Hi,

I'm the author (or better modder^^) of Wrye4Fallout3. Sorry for the problems with this but it's a beta...

My main goal for Wrye4Fallout was to make the installer (BAIN) work because I want to see conflicts, and sort by Mods. The Installer should now work 100%.
My second goals: Start and use Wrye without Pyhton/WXWidgets installed. This should also work.

With the create of the bashed patches I've some problems - But the question is: Do we really need the bashed patch ?

There are some really great projects (FOIP) for merging overhauls and there should be a lot of problems with already existing mod (no Wrye Tags)... I don't know if the Mod Authors see a really need for a bashed patch ?!

What do you think ?

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1063752
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=10097

Coincidentally, I am right now in the process of building patches for my new load order. FO3Edit is a marvelous tool, but its own merged patch tool only has some functions built-in, and it is not configurable with options the way the bashed patch is. Yes, I understand that no mods are tagged right now, but even implementing tags and allowing the user to apply them would be faster and more convenient than what I am doing at the moment.

For instance, if Wrye4Fallout3 recognized an "Import Scripts" tag, I could save myself some time and trouble by just applying that tag to the mod I want.

In addition, recognition of tags would allow me to create one bashed patch, configured for every mod I want features imported from, rather than creating several merged patches with FO3Edit.

gothemasticator

All that is basically changing gameplay settings. Doing something like what you mentioned above doesn't even take a minute to do in FO3Edit.
I simply do not see a Wyre taking the same spot in FO3 that it has in Oblivion.

Of course not I wasn't insinuating that it would. The reason Wrye is necessary in oblivion is that it was one of the first to feature something like it. The reason it is so popular is four-fold. firstly is that it came first it started development as a tool for Morrowind for nick's sake. Secondly ease of use, making a based patch is as simple right clicking on it an say rebuild patch and clicking a few check boxes. Thirdly established user base, by the time it came to oblivion it had a very skilled user base which only grew as he added more features. Fourthly, to someone who is used to Wrye bash or Wrye mash Fomm or obmm are clunky as all hell and are lacking features we are used to(tags, manual re-dating, bashed patch.). Now I do admit it's packaging feature is easier to use than BAIN but [censored] it errors half the time and is redundant next to manually installing. Granted it does ease uninstall though taking that into account I generally only use it for non plugin mods.

Also if it's available can someone point me to the FO3Edit source code. It's not like bash where you can just right click a file and open it in a text editor.

I'm obviously not a mod maker, so would not expect my votes to count as much as mod makers do, but I agree with gtm above in that it returns some utility to the mod user.

As it is now building a patch for overhaul combining is tedious and bordering on mod making itself. Otherwise we are left to rely on modders to provide the merged list patch.

With Oblivion I've about 5 overhauls that are merged into a unified whole with many many many tweaks on all kinds of settings - and the patching process takes about 5 minutes. True this is possible only because mod makers have strove to make mods that are usable by wrye bash - which is work and challenges the notion of 'my mod my rules' ... there certainly did seem to be splits within the 'community' about bash over such issues.

So taking the time to make the mods leveled lists and all be bash ready, and more time making some patches for bash mean that the front end is a lot of work but the final usability is much greater and easy to manage.

By engaging in that dialogue (between Wrye and modders) both sides were pushed and the result was now you can combine all kinds of things that were not thought possible 3-4 years ago.

What I posted in the other thread was in regard to things that would not at all be applicable to Fallout3 such as COBL, Exhaustion, SEWorld (although maybe for PL & Pitt) and tweaks like arrow count and so on.

I'd love having the camera tweaks though. But all the rest is just going to confuse a lot of people who never got into Oblivion.

What could be created could be a beautiful thing and really only limited by what one is not willing to do.

my 2 caps

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edit - thanks for opening thread.

I hope I'll find a way to make bashed patches work - At moment there are some problem - Will continue work and add subversion repo in new year (after holidays)...

Just to let you know the problem of not having bashed tags in mods currently isn't really much different then when the feature got introduced in Wrye Bash. By the time the feature got introduced there were far more mods then there currently are for Fallout 3. Before that it was just leveled list merging for the most part with the bashed patch.

I don't know how useful this is currently but in the future as more mods come out the features of Wrye Bash will become very useful and potentially a necessity for Fallout 3. Even right now I have come across mods where it would have been much easier to get working together if Wrye Bash was fully working with Fallout 3

PS. With all of the people typing Wrye's name wrong I can't believe he hasn't come here to correct people here.

Yes it's Wrye pronounced like corned hash on toasted rye.

Though I will admit for the longest time it did think it was Wyre simply because that was more computerish.

Also agree with you fully and completely.

OMG - See it - I've corrected this on all pages.. Sry about this^^

Hope a mod or admin can change the title "[WIP] Wyre4Fallout3" to "[WIP] Wrye4Fallout3"

---Edit

On the other side: Think some people will search for Wyre xD

Are you Wrye? If not, perhaps you should think about renaming this project. And yes. we need a bashed patch.

Unless something has changed over the last half year, most Oblivion mods are not taged probably. Even if Wrye Bash had been fully functional for FO3 since its launch, I doubt most FO3 mods would be.


Case in point: Project Beauty. If I'm not to much mistaken, Project Beauty changes the looks of NPCs to make them look better, more destinct (similar to TNR in Oblivion). At the moment, this mod has to be merged *manually* with every mod that change something in the touched NPCs (if you want the new looks). I don't think it is difficult to do, but it takes a lot of time and has to be redone whenever a new version of either mod comes out. With a functional bash function, all you have to do is to add a NPCFaces tag to the description field of the mod, and press rebuild patch. This will ensure that the changed faces work with *every* mod out there - no explicit mucking around with compatibility patches.

As I wrote in the linked thread, bash functionality can automate the bread and butter parts of making mod compatibility patches, allowing modders to focus on the more challenging issues at hand.

Also, the nVidia fog fix were not a gameplay setting. It were a badly set fog parameter on each cell that sometimes caused a black screen when you entered the cell. The fix were to change the fog parameter from 0.0 to 0.001 (did anyone say divide by zero). For every cell in the entire game. Including modded cells, which were a lot of trouble, until the feature were added to Wrye Bash.


He is semi-retired, after all

I've never been a particularly big fan of FO3Edit's merged patch functionality. While it's great that it exists, it can just as easily cause problems by people not understanding how it works than it fixes problems. At the same time, the feature is also a necessity for merging formlists and other records and are criticial to some mods working right (i.e. WeaponModKits). So, if Wrye get's to a point that it can more intelligently create merged patches based on mod-maker defined tags, I think that would be a big help for the community and could minimize a lot of potential conflicts.

I admit that I only really played with mods for Oblivion over the first year or so that it was out, so I didn't really mess around too much with wyre bash. I used it a little bit early on, but I mostly felt like a monkey slamming buttons. Anyway, best of luck, and I'll keep an eye on any developments here!

Thanks!

Having a Bashed Patch feature in Fallout would solve so many problems - mainly leveled list stuff and merging faces as well.

Renaming it would be the wrong thing to do, since it is originally Wrye's work. And Wrye has passed the torch so to speak to others to carry on the work, since he is almost entirely retired.

gothemasticator

If Morrowind's tool was Mash and Oblivion's tool was Bash, then shouldn't this be called Fash?

:)

"Flash" would be... well, flashier.

gothemasticator

This bug doesn't exist in FO3, so that's not relevant here


This is correct, for Project Beauty it would be helpful.


This is not entirely correct. Wrye Bash offers little to no functionality that helps me when writing WMK or MMM FOIP patches. I would still need to do everything by hand, due to the fact that most of them are a little bit more complex than a simple compatibility patch.

I'm not belittling what Wrye did for Oblivion and it's a great tool. I'm only saying I find it doubtful that it would have the same impact on the FO3 modding community as it had on the TES community. I still would like to see Wrye Bash completely ported over to FO3, but the actual need for it is not that big, since FO3Edit already creates pretty intelligent mergers of leveled lists, Formlists, NPCs and the like.

This is true, too, for Oblivion modding. FCOM, which requires the bashed patch, is still a large group of hand-made patches. The bashed patch has not made the FCOM patches obsolete.

So, no, I doubt a fully functioning bashed patch would change the mod-creators' work. But, it would make some things easier for us mod-users. Project Beauty was mentioned above. I'll add to that: FaceMe, which I spent quite some time looking at before deciding that losing many of its changes was a lesser penalty than all the work it would take to manually build a merged patch in FO3Edit. And, that's after installing the various FaceMe compatibility patches that exist.

gothemasticator

Let's not forget the most important compatibility component - that which has not been created yet.

While there are many things that bash can do for Oblivion that are not applicable to F3 - the main reason for that is that because the many projects that are bash reliant are only possible with bash and were created because the functionality existed in bash.
Item Interchange & Large components of COBL being an example.

Then how about this concept - more room for more mods! With bash you do not need to have all mods active - many can be merged into the bashed patch and have it count for all of them. With Oblivion I have a total of 123 esp files that are merged into one file. With F3 I'm already near 200 and a hard cap is fast approaching.

Further it does provide a point of reference and method for people to develop compatibility.

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but don't get me wrong - it is not as though I'd expect a miracle - such as all modders talking bash and working collaboratively with one another. Having a bashed patch is a very large step in that direction though.

Still FO3edit is well put together but that did not mean that modders then got it together to ::gasp:: clean their mods before releasing them.

FOMM is far more advanced and user friendly than OBMM as well. Just saying - very impressive by comparison.

I like your signature Psymon. Also you do raise very good points in your post. Looking at it in comparison FOMM is VERY much more new user friendly in comparison to OBMM and Bash. Still would prefer Bash call me stubborn. Also if I recall correctly the BOSS for oblivion actually will tag your files for you or at least suggest tags.

Still wondering if FO3Edit's source is available though.

+1

The problem with a small community supporting two tools of the same type is that it creates confusion and can lead to problems of Fo3Edit and Wyre4Bash do the same "thing" or "function". If they get even a little out of sync, we'll have some mods that work well with Wyre-derived patches and others that work well with Fo3Edit-derived patches. That would be a huge mess that no-one needs.

However, as Mez eloquently put; the Merged-Patch feature in Fo3Edit is not totally "complete" as a feature (Elminster spoke to me of wanting to improve it but never having time), and can cause problems with mods if the user doesn't know when to and when to not use them. Also Fo3Edit is Incredibly complex and difficult to understand without a 200 page manual, which has helped Alot of people to use Fo3Edit - it is also overly complex and resists wide-spread adoption for this reason. That leaves a really nice "niche" for Wyre4Bash that it could fill and thus add a hugely-needed function to the community.

I think having features in Wyre4Bash that are new/not in Fo3Edit would be alot more useful for all of us than to have a Wyre4Bash that replicates some Fo3Edit functions but not others and not exactly-enough to retain mod compatibility. Elminster has "gone beyond the veil" from the community for a time, and I don't know when or if he will return to work on Fo3Edit - so it helps us all that Wyre4Bash is coming to Fo3 with committed development time/resources, and I would love to see it take a useful/needed place in the community.

Miax

Another thing mentioned by Psymon that is done better in Wrye Bash then current Fallout 3 utilities is the merging of mods. I needed to merge plugins to keep my game working in Fallout 3 when I was getting near 200 mods. The problem though is that the mod merging functionality of FO3Edit didn't work for me and I ended up using FO3Plugin to merge mods but FO3Plugin isn't the best program for merging more several mods at once. When I did this when I last played Oblivion it was much easier because I had Wrye Bash which worked very well for that.

to be technical; BOSS suggests tags (they do have to be added in to the masterlist editing) and Wrye Bash automattically grabs the tags - this will too unless Lord used a really base for porting.
Most Oblivion mods stilllack tags and they have to be added (from the masterlist or by hand)

I think you would have to PM Elminster to get the source for FO3edit.
Pacific Morrowind

I would love to have to function to create a Fashed Patch. While Fo3Edit is a great tool, it can't do everything. And I doubt that Wrye4Fallout3 would do everything, but together they would come very far.

And about FOMM, there's a reason it's number one on Fallout3Nexus. Wrye wasn't there

Bumping for Ripple to see.

- the discussion has been had, but not with Wrye - he opted out early and, last I heard was lost in WoW.

Hopefully he will be back for TES5.

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to reiterate - the lack of this is why Fallout3 modded is only so-so and at times blows.

The more work arounds for these issues and for the whole two camps (esmifying the whole load order or not) and just a general disregard for cleaning mod really turns me off to F3 anymore.

Oblivion is so sturdy and can take 100s of mods being installed and uninstalled. F3 just not as modable and not as many tools.

Hopefully LordofDOOM did not totally drop this.