Steam Works

I just wattched a trailer for the creation kit and I'm quite interested in Steams mod features. It looks like it makes mods into a kind of free DLC, the mods auto update and when you play the game on another machine you will automatically download the mods onto that machine.

I've not actually cared about any of Steams features before, I've just put up with Steam to be able to play games, but this one sounds really good.

Carful fen you’ll get the dark ones hackles up.

My One big concern about it is… Why are they putting so much effort into this? Someone somewhere is going to have to pay, it’s all beginning to get a bit too commercial and I think this is a means to an end.

Read into that what you will.

Well I for one wont be using it, I prefer to download and install my mods myself. There is so much that can go wrong with this method and I can see nothing but grief especially when the more complex mods are released.Say you download and install mods A, B, and C and they all work together, you then see mod D and think "I like that, I`ll install it". However mod D overwrites some of mod A which now is broken.Then mod B gets an update, this breaks mod C and before you know it, your install is bolloxed with mods not working as they should, and I`ll guarantee you`ll get no support from Bethesda or Steam.

Give me manual download, BOSS and Wrye Bash any day.

Yeah Steam games often have problems with not working etc so with mods it will probly be a complete mess if you try and download more than one. I was trying to work out how this would work, I mean a lot of mods for the same game have different ways of installing. One thing I've very concerned about is if there will be comments on the mods page on Steam, I usually read peoples comments before I download, incase there is a virus or whatever, also I doubt Steam will check each mod so I'm a little concerned about how safe this will be.

I am a little concerned that they might try and force games to only allow mods to be used through Steam and then put a small price on mods (Some of which would go to the modders, but you can bet it would only be a small amount). I'm hoping though that this is just a service to help them keep control as the number one digital game shop.

Sounds like it will work like Nexus Mod Manager, that works well for texture mods, it tells you if a file is about to overwrite another and what mod it’s overwriting it’s just a case of plodding through each file one at a time instead of saying yes to all, also NMM wont auto update it just lets you know that an update is available, so you can research any change notes and choose to update or not.

fortnightly Oblivion has taught me the importance of load order.

However everyone says it’s easy to roll back to vanilla should something go wrong and it is – BUT once the CK is out and you get game changing mods that give unique weapons, spells even new playable races, then any saves with those stand a good chance of being corrupt if the mod is removed or overwritten, the mod authors will worn you about this in their notes but I can foresee a lot unhappy people who don’t read the notes and just go happy clicking on all the mods they like the sound of.

Well, patch 1.4 went live yesterday and the word from Beth is that if the CK does not go live today it will be next week for sure

I heard some of the big modders already have it on beta, and if you check out the mods available on that video you’ll see Seraph has his/her name attached to one of them, if that’s so it could hit the ground running with some interesting mods from the start.

1.4 didn’t update for me, I was already running it.

Visage wrote:I heard some of the big modders already have it on beta

You heard right

I've subbed to some of the mods in the work shop, open skyrim so that I have no more load times going into cities and the silence is golden mod, which makes NPC's not talk to you unless you get very close. The work shop isn't good at the moment, firstly there is no search option, you have the option to filter different types of mod like armour or spells, but I can't type say "Nude female mod" into the search engine and get what I know I want. Which is really crap when you have as many mods as Skyrim gets. When you do find a mod you want though you can sub, however so far I see no easy way to see what mods you are subscribed to. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see the tab, if that mod gets less popular and hides in the crowd I'm going to have a hard job finding it.

Still at a time when more and more games are saying "Sorry we're not supporting mods, what no it has nothing to do with releasing crappy DLC and making you pay for it, it's just that games have moved too far along for modders to be able to mod any more" it's nice to see games getting easy to access support for mods, and it is really easy you just click subscribe and thats it, start Skyrim and they install.

Welcome to the club.

Not used the workshop yet myself, I did pick up the free texture pack under dlc on the skyrim page, I had to play around a bit to get it to work without overwriting my other textutes but all fine now, infact worth it for the higher res npc clothing.

After some testing with the new beta patch it has become apparent Bethesda have taken onboard all the concerns about load order issues with Steam Workshop and have altered the way it works. Hurrah, you all say, unfortunately in doing this they have broken the functionality of Nexus Mod Manager, Wrye Bash, BOSS and a few other important utilities that require absolute load order information.

The developers of these third party programs are frantically recoding to get these apps working for when the patch goes live.

Thread

Why haven't we got a head banging wall smiley?

I`m actually encouraged by this, it shows Bethesda are listening to players concerns and attempting to fix them. The issue that it breaks current third party tools is not really their concern and they have enough faith in mod authors to know work arounds will be found, which of course they have. Now they just need to sort the nav-mesh issue in the CK and I`ll be really happy

So what will happen to the mods I have installed using Nmm & Boss come the next patch will I need to reinstall everything? Also dose this only affect Skyrim or will my Oblivion install be mucked up because Wbash is being adapted to this new sort method?

Patch 1.4.27 is live


Patch Notes

UPDATE 1.4.27 (PC Only)

LAUNCHER

* Fixed issue with downloading mods when you are subscribed to more than 50 mods
* Fixed crash when loading a subscribed mod that has been removed from Workshop by the author
* Mod load order functionality

BUG FIXES (PC only)

* Fixed occasional crashes when loading a save that relies on plugins/master files that no longer exist
* Fixed issue where controls would become unresponsive while charging an enchanted weapon
* Fixed issue where controls would occasionally become unresponsive while switching from third to first person while using the Arcane Enchanter
* Fixed issue where controls would become unresponsive if activating a crafting station with autorun active
* Fixed issue where keyboard would fail if Rename Item was selected before choosing the number of charges, while using Arcane Enchanter
* Fixed several issues with remapping buttons while using an Xbox 360 controller
* Fixed issue where pressing Escape button after fast traveling but before the loading would cause certain menus to stop working properly
* Followers now sneak properly when player is sneaking


Will be good if followers do sneak I'll be giving that a go asap.
Before this patch I took the Mage Cat out for a walk he was hilarious and dyed more than any of the others, best follower so far has been the Mage Dark Elf.

As far as your current Skyrim install you have two choices

1. Dont update Skyrim until Bash, NMM, BOSS etc are updated - this is the route I`m going down

2. If you have already updated you have a bit of work to do, you`ll have to get your load order and copy/paste it into your plugins.txt file located at C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Skyrim\plugins.txt

Bit more clarification from Lojack, the author of Bash

For now, what all Wrye Bash users should be doing - use Wrye Bash as you normally would. Exactly as you normally would. The only change happens when you're ready to start the game:

Open up 'plugins.txt', found in your '[username]\AppData\Local\Skyrim\' folder. Then, using the list of plugins from Wrye Bash, edit plugins.txt to list, in order, all of your ACTIVE plugins - so only the one's with checkmarks.

Editing plugins.txt in this way will make the game read the plugins in the same way Wrye Bash is.

The only downfall to using this method: Wrye Bash is still redating the plugins. That means if you have subscribed to some mods on SW, SW will still want to download those mods again.

Once the updated BOSS API is out, Bash will use that to edit plugins.txt for you, so things will be back to business as usuall, and you won't have to edit plugins.txt yourself, and Wrye Bash will no longer redate plugins (when running in Skyrim mode).

I've yet to use bash for Skyrim as I've not had the need to YET, But Nmm has also updated though I don’t think it fixes this issue, but looking at my plugins ini it looks to be in the right order i cant see any load conflict, though I've only got 15 esp's in there and most of them are to do with better sorting, a majority of my mods have been to textures not using esp so they should be unaffected.

I knew it would update as I’ve had steam online for other games but I was counting on using a backup TESV file, it appears it’s now a bit more complicated than that, and it sounds like it brakes Skyboost again.

I'm going to launch Skyrim and see what happens.

Once I'd removed Skyboost it launched & everything’s working as it should, I treated Lydia to a trip out but I didn’t notice any sneak improvement, but I didn’t really get enough time to test it, I’m hoping she won’t break out of sneak and into combat before I do.

Glad to hear everythings okay, I`m going to wait for Bash and I have a couple of SKSE plugins that need updating as well, namely Uncapper and Smart Souls.