Thank you for this I was hoping someone would attempt something like this ! A mod hoarder like myself always needs help in this area!

I use vortex for Skyrim over on the nexus, as it's more user friendly. This mod organizer looks exactly like the other mod organizer for Skyrim, and it's an amazing and ground breaking feature for the sims 3, including the script extender there are some amazing things that can be done for the sims 3. But I never used mod organizer for skyrim, should I look up tutorials on that in order to understand how these functions work for the sims 3? Or would it be too much to ask for a tutorial video for dummies?

Will it be able to compile CC into in-game Collection folders in a future update in the same way that CCMagic does?

Wow! I can't wait to try this out. Thank you

Probably. But not in the near future cause of burnout so I'm taking a break from this project.

Don't feel like making tutorial. But it's pretty straightforward. Supposedly you want to install a mod called 'MODA', and for 'MODA' there are two packages you downloaded called 'PACKAGE1', 'PACKAGE2' (they end in .package extension). So you create a new folder in 'S3MO\Mods' folder called 'MODA', and you place 'PACKAGE1' and 'PACKAGE2' into 'MODA' folder. Hit refresh in the tool and it will show up.

Or alternatively use the install button (second from top left) and select the packages/zip you want to install. Enter a name for the mod in the popup and it's done.

That's fine, and it sounds straight forward enough, but I guess for people who have no familiarity with this program, as an alternative would you recommend tutorials on Mod organizer for Skyrim/Fallout as a good frame of reference?

I'm testing this mod out and I'm trying to work out what the colours and tags mean, i.e the green and red conflicted mods, and the plus and minus sign flags next to the conflicted mods. Which mod replaces the other?

I really appreciate the MO2-style layout, It feels comfy. I imagine some ideas to throw around could be perhaps multithreading and better handling when actions are cancelled.

I want to but don't really know how to add tooltips to the icons when hovering. But just think bottom (high priority number) overwrites top (low priority number) and it will all make sense.

I'm testing this out now, and it looks so promising and really cool! I realized what you meant about the folder mod building but I see you combined things like CAS stuff in the previews. So let's say I have 1000 objects in CAS, can I put that all in one folder and let this program merge it? Because I tried to do that with mods and it didn't work, but when I individually created folders for each mod my game didn't crash. But I'm thinking that's just because of the mods. Maybe I can place all cas items in one folder and all obj in one folder, like with ccmagic. I wanted to check in with you first, though.

It's already multithreading in calculating conflicts and computing MD5 hashes. The only places I know needs some improvements when canceled are the installer and the profiles which it will compute the models (to populate the main list) and recalculate the conflicts (in the background thread) every time even if canceled. Gotta admit I'm just being lazy on this part and doing this as a shortcut so I don't have to check if anything has changed.

Since you're feeling some lag I guess you are migrating your mods? How does it goes?

Don't really recommend putting 1000 packages in a single folder since that will defeat the main purpose of this tool - to organize . The packages in a folder is merged based on the order of the filename (in file explorer and also the right panel). You can see the conflicts and change the order by changing the filename itself.

But the game shouldn't crash even if you place all the mods in a single folder. Actually can you elaborate how it crashes, like in main menu or in game or title screen? Perhaps some of them are conflicting in a way that break the functionality for some of the mod resulting in crash? This tool is not put everything and run, you have to verify conflicts and decide which mods to be the winner. I don't know exactly how CCMagic merge them, probably in some kind of order from the left panel setup so if you're lucky everything is overwriting the way it should. Unless it's doing some kind of magic to determine which packages should win but I highly doubt that.

Personally never had problems with CCMagic because of minimal mods, and I also changed the priorities in its generated resource.cfg every single time it rebuilds for the packages that I know are conflicting.

So this tool is meant for people to sort through gigabytes of cc and just have it organized in a big folder but have individual cc placed in each subfolder? Mod organizer is meant to solve conflicts and make modding easier for troubleshooting and automatically creates your load order based around your personal set of mods. It's not to literally organize your folders, and the program this is built off of doesn't even do that, we have to do that manually so the program can find the conflicts, the purpose of the program defeats itself. Mod organizer for bethesda games unpacks the mods for you, sorts it for you, and prioritizes it for you, you can override those priorities to get certain mods to work together at your discretion.

The game crashed at the main menu. When I placed the mods in individual folders, one by one, the game no longer crashed. I already sorted through the conflicts and removed the conflicting mods at that point.

Also your description said it's comparable to CCmagic which does just that. It makes using mods and cc easier, one of it's main features is to put everything and run. If your utility does not do that, then don't compare this to it. But I don't use ccmagic to merge my mods, I use ccmagic to build collections and merge my CAS and OBJ, those aren't mods in the context of how the sims community uses it. Mods are overrides, scripts, tweaks, etc. I merge my mods with s3pe, while using this program I found more conflicts that delphy's dashboard couldn't find, but if what you're saying is true then this tool is just a better delphy's dashboard, and I would update the description to make things a little more clear.

And to note, I didn't place 1000 mods in one folder then run your program. I already have an organized mod folder and placed for example "Food mods" into the program. I copy and pasted my already organized mod folders, went through each folder, solved each of the conflicts, ran the build tool. It wasn't until after I took out each mod from each folder, and placed them into individually named folders, still no conflicts, ran the build tool, then I no longer crashed. The most I'll have in a cas or obj folder is 200 objects. I don't put much more than that because it defeats the purpose of my collection folders, I want a minimal catalogue for each themed collection. I was just asking as an example to get a better idea of how to use your program, because CCmagic doesn't registers folders when importing the files into it's program. You have to take the packs or packages out of it's folder, then drop it into it's category then build the program. I've put 13000+ objects into ccmagic at a time, it took 3 minutes to rebuild, I open up my game with zero issues. A conflict is a conflict, if my game crashes it's due to just that, not the amount of files I uploaded into a program designed to merge it.

I don't know where you get the idea of MO/MO2 solve conflicts and sort everything for you. Didn't you have to sort the mods around to change the priorities to make sure loose files from ModB is overwriting ModA, based on the conflict info it provides? This tool is exactly the same but instead of loose files, it does it for packages, so I'm not sure how this program defeat itself. In case it wasn't clear, you can reorder the list in this tool just like MO/MO2, just not for every packages in the folder because its intended use case is to not have many packages in a mod, but rather have everything splitted and organized into sensible folders. Sounds like you're just frustrated because you are advised to to split them into small folders.

MO/MO2 do NOT unpack the mod for you. It unpacks the BSA/BA2 presented in the mod folder into loose files, then it will show you the conflict info of those files and you reorder them. Plus it's not a good idea to unpack them anyway because they are packed for performance especially for Fallout 4. And obviously packages for Sims 3 can't be unpacked.

Did you hit refresh before doing the rebuild? It is needed when doing things in explorer outside of the tool. Because running the refresh is pretty expensive so it's not tracking every single files and refresh automatically.

What I advise is that you have a blank mod (same as separator for MO2 but worse), name it "------------------Food Mods", split the packages into multiple folders, either based on author - "AuthorA Food", "AuthorB Food" or based on food types - "Banana", "Apple", or others. That's how I intend the tool to be used. Sorry if the description wasn't clear enough. And the amount of packages doesn't matter.

The same goes for CAS, create a blank mod separator "---------------------CAS", under it you can have more separator like "----------hair", "---------skin" etc. Under them you can categorize the packages by authors or expansions like how I did it in the screenshots.

Edit: Another example is for NRaas mods. In CCMagic I would dump all NRaas mods into one set. For this tool, you can have a blank mod called "---------------NRaas" as the category, underneath it you can have folders like "Master controller" with its main package and all its modules, "Story Progression" with its main package and all its modules, etc. etc. Then everything will be neatly organized.

This tool looks fantastic so far! Thank you for sharing the solution that works for your setup and helped cure your CC woes. I'll be testing it shortly.

The latest MO/MO2 has LOOT built into it which does sort your load order for you. As far as solving conflicts, it tells you what conflicts, and the loot program adds more detail if you don't want to use the one built into it. But for solving conflicts it tells you why and what is going on, as someone who came from modding off of xbox1 I consider that doing the heavy lifting for you, I had to learn about scripts and how mods work just to figure out the conflicts myself. So yes, I stand by MO/MO2 being a powerful tool that does most of the work.

So now your utility is designed "reorder mods but to not have many packages in a mod, but rather have everything splitted and organized into sensible folders." That's what I thought you said the last time. But were you aware your program didn't do that? That the user had to do that manually? That's what I meant by "defeat itself", you're basically saying "this is a program meant to incentivize you to make more folders".

I'm frustrated by the fact that this is EA and not Bethesda, we don't need more folders. Food mods can go in a food folder. The simming community is about convenience, not more work.

You compared this tool to CCMagic. CCmagic incentivizes you to drag, drop, and play. This tool adds extra steps for some reason? Which again is fine, but when we have questions for a new program you created and you didn't provide much of a guide for I would hope you would understand the confusion and if anything know how to explain things a little better for people who don't create these kinds of programs.

But even then, I wouldn't mind that this is the kind of program I have to create more folders for - as I already did that, LOL.

I just noticed in your screenshot that YOU combined package files into a folder, which I why I asked if that could only be done for CAS and OBJ instead of mods. Since this program borked my game when I did it with mods.

And if merging the mods itself was the problem then why didn't my game continue to crash at the main menu, when I merged them anyway using this program? The only difference was I took each mod out of it's already subcategorized folder and put it into it's own folder. I was hoping you could chime in with some kind of answer other than "I wouldn't have done that and it shouldn't have done that and you're not meant to put more than one package into a folder, kind of, anyway"

Unpack as in: rar. zip files. As in like, the literal mod itself compressed into that file. You can drag and drop the file into the program and it unpacks it. You can also download it directly through the nexus and it does the same thing.

So to be clear here, you have to place each individual mod into it's own folder then place those folders into this programs mods folder. This program will then find conflicts, we as the user solve those conflicts(either by deleting the conflict mods or letting one mod take priority over the other), and we can then merge those package files that we had to place into folders, into one file.

That the gist?

Cool. So my question previously was, I noticed you put more than one package file into one folder. How often can we do that and would you only suggest us doing that for CAS and OBJ?

I assumed we hit refresh every time we change anything in this programs mods folder, so yes I did hit refresh.

I did create a blank file, but I didn't try separating the mods like that, I'll definitely try again.

And ok, so "the amount of packages doesn't matter." good to know! That's the base of what I was asking, thank you for answering! I will have to figure out what went wrong when I combined my mods the way I did last time. Thank you for this utility. I will continue to test and jiggle with it, I will try your suggestions. I still stand by this program being really cool, I recognize I am learning how to use this tool and one of the first of the 60+ people learning as we go along. As someone who has been using CCmagic for 5 years there was some hiccups, but if it counts, I couldn't wait to get out of work and try out your program. And AGAIN, I do not mind that I will have to create more folders, like with MO/MO2 it also creates mods like that, now I'm more of a vortex user myself but the concept stays the same it's just in prettier colors. :lovestruc

Not really sure what's causing the crash. Could be a bug or something which if you can find the cause and replicate, I can fix. During development, my faulty merge doesn't cause crash, it can't even get into the main menu, just a constant black screen.

Have you tried using the installer? It will automatically copy the packages into a folder you name in the installer popup. Also not sure if you are aware, you can double click the mod to see the conflict info, there you see what resource keys are conflicting, and decide who should win. Then you can double click the packages to see the resources inside. There are no way to solve conflicts by merging like bashed patch because of how it works, maybe it's possible for xml tuning files. To be honest, I know nothing about creating mods for the game so what I'm saying might be just garbage. Essentially packages are like BSA/BA2 but you can't unpack them so they are conflicting anyway.

Edit: Vortex will never beat MO2!! (Even though the creator of Vortex created MO) MO2 ftw!!

Edit2: For my tool, the folders are just there for priorities. The tool basically fetch all the packages into a giant list based on the priorities, like: ModZ (priority: 1) -> Package1 -> Package2, ModA(priority: 2) -> Package1 -> Package2 etc. and then build them in the order (Actually it build them in reverse so it can skip conflicting stuffs resulting in overall smaller size).

Edit3: Also, how is the build time compared to CCMagic?

I did all of those things, but through this clarification the ctd was def caused by something on my end in my folders. But I created the individual folders like you said and that fixed it, plus everything felt lighter after going through all those conflicts that even Delphy couldn't catch.

So I can see now why you compared this to CCmagic and Delphy's dashboard, it's basically 2-in-1. I take back my original claim, that is a more convenient tool for the sims 3, it just works a little differently than both.

Also, LOL, I knew you were going to drag me for using vortex and thanks for forcing me to relearn MO2 this is a love/hate relationship

Edit: I just ran my CAS hair folders (separated by: Afro, AF, AM, and CFPF) around 200 files in 2 folders no more than 100 in 2 others. Only 2 conflicts (delphy read them as duplicates with those files, a common double negative), built it. No crash, worked like a charm. I'll just redo my mods a different way and see what went wrong on my end. Thank you for the clarification and MO for the sims 3!

Edit: Well I'm able to reply to you like it's a discord chat so that tells you right there it's like 10 x faster than any other merging tool out there right now. It took mere seconds for all the mods and CAS hairs. I really like this tool so far and it feels like it's here to stay, I just needed some clarification so again thank you for that!

No, this doesn't replace Delphy's dashboard tool. It is still needed to find corrupted packages, unless I implemented it into the project. But I'm so burnout right now so not in the near future. What's the size of your mods? For me it take average 3.5 seconds to merge ~1.5 GB of mods (ofc it's dependent on CPU). It behaves similarly to copy and pasting files, so it should just be slightly slower than copy and pasting.

Ah! Yes it does. Thank you :D