ED, Please give us a better way to manage mods

[doveman]

At the moment it's a nightmare. Even if I use modman, that makes backups of the files overwritten by any mods I install so if DCS updates, then the backups are obviously of the old files, so if I then uninstall a mod, it will overwrite the new files with the old ones. I'm not sure what would happen if I delete the "ModMan_backups_dont_remove" folder before uninstalling all mods and then reinstall them.

 

What I would suggest is that a folder is designated for user mods, either in Saved Games or the DCS folder, named something like Customise and under that the DCS folders that are used by mods would be mirrored, so depending on the mods installed there would be Customise\Config, Customise\Sounds, etc. Then DCS should look to this folder and if it finds any files, use those instead of the default ones. This way, DCS can update and all the mods will still continue to work without the user having to mess around re-installing them everytime (assuming that the update hasn't made any of them incompatible of course). Obviously the updater should ignore this Customise folder when updating and not move it to a backup folder.

 

We also need a way to manage the mods, so that we can see what we've installed and easily install/uninstall them. Perhaps Modman will do for this if it can be pointed to the Customise folder and not throw a wobbly because it can't see the default files to backup.

 

EDIT: You might be able to get some ideas on how to implement this from Tannin's Mod Organiser for Skyrim, which I understand uses API hooking to create virtual directories on the fly which overwrite/add to the default game files.

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/1334

Edited November 9, 2012 by doveman