[MISC] Best Practice

[lonewolfe10]

One of the hardiest things I have found is learning who is who. There seems like a never ending list of modders out there with more getting added each day. And even between here and the other Skyrim sites it's hard to tell who one should be looking at for. This is before factoring in that a lot of these mods are ported over from other games like Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3 and alike.

I am not just on about who people think the best modder is, but people who put Document and screen picture folders into their mods, and have an FOF file if needed. I think I did what most people do when they first come over a site like the Nexus site. Shiny object syndrome took over and I down loaded lots of mods. I started playing this game on the 31^th October 2012 and as yet this is the first install of the game. One look in my data folder tells me this was a bad idea.

At the end of the day best practice it would seem is what is at the heart of the TES Alliance philosophy. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall was published in 1996, and here we are 17 years later and I think my data folder still looks the same. (sort of)

Not sure if I have a point or just voicing what my mind is thinking. But if modding as it seems will only keep growing, best practice could save people a lot of time and trouble in not breaking their game.

So is there a list of people who use best practice, or is this something one learns over time?

It's my Data folder so does that mean I should be repacking all the mods that don't have these files?

Other EXE files in skyrim game folder, sure I had been told that this was never a good thing to do, yet some mods have this, is this right. Or should they be moved?

BOSS tells me that things need cleaning, what's the etiquette with these, if I was a modder and I got 100s of mails telling me BOSS doesn't like my mod, that would not be a good day.

Any ideas?

and i didn't see the Please Read Before Posting. Sorry

Edited January 14, 2013 by lonewolfe10

[WillieSea]

Everybody works different, so trying to tell people how you do something may not be listened to. After all, we know whats best for us, right?!!

All kidding aside, I am one of those 'freakish' game players who only has one mod made by somebody else in their load order. This is not to say I don't have any mods, all the mods I do have are DLC or made by myself for my own use.

For one thing, before I install anyone elses mod, I give it the 'stink eye' look over. All items should be in single folders (not spread all over the DATA folder), there should be no dirty edits going on, and it has to fit a 'need' that I have that I figure I will actually use (I don't go for the 'oh shiney' syndrome, I have been doing this for 10 years now since Morrowind came out. BTW, my Morrowind game folders are a mess, that is where I learned my lesson.) But, as I said, I am one of those freakish game players.

As you could guess, the methods I use are not for everyone, since it implies you know your way around the CK, you know how mods work and how they may conflict with each other just by looking at the objects in the mod files and your a whole lot of OCD, that sort of stuff.

As for new 'clothing and armors', I do download them, but I extract the meshes and textures and add them all to my own 'clothing mod'. (One mod for all that cool clothing.)

But yeah, I think you learn for yourself what works and what does not. I actually find I download very few mods and I troll the Nexus a lot.

[DarkRider]

Anyone who portends to know the "best way" when it comes to modifying your game really just means, the best way for them.

Folks will tell you tools like Wrye Bash and BOSS are essential for proper mod management but there are a whole slew of folks who have no need of such things, WillieSea and myself are two examples. I prefer to mod my game myself, I don't use a lot of outside mods, those I do use I modify, clean, tweak to my taste.If you know how things work, there's nothing wrong with manually handling your install.

There are a lot of options out there, the 'best' thing to do is read up on the pros/cons and make choices that work best for you personally. You don't HAVE to do X, Y, and Z to have a successful modification, but if you're going to use a lot of mods there are tools out there to help you.

As for best practices in modding, there are certainly some popularly accepted practices like cleaning out dirty edits, including documentation, stating usage permissions etc that most folks would agree are the standards of what we do as release modders. There is of course a subset who disagree with the popular vote, that's their right. As a mod user, you likely have an idea which practices have made it easiest for you, that'd be a good place to start developing your own view of best practices for your mods.

[Tigersong]

I know my pet peeve is modders who name their readme simply "Readme". That leads to Windows pestering me to give each file a different name, when the author could've spared me that.

[DarkRider]

The readme argument has existed since modding began I think. As a noob watching my 'elders' squabble about it made an impression; I like to include the title_readme for each of my mods.

[WillieSea]

"elders"

My readme always has the name of the mod with it. Not that anybody ever reads it anyway, but its there for the few who do.

(that argument may be even older than the name of the readme...)

Edited January 15, 2013 by WillieSea

[DarkRider]

True that

[Khettienna]

*on the other hand*

There are some people perfectly aware of what they are doing who do use various tools and mod managers to save time and trouble. Using a mod manager properly makes installing and uninstalling and ordering trivial, so you can try out new mods without disrupting your existing setup or getting stuck with things you don't like. Of course, if you only like your own mods, it's true that these are probably a waste of time.

My opinion:

1) Yes, you SHOULD repackage mods to be used by your mod manager if they don't already come that way. Most of them do, so this shouldn't take too much time. And yes, you SHOULD copy the mod description to a text file and save it with the mod if the author didn't provide a readme and the mod isn't self-explanatory. This is for your own sake, of course, so if you don't think you need to do it, don't.

2) No, .exe files should not be in your Data folder. If a mod came with an .exe, you were probably meant to run that .exe to install the mod, not install the .exe itself to your Data folder. Check the documentation for that particular mod. And - this should go without saying - scan the .exe with your anti-virus before running it.

3) Many mod authors are still fairly new to the game, having just joined us since Skyrim, and don't know about mod cleaning. There are also some old hands who know about mod cleaning, but think for whatever reason that their mods are above cleaning, or that their mods don't need cleaning because they work fine in their own games where they have no conflicting mods installed. You should notify them about dirty edits, however do check their mod comments to see if others have already done so first. Some unbalanced individuals will decide your feedback is insulting even if you merely stated the facts of the TES5Edit report, so be prepared for that, but you are doing it for the good of the community as long as you are genuinely trying to be respectful about it.

4) If you can't remember what a mod does, just uninstall it and be done with it. You're not going to have fun if you have more stuff installed than you can keep up with, mentally, and if you over-junk your install, you won't have room to try new things. And always try new things! That's part of the fun. Plus, trying new mods will broaden your creative and technical horizons - like a chef dining out, a writer in a library, or a dancer watching a show, other people's work will teach and inspire you every time. Even if just to show you what *not* to do, that's a good way to learn your own best practices.

[Tigersong]

Oh, and don't make a Bashed Patch from mods that don't conflict. It isn't a mod-merging tool, as I found out through experience.

[lonewolfe10]

Thanks for the heads up. i shall apply said wisdom