Why the mystery? Options

[Renee]

I've hit upon what feels to be a rather sensitive area over at Nexus. I hemmed and hawed whether I should bring up this subject at Nexus, Beth, or here. I'm too new to modding to open up the floor at Nexus mods, and I don't know Beth's modding community very well. So now I'm here.

I find it odd, the lack of information some mod authors put on their pages. When I started at this 2 months ago, I was told by a friend "read the Read Me, always read the Read Me page". And the thing is, this is all good and fine as long as there is a Read Me. Many times there isn't one. Many times, there aren't any instructions at all. This seems rather dangerous to me, as a n00b modder.

The issue I've found happened with the Coolsims Hair Pack. The "Read Me" says this..

"This is a resource pack for those who know what to do with this."

That's it. That is all. I found this mod last week and it had the exact hairstyle I wanted. My character was all ready to go, all i needed was hair. So I get into the page and realize there's no esp. Hmm. Plenty of meshes, plenty of textures, but no esp. How do I activate this mod, then?

... I'm sure a lot you already know the answer: create your own esp. But from my perspective, I didn't know this yet. I am new at this. Everybody was new at modding at some point, now it's my turn. The thing that has me baffled is why doesn't the author of this mod (or several other mods out there I've seen) simply place this bit of information up front? Why the mystery?

It's a simple sentence. Instead of the vague, exclusionary phrase "This is a resource pack for those who know what do do with this", why not add "you'll need to use the Construction Kit to make your own esp". Or the author could have made a section called "requirements" and then put the words 'Construction Kit' in this section.

Luckily for me, I'm starting to get the hang of this; I'm getting good at figuring stuff out on my own without bothering any of y'all. I realized there's a second Coolsims page made by a different mod creator which only includes an esp. This mod leaves the following information:

"Lots of people complain about the mod because it not work.. it'll solved with this esp
This mod still require Coolsims Hair Pack."

The author of the esp isn't very good with English as we can see, but he or she still manages to make it sound like all you'll need to do is unzip this esp, place it in the Data folder, and you're done. Not so. When l unzipped the esp, I wound up with a file called Coolsims627.esp. I installed this and at first I could see (during character creation) that the game is trying to put some hairstyles in my game, but they weren't showing up. I threw a question up in my Crisis thread, but before I started using the instructions SubRosa gave me, I decided to see what would happen if I renamed the esp. Revmoed the 627 so it's now called Coolsims.esp and voila! The mod works.

There it is again. Why the mystery? Why wouldn't the author of the esp simply say "you'll need to rename the esp once it's installed in your Data folder." It really is that simple. It boggles me. If I ever get confident enough to make my own mods (and also publish them) you can bet my ReadMes will be incredibly detailed. Step by step. There will be no half-baked blueprints. I mean, c'mon.

Is it because some modders think they are 'too cool' for us n00bs? Is it because they only want to see their creations being used by those who they consider to be within their circle of friends? Why publish the mod publicly, then?

I open the floor for discussion. Thank you.

This post has been edited by Renee Gade IV: Mar 25 2014, 04:42 PM

[SubRosa]

Now that you included links, I am downloading them both to actually look at them. The first is just the meshes and textures. So it is indeed a resource pack, that will not work unless you create your own .esp file for it. As I suspected, it was probably released that way for people who would integrate it into an existing pack of multiple hair mods, or into a new race mod.

I see the second one is just an .esp that adds the hairs to the game, creating a new hair entry for each, and adding them to the races. That will work no matter what the name. I think what may have happened is that after you renamed it, it changed its position in your load order. Two mods that alter the same records (in this case the Race records) will not both work. Only the one that loads last will work. So if you had another mod that alters the races in any way loading after Coolsims, then Coolsims would not have worked. OTOH, if Coolsims is now loading last, something else might be getting preempted by it now.

One of the reasons that people release hair mods as resources (i.e. just the meshes and textures), is that otherwise if you had say Corean Hair, you would not be able to use Ren's Hair, as they both change the Race records. You have to combine them both into a single mod with one .esp.

Ok, just tried installing it, with the 627 still in the name. What I noticed is that even with Coolsims loading last, when I took an existing character and used Showracemenu I did not see the new Coolsims hair styles. I still saw Corean and Ren's, which load earler in the order. But those were also the hairstyles I created the character with to start. But when I created a new character from scratch, I had all the new Coolsims hairstyles, and no Corean or Ren's - which is as expected.

I think this is just a 'feature' of the game. I have seen similar things before when disabling or renaming hair mods. Sometimes an old character that is using a hair style from a mod that is no longer active, still has the hair style. Unless I try to use Showracemenu to open the character. Then it usually just CTDs the game. Sometimes the game 'remembers' the hair you had, even without the .esp. So I think because of that Coolsims was not showing up for me with an existing character.

Renee, did you by chance start a new character after you renamed the .esp file? That might have been the fix.

Now what really drives me nuts are the people who post mods with no readme files at all. Or a Readme file that does not have the mod's name in it, but rather just Readme.txt. The same as everyone else's, so it overwrites the last one. Or people whose readme file says "Adds Sword of Doom to the game." and that is it. No mention of where to get it, or even what it does. I guess they figure if we play the game long enough, we will find it eventually.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Mar 25 2014, 10:44 PM