mods, you can install the app and sign in on any machine and it will download your entire mod setup and deploy it exactly as you've set it on the other machine. Very cool feature, it's a lot like Wabbajack, but with the potential for even more. People can share their epic mega mod packs fairly now, with everyone credited by default, and casual users can install them '1-click' style with an app and be running a sick mod setup with no knowledge. That's insane, actually.
However, I have modded so many of my mods. Combined texture packs (landscape textures are a bear in these games - there have to be 100's in this crazy file hierarchy,) edited scripts, mods that have since been deleted from the internet... it can't 'keep' anything that's 100% unique to your setup. If it doesn't exist on the Nexus servers, it can't be backed up. They do not have physical backup capabilities yet.
So basically, every time I fire up my modded Skyrim or FO4, in the back of my mind is the understanding that if I appreciate what this work has done for me, I have to smush all of it into super-mods before it is all lost to the ether... track down all of the relevant game files and pack it into a smaller megamod compilation that Vortex can just take, maybe with a list of the mods names tucked in the archives, and specific changes I've made. All of this is pretty simple, as I can get the original versions and compare them from within Vortex, use whatever tools I need. I actually have the original game archives extracted as mods, which will of course grant me access to every change my setup is making to the entire game when activated. You can modify almost anything in any of the game folders, add whatever files and folder hierarchies and scripts to deal with them. I can see, compile, and document all of it. A variety of ways to get it done. It's just not nearly as fun as the actual modding. More like cleaning up all of the mess in the wood shop.
But you know? It's hard to get anything done in a messy shop, and it's not as enjoyable. So I'm getting started on the archiving today by documenting the whole thing. I've rebuilt it all from scratch a few times now, but I'm at a point in my knowledge and organization where I don't see gains doing it anymore, it's just time lost and a specific experience I can't get anymore if it goes out. Not to mention, I kinda can't make big changes to my system with these mod setups in place as they are. By the time I do a fresh install of W11, I need to have all of this packed away.
