New Mod Install Tool - feedback request from Modders and Players

ALIEN

Hello fellow adventurers,

this time there won't be any poll. Instead, I need you to tell me about everything related to installing mods via Install Tool.

Players:
please tell me what you don't like about BWS (yep, GUI sucks) what should be improved and what is missing. Don't write something like "same as BWS, only better", focus on most annoying or important things.

Modders:
which features related to mod presentation/configuration/maintaining new Install Tool should have?

Every feedback will be read and take into consideration but not everything is possible

You can also come to Discord Channel https://discord.gg/xbMzNAp and have discussion

EDIT: New, working Discord invite

Raduziel

As a modder:

BWS should skip the file size check. It makes us keep updating our files to avoid a message that would worrie the player (I remember when installing With BWS lots of mods popping up the message "file is size X but documented file size is Y, what you wanna do?" something like that).

As a player:

Let us be able to previous determine when the tool will be paused to install mods that are not embraced by it.

One of the reasons why I rarely use BWS is because of that. I have to keep my eyes on the log to know where the installation process is.

Maybe I'm misusing BWS, but from the top of my head that's what I would like to see improved.

AstroBryGuy

The tool should encourage players to actively select the mods they want to install, rather than getting a truckload by default.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Anprionsa

• Links to readmes! Each mod should have a link to the mod description from their own page. Sometimes you need to know when you're going through each mod what works and what doesn't work for each install. The link could be in the description as "read more here..."
  
• Any way to work with EE Install Tool? It's been kept relatively up to date (even having gone back in the forums to read the broo haha about it all and the person behind it, doesn't matter too much to me) and I know it seems anathema, but combining resources seems like a better thought. So perhaps an olive branch?
  
• Not something for BWS per se, but having a forum post for peoples installs? Have a place where people kind of explain what their install is and what they like about it, links to the download so people can have a relatively pain free install, that isn't just the regular one that is "recommended".
  
• Some modders don't actively look to be put into the BWS install. But I'm sure there can be some outreach, either by you or someone else (volunteers?), that can get new mods into the tool. More experimentation isn't too bad as long as it's clearly marked. Have a thread particularly for those installs so modders can check up on it and see (if they want to) if it's going well, if it works well with other mods, etc...
  
• Perhaps it's time to actively push for this to be an EE install tool only? Perhaps going further to actively support EET installs as the default? Just cuts out a lot of potential issues with legacy mods or fractured BGEE and BG2EE support, putting into ONE install and mod platform? Just a thought, many won't agree I'm sure.
  
• I'm sure you all saw this coming. But GITHUB! Work with each modder that has a mod to move it to GitHub (or any other Git repository).
  
• Can I go a step farther? Have BWS have forked repositories of all the mods that are in it's "database" so that the install can be relatively stable? When there is an update the modder could push it to the BWS install, the BWS team checks to make sure it's stable, etc... Just another possibility (maybe too much work, not sure).
  
• I'm sure I'll think of more.
  

ThacoBell

-No preselected mods. I want to choose what I want to add.
-It needs to read my mod folder. I keep all the mods I like to use on my computer. I would love a tool that I could just point to the directory, and install everything it finds there.
-Don't rely on internet links. Extension of above point.
-Don't be slow. Everytime I hear about BWS, someone mentions that its takes an hour or two to install. Wat. An easy installer tool should not be SLOWER than installer everything manually.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Deltharis

subtledoctor said:

Anprionsa said:

Any way to work with EE Install Tool? It's been kept relatively up to date (even having gone back in the forums to read the broo haha about it all and the person behind it, doesn't matter too much to me) and I know it seems anathema, but combining resources seems like a better thought.

I don't see the point. My qualms about platform-dependence aside, I am confident that whatever AL|EN is cooking up is going to be great and will render that other tool useless.

I mean, EE tool is a fork of BWS. The backbone of the system - a database of mods and their ordering - is the exact same (though I suppose EE Tool got rid of mods that don't work for EEs). That is the greatest strength of BWS (and EE tool), and that part of community is now fragmented. I don't have a ready solution, but having two separate databases that don't synchronise is going to hurt us one day.

AstroBryGuy

Anprionsa said:

Can I go a step farther? Have BWS have forked repositories of all the mods that are in it's "database" so that the install can be relatively stable? When there is an update the modder could push it to the BWS install, the BWS team checks to make sure it's stable, etc... Just another possibility (maybe too much work, not sure).

The author has to make a pull request to update the BWS copy of the author's own mod? That would make BWS a gatekeeper to approve mod updates (and basically hijack a mod from its author if the BWS team disapproves of said updates). No thanks.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

hackinslash

@Raduziel Once you select Mods in BWS you can go up to options, sort in install order and just scroll down and right click a mod and it'll allow you to pause BWS. That's how I get mods currently not on the BWS list into my installs.

Arthas

Every time I see a poster under 150 posts that talks about EE install tool or pushing EE agenda, I feel like betting behind these monitors hides Roxanne

Anprionsa

@Arthas

The only posters here that have said that are myself and @hackinslash. That's a pretty narrow view to take. Nor is it applicable to this topic. This is about what @ALIEN has asked for, which if to believed (and I do), is going to be pretty cool.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

TheArtisan

Anprionsa said:

• Any way to work with EE Install Tool? It's been kept relatively up to date (even having gone back in the forums to read the broo haha about it all and the person behind it, doesn't matter too much to me) and I know it seems anathema, but combining resources seems like a better thought. So perhaps an olive branch?
  

Roxanne seems opposed to working with others under any circumstance. She has had multiple incidents of doing things to other peoples' work without their input or knowledge. She is continuing to do so right now with her BWS-knockoff.

Not something for BWS per se, but having a forum post for peoples installs? Have a place where people kind of explain what their install is and what they like about it, links to the download so people can have a relatively pain free install, that isn't just the regular one that is "recommended".

No "recommended" BS. Period. People need to stop being so damn lazy and put in the effort of actually doing some research into what the hell they're installing.

Some modders don't actively look to be put into the BWS install. But I'm sure there can be some outreach, either by you or someone else (volunteers?), that can get new mods into the tool. More experimentation isn't too bad as long as it's clearly marked. Have a thread particularly for those installs so modders can check up on it and see (if they want to) if it's going well, if it works well with other mods, etc...

With or without the mod creator's input first? Because if it's the latter, hell to the no. If it's the former, might as well ask them if they want to do it themselves.

Perhaps it's time to actively push for this to be an EE install tool only? Perhaps going further to actively support EET installs as the default? Just cuts out a lot of potential issues with legacy mods or fractured BGEE and BG2EE support, putting into ONE install and mod platform? Just a thought, many won't agree I'm sure.

EET should never be the standard. Not everyone plays EET. I don't even necessarily recommend EET to others given that I still encounter issues that I do not find in the standalone games.

I'm sure you all saw this coming. But GITHUB! Work with each modder that has a mod to move it to GitHub (or any other Git repository).

If a modder wanted their stuff on github, they would've done it already. This is hardly a new or obscure idea.

Can I go a step farther? Have BWS have forked repositories of all the mods that are in it's "database" so that the install can be relatively stable? When there is an update the modder could push it to the BWS install, the BWS team checks to make sure it's stable, etc... Just another possibility (maybe too much work, not sure).

Oh no. No, no no no no. You did not just suggest this. I assure you if this concept somehow came to pass I will not allow my mods to have anything to do with said install tool, ever. If I'm concerned about my mod's stability, I will check and confirm it myself. I do not want other people modifying my work under any circumstance, even if it is to 'fix' it.

CamDawg

Arthas said:

Every time I see a poster under 150 posts that talks about EE install tool or pushing EE agenda, I feel like betting behind these monitors hides Roxanne

While I understand the--sadly, justified--suspicion, @hackinslash has been a longtime user here and at G3. Since I have magic powers at both places, I can confirm that (s)he is not Roxanne.

Anprionsa said:

Perhaps it's time to actively push for this to be an EE install tool only? Perhaps going further to actively support EET installs as the default? Just cuts out a lot of potential issues with legacy mods or fractured BGEE and BG2EE support, putting into ONE install and mod platform? Just a thought, many won't agree I'm sure.

I'm going to go a little out of order, because I think the response here will bear on a lot of what is to follow.

I do not want to undersell the technical accomplishments of @ALIEN and the other BW(S|P|FP)? contributors. However the fundamental source of work (and associated problems) for a project of this scope is sorting out mod conflicts, dependencies, and other wonk that grows exponentially with every new component of every mod. @ALIEN has been tirelessly concocting and evangelizing--with various degrees of pushback from modders--on methods within WeiDU itself to try and semi-automate some of the necessary conflict resolution, but it's going to remain The Problem with any such tool.

By comparison targeting a specific game platform, while technically difficult, is a problem that really needs to be solved once. I hope I haven't glossed over or cocked that up too badly @ALIEN; feel free to sort me out as necessary.

And that's setting aside those luddites, like myself, who continue to insist that BG, BG2, IWD, PsT, and IWD2 are all separate games with different strengths and weaknesses. Uniting them means they lose a little bit of their identity*, and I say that in full recognition of the amazing technical feats that @swit (K4thos) has already accomplished.

Anprionsa said:

Links to readmes! Each mod should have a link to the mod description from their own page. Sometimes you need to know when you're going through each mod what works and what doesn't work for each install. The link could be in the description as "read more here..."

Yes. There's a subset of us that spend more time than we care to admit on documentation, and the readme is the most important bit--especially when it comes to compatibility.

Anprionsa said:

Any way to work with EE Install Tool? It's been kept relatively up to date (even having gone back in the forums to read the broo haha about it all and the person behind it, doesn't matter too much to me) and I know it seems anathema, but combining resources seems like a better thought. So perhaps an olive branch?

The olive branch has been held out throughout the aforementioned brouhaha, and remains extended. She's still welcome here and at G3. I've always admired Roxanne's work ethic and how much time she was willing to help players, and the community benefits if she remains active and engaged.

Anprionsa said:

I'm sure you all saw this coming. But GITHUB! Work with each modder that has a mod to move it to GitHub (or any other Git repository).

The biggest thing keeping G3 from going full Github is that folks are just gone. Most modders have ridden off into the sunset, never to return, and that's not a trend that's going to reverse itself any time soon.

Anprionsa said:

Can I go a step farther? Have BWS have forked repositories of all the mods that are in it's "database" so that the install can be relatively stable? When there is an update the modder could push it to the BWS install, the BWS team checks to make sure it's stable, etc... Just another possibility (maybe too much work, not sure).

I'm sorry to just pile on at this point but this really is a phenomenally poor idea.

subtledoctor said:

1) For Heaven's sake, don't call it "the install tool." Give it a name. What it really does is create an automated Weidu install script, right? It's not actually installing anything. So maybe give it a name that mentions and honors Weidu. (I called my tool "Weidu Launcher" which is nicely literal but still almost as bad as "install tool" )

If tools such as "WeiDU" and "DLTCEP" can catch on, then any name will work as long as the functionality is there. For the record, my vote's for DWD (DoWeiDU) because it would be fun to say, plus we could start threads entitles "Why DoWeiDU?" as part of the evangelizing.

That, or Tyler Perry's WeiDU Install Tool featuring Tyler Perry.

subtledoctor said:

2) Forget the collections of "recommended/tactical/expert" etc. groupings. They have always been a terrible idea.

Agreed. Plus it may mean players discover mod forums and learn that not only can they report bugs, but they can even suggest features and new ideas to the authors.

subtledoctor said:

3) Don't ask modders to do more work to be included than just making a their mod.

Agreed, but not for the reasons you suggest. Mods without active support are numerous, so any tool that relies on changes within a mod itself are not going to go well. That goes double if it's ongoing changes instead of a one-off change.

subtledoctor said:

ThacoBell said:

- Don't rely on internet links. It needs to read my mod folder. I keep all the mods I like to use on my computer. I would love a tool that I could just point to the directory, and install everything it finds there.

This. Just find every .tp2 file in the player's game folder, parse them for a list of components, and apply whatever metadata for order and conflicts. Forget downloading stuff. Or offer it as a bonus, but don't make it a necessary part of the program.

An 'offline' mode would be very welcome.

* Before one of young'uns point out that I've worked on the majority of said projects: I know, I know.

Anprionsa

@Artemius_I

Yeah I wasn't here during that whole ordeal as I have come off and on during these forums over the years and still don't really know what occurred.

Agreed, which is what I was trying to say kind of. Just having a list of of different installs that people may have with the mods and why they like them, that's all I was trying to say.

I guess what I was trying to say is that I wanted as many mods as possible in the install and was just asking if it was possible to have @ALIEN or anyone else just reach out and ask and if possible get as many as could be possible to have.

I guess I just like standards? Like as you can tell by my other posts I just like things in one place haha. I kinda wish that Beamdog would have had it all together, but that's just a personal opinion obviously.

You can see my response to standards, it's just a personal preference. I guess my idea was to just have the tool have stable mod installs, but I apologize if it came off as something crazy.


@CamDawg

I'm very grateful for both you and @ALIEN work regarding these mods. Any idea I have is mostly from a place where I'm trying to help and it may come off as naive.

The readme idea was mostly to have a link within the install tool to something perhaps more indepth.

How long do you wait until you can take a work that someone else did and kind of adopt it? Like seriously? I'm sure it's happened to you quite a bit with people wanting mods that are no longer compatible and old. Does G3 kind of take them over? Are those mods the best to move to GitHub because then they can become "community mods". What do you think?

Yeah not all my ideas are rooted in reality. Some are definitely naive and from a place of idealism I guess. No offense at all for taking aim at poor ideas.

hackinslash

I am not a doppleganger, nor some new account created to spam the boards. Actually went back to a real profile pic of mine to try and show I'm no bot(and have kept same profile pic across here,G3 and SHS). Also I've never pushed EET as the must do install mod.

In this thread I did offer a way to Pause BWS without having to sit waiting for that mod to install.

As for the BWS tool itself? The Mod list is behind the EE tool but I find the links provided by BWS to point towards the correct place they are hosted rather than multiple dropbox links.

I find having recommend/tactical etc does make selecting some mods like SCS a lot easier than manually going through the list and selecting components. I use this as a starting point before I remove a load of mods that I don't want. Go through read-me's, visit Mod forum from a right click on a mod inside BWS. After hours of working out what I want I'll export it somewhere as an ini file that way if an installation stuffs up, I'll start again on a fresh install.

I do appreciate the amount of time over the years to work out the conflicts between mods.

Mods hosted on Git tend to be downloaded everytime you try an install(PPE comes to mind).



I apologise if my Post count isn't too high.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

CamDawg

Anprionsa said:

How long do you wait until you can take a work that someone else did and kind of adopt it? Like seriously? I'm sure it's happened to you quite a bit with people wanting mods that are no longer compatible and old. Does G3 kind of take them over? Are those mods the best to move to GitHub because then they can become "community mods". What do you think?

I had originally written something a lot longer, but realized it was a hot mess of tl;dr. The executive summary is this: There are no 'community mods'. The mod remains the author's, and the fact that someone else may do maintenance or bugfixing does not change that. G3 works well because we've built trust with one another. There is an expectation that the community can come in and make updates when someone is absent. That does not extend to moving to Github, which is something most modders ask you not to do.

MidnightRider00

Just the fact that I always seem to need to re-download everything when I did it minutes ago. There should be an option to ignore the different file sizes or whatever makes it have that behavior.

And I was not even aware that this mod tool was still in use. I thought that Roxanne's mod setup was the current version and this one was discontinued. I went on to research after her mod tool kept giving me failed installations and after one that was successful, I had to reinstall everything again because the high-level ability level up screen was glitched. Very annoying having to do that in the middle of SoA.

I'm currently downloading the mods again...

hackinslash

@ALIEN I have got your tool to make Mod.Ini's but is there a reason I can't pilfer from the EE set-up tool? Naturally I'd make links point to where they are hosted(no dropbox ones).
I ask cause Tweaks Anthology is up to V6 and BWS is still V4. Or should I just keep trying using your tool and learn a little more?

Mantis37

If possible, some support for installs for Android and other platforms as well. It is interesting to do it all step by step again before copying the zipped up files back, but it would be nice to have an automated option.

Niewiem

If it is possible then a bit more info about incompatibilities if you choose mods that have them. In BWS there was mostly only "this is preferred to this". It would be great for me if new tool would actually be something "technical incompatiblity - both mod change same text in files this is preferred" or "plot incompatibility - both mod occur in same time frame - it will make no sense but has no technical issues"
And then give possibility to force taking both if it is only "plot incompatiblity" or some other incompatibility that will not be game breaking

I know that it is a lot of work so this is just a dream of mine
Thank you for all you do for community!

cdx

I personally like that there are different sets of pre-selected mods. It especially helps for the "Well-integrated content". I usually start from Recommended and adjust from there. The green/grey/blue/challenge coding of individual components also helps. Judging by what others say about pre-selected mods, maybe make the default the minimum install (only bug corrections, etc) but do provide the option for Minimum, Recommended, Tactical, these are quite useful at least for some of us. I think it should be very useful for a beginner user, it has certainly been for me.

There is an annoying issue at the moment that causes the biggest downloads to re-download every time. Which for me is about over 1GB of unnecessary repeated download. BG1 original movies, PPE, EET.

I understand why people would want the installer to detect files in a folder but it seems unreasonable development to me unless every download includes metadata for the installer to read. You can't really expect the installer to track dependencies and preferences between different versions of mods (e.g. mod Aver1.12 component XYZ is preferred to mod Bver55.2 component FOO, but Bver56.1 component FOA is preferred to mod Aver1.13 component ZYX; but Aver1.14 XYZ is removed from Aver1.15 and replaced by Bver58.4...). It should only consider the latest version of the mod available. Certainly provide an offline option, but just ignore the file if it isn't the latest version... and offer to download it. So, same as it works now (if you pre-download the files), except for the currently buggy re-download of some latest versions.

I like the links to the readme/forum for the mod, it's very helpful and a bit frustrating when not present. Maybe create a thread on the beamdog forums by default if there is no hyperlink/website available at all for a mod.

Another thing that comes to mind is the Back-up feature for about 500MB. I guess it isn't very intuitive. I've tried using it once or twice but I end up keeping vanilla install folders untouched and just make copies of them for every install (yay for big disk drives), then rename them. Seems like less of a hassle. (EDIT: I also prefer to do a fresh Windows reinstall to using system restore, so maybe that's just me).

ALIEN

Thanks for all feedback, please continue to share ideas/requirements etc but let's skip the 'application name' suggestion

Note: the fact that I didn't address any of the post doesn't meant that I'm not taking this into consideration. But now I need to write more code than forum posts and replies if I want to get anywhere

xscott71x

Failure on the following mods

Arthas

@xscott71x

This is not the right place for that kind of discussion. Either install the mods manually or do not install them at all (and this last option means that you should not use BWS)

xscott71x

@Arthas That's strange, because the button on the bottom; "New Mod Install Tool - feedback request from Modders and Players" takes me right to this thread, which is unbelievably titled -- wait for it -- are you sitting down? "New Mod Install Tool - feedback request from Modders and Players.

ThacoBell

xscott71x said:

@Arthas That's strange, because the button on the bottom; "New Mod Install Tool - feedback request from Modders and Players" takes me right to this thread, which is unbelievably titled -- wait for it -- are you sitting down? "New Mod Install Tool - feedback request from Modders and Players.

Right, @ALIEN is looking for feedback on a NEW tool he is working on. Not BWS.

Niewiem

xscott71x
this is thread you are searching for:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/44476/tool-big-world-setup-bws-mod-manager-for-baldurs-gate-enhanced-edition-trilogy-for-windows/p38