Fractal Softworks Forum

Starsector => Announcements => Topic started by: LazyWizard on February 22, 2019, 07:07:36 PM

Title: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: LazyWizard on February 22, 2019, 07:07:36 PM
As some of you may already be aware, Nexus Mods recently added a dedicated Starsector section (https://www.nexusmods.com/starsector) to their website, and as of last week their Vortex client now natively supports Starsector (https://www.nexusmods.com/news/13936).

For those who've never used Vortex before, it's a generic mod manager that allows you to download and install mods directly from the Nexus website, handles updating mods for you, and will warn you if you're missing dependencies. You can even set up multiple mod profiles and quickly switch between them*, for those who like to mix vanilla saves with heavily modded playthroughs.

You can grab Vortex here (https://www.nexusmods.com/about/vortex/), and download mods for it here (https://www.nexusmods.com/starsector). This should make using mods easier for our newer players, and hopefully the Nexus integration will help introduce Starsector to a wider audience.


*Mod profiles are an experimental feature and must be enabled in Vortex's settings.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: nathanebht on February 22, 2019, 11:05:15 PM
Cool! Looks like most of the mods are on Nexus already too.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Midnight Kitsune on February 23, 2019, 04:30:02 PM
Wll the mods be enabled In the launcher if we enaenable temail in Vortex or will we still need to check the boxes?
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: TimeDiver on February 23, 2019, 04:40:57 PM
Considering that (for the Windows version, anyways) Starsector's game/mod settings are stored within the Registry... does Vortex have permissions to alter the Registry in that manner?

I dunno. Haven't gotten around to actually trying out Vortex yet. Took a near-year long hiatus away from any and all Nexus-based modding, and am severely behind the times.

Doesn't help that I'm an utter control freak when it comes to my PC, and anything that could conceivably end up being installed on it; so I manually installed mods when possible.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: LazyWizard on February 23, 2019, 04:48:28 PM
Wll the mods be enabled In the launcher if we enaenable temail in Vortex or will we still need to check the boxes?

You will still need to enable any mods added through Vortex in the Starsector launcher. The Vortex API includes bindings to read from the registry but not to write to it, so I couldn't have it enable them for you automatically.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Shrugger on February 23, 2019, 11:16:13 PM
Generally: Great, and I'd very much like to make use of this!

Minor questions:
Can we manually add non-Vortex and/or non-Nexus mods to Vortex?

Because else I predict a holy mess of conflicts, having to install everthing manually after all, and possibly having to check nexus and the forums simultaneously in order to always get up-to-date mods.

Also, does the Version checker work with Nexus mods?
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: LazyWizard on February 23, 2019, 11:34:37 PM
Can we manually add non-Vortex and/or non-Nexus mods to Vortex?

Because else I predict a holy mess of conflicts, having to install everthing manually after all, and possibly having to check nexus and the forums simultaneously in order to always get up-to-date mods.

You can! Just drag the zip over the box at the bottom of the Mods page.
Spoiler
(https://i.imgur.com/LCBrkoL.png)
[close]

You won't be notified of mod updates through Vortex if you installed it manually, so you may want to keep Version Checker around if you're mixing and matching Nexus and forum downloads.


Quote
Also, does the Version checker work with Nexus mods?

Currently it will direct you to the forum thread rather than the Nexus page, but it will soon support both. :)

For any modders who want to add the field to your .version file early, it'll be called "modNexusId", and the value should be the number at the end of the Nexus URL (for example, Nexerelin's (https://www.nexusmods.com/starsector/mods/28) would be 28). This field will be optional, of course.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Tartiflette on February 24, 2019, 12:51:29 AM
Mod profiles is really something I wish the game would support, especially with the amount of QoL and libraries mods we have sprinkled among content mods. Or at least a taller launcher and a separate window for utilities.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Alex on February 24, 2019, 12:26:45 PM
You will still need to enable any mods added through Vortex in the Starsector launcher. The Vortex API includes bindings to read from the registry but not to write to it, so I couldn't have it enable them for you automatically.

Hmm - if I were to add an alternate way of enabling mods (such as, say, a json file somewhere in the mods folder), would that help matters? If not - is there something that would?
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: LazyWizard on February 24, 2019, 01:14:45 PM
A json would be ideal. :)
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: JadedTarget on February 24, 2019, 01:27:19 PM
I personally use a few installs of Starsector with different mod groupings.  So an Enable All next to the Clear button would be nice for that reason.  Might be useful after switching Vortex profiles too?  I'm sticking with this method over using Vortex for now though, since the more direct control over mod installation, edits, and updates seems more convenient to me.  Enabling mods and switching profiles takes my PC ages so either I'm weird or my PC is just junk.

Also, there's at least one SS mod on Nexus that requires GraphicsLib and that's not on the Nexus yet.  Had to throw it into Vortex manually anyway.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Alex on February 24, 2019, 03:51:32 PM
A json would be ideal. :)

Done!

mods/enabled_mods.json, looking like this:

{"enabledMods": [
  "lw_console",
  "lw_lazylib"
]}
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Originem on February 24, 2019, 11:15:03 PM
How to deal with updates which will break the current save?
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Alex on February 25, 2019, 09:12:59 AM
I don't know if there's any way on the mod-side to flag it as save-breaking and have Vortex do something intelligent, but as I understand it, you can tell it not to auto-update mods, which - again, if my understanding is correct - would be the general way to go.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Shrugger on February 25, 2019, 10:50:14 AM
Great Work, Wizard and Alex.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: zlelmefs on August 30, 2019, 04:24:03 PM
Nexus is a bad site that doesn't deserve support. Took over mod logistics ecosystem by acquisition, seeks to centralise control over as much of the mod scene as they can, and now holds mods hostage behind registration and upsells and other attempts to extract money from users while trying to remove all control or choice from the same. Their attitude makes their mod manager totally untrustworthy, too, however well it might work. It's designed to let them, not you, decide what you can download or install, or even let them ban you from using mods at all. Creepy creepy creepy. No way to justify it.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Vayra on August 30, 2019, 08:09:42 PM
sorry
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: DaddyO on September 02, 2019, 08:54:21 AM
Vortex looks good but I would prefer not to have to pay to use their product.  Plenty other options and though this looks really nice I am not for handing over all my mod installs to a 3rd party app for money.  Thanks for the help though.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Midnight Kitsune on September 04, 2019, 07:48:21 PM
Vortex looks good but I would prefer not to have to pay to use their product.  Plenty other options and though this looks really nice I am not for handing over all my mod installs to a 3rd party app for money.  Thanks for the help though.
Ummmm, what? You don't need to pay a dime to sign up for Nexus nor use the Vortex launcher
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Wispborne on October 13, 2020, 10:10:03 AM
(https://i.imgur.com/K6tEwTf.png)

I have done some work on the Vortex extension for Starsector that allows it to read from mod_info.json.
Mods that are installed manually (not from NexusMods) will now display their version and author in Vortex, with this extension update.

Only newly installed mods will have the additional info displayed.

It is available from within the Extensions section of Vortex, named "Starsector Support" version 1.1.
Or you can see it here, but it still needs to be installed via Vortex: https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/179

Quote
Includes support for mod version and author(s) for mods installed from file, rather than from NexusMods.

This extension will read mod_info.json, stripping out comments that use the '#' sign, and extract the mod version and mod author(s) from the file, allowing Vortex to display this useful information, which is normally limited only to mods that are downloaded from NexusMods.

The displayed mod name will be unchanged (if downloaded from NexusMods) or the name of the mod's archive (if installed manually).
This is due to some mod authors releasing multiple iterations of a mod with
the same version, with the only difference being in the filename.
For example, "ModName-3.0.0-beta-1.zip" and "ModName-3.0.0-beta-2.zip" often both have a version of 3.0.0. Since the beta number is important information, it should not be replaced by the name in the mod_info.json file, which may simply be "Mod Name".

Also:
When submitting this to NexusMods, they mentioned that they are iteratively removing baked-in, official Vortex support of less-popular games in favor of user-managed extensions.
What this means is that, most likely, Starsector will not be supported out of the box by Vortex (nothing changes on the NexusMods site), but support can be easily added by using the in-app extension browser to find and enable a (the) Starsector extension.

The purpose is for them to spend less dev time verifying support for less-popular games, which also means less turnaround time between updating an extension and the changes going live.

tldr; The Starsector support in Vortex is going to switch to an user mod for Vortex, rather than having the NexusMods team seal of quality.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Lilly112 on November 15, 2020, 11:44:24 AM
So.....has something happened? Nexus has zero Starsector mods on it...
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Wispborne on November 15, 2020, 02:10:26 PM
I don't see any change. There's a good subset of the forums mods on there at https://www.nexusmods.com/starsector
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Lilly112 on November 16, 2020, 09:10:34 AM
Ahh, yea. Just a stupid layout design. I have found them now.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Lemuria on November 20, 2022, 02:40:54 AM
Vortex looks good but I would prefer not to have to pay to use their product.  Plenty other options and though this looks really nice I am not for handing over all my mod installs to a 3rd party app for money.  Thanks for the help though.

Maybe Starsector would be better off with its own community-maintained **open-source** package manager for managing mods. That way, the Starsector modding community remains self-sufficient and we won't have to rely on a third party.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Shaggygoblin on January 13, 2023, 06:38:20 AM
Vortex looks good but I would prefer not to have to pay to use their product.  Plenty other options and though this looks really nice I am not for handing over all my mod installs to a 3rd party app for money.  Thanks for the help though.

Maybe Starsector would be better off with its own community-maintained **open-source** package manager for managing mods. That way, the Starsector modding community remains self-sufficient and we won't have to rely on a third party.

Something like CKAN for Kerbal Space Program.  +1
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Toxo on April 19, 2023, 09:40:03 AM
Maybe Starsector would be better off with its own community-maintained **open-source** package manager for managing mods. That way, the Starsector modding community remains self-sufficient and we won't have to rely on a third party.

This is the way.
Nexus is dodgy as f***. Whoever is interested in the controversy around their anti-user practices, a quick google search will bring it up.
Avoid that site, and association with them, at all costs.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: Ragatokk on February 16, 2024, 04:12:04 AM
I kind of agree with the guys that don't like nexus, the censorship and people not being able to take their mods off the platform is very scummy.
They just yoink the rights to the mods that they have not helped develop at all.

At the same time I think the convenience is pretty decent, am paying for their increased downloads since installing modpacks for skyrim is too much to do manually.

It's also nice to be able to search for things, but I honestly think that part is rather lacking, think even the steam workshop is better when it comes to that.
Title: Re: Starsector is now on the Nexus
Post by: ceem0 on February 19, 2024, 09:23:28 AM
Awesome work.  I understand the sketch nature of Nexus, and I get that a Steam release is problematic from their side of the business cut and the tech cruft on top, but any place where there's a central repository helps out.