Oblivion Mod Organizer

Description:
========

Oblivion Mod Organizer (OMO) is a small tool I'm working on and added to tesnexus yesterday: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=38277
Right now I consider OMO an alpha version though I've been using it for a couple of weeks now without a problem.
It's purpose is to make organizing Mods easier, as such it competes a bit with wrye bash and obmm but my goal is not to provide an alternative to
those tools but an extension.
What it does is fool the target application (currently oblivion itself, the construction set and obmm have been tested) into seeing a union of several directories as one
data directory, so if you have a directory structure like this:

Oblivion
|-->data
|---->a.esp
|-->mods
|---->bmod
|------>b.esp
|---->cmod
|------>c.esp

what the target application will see is

Oblivion
|-->data
|---->a.esp
|---->b.esp
|---->c.esp

The same of course works for textures, models, ... contained within those folders. Therefore you can organize each mod in its own directory and still use supported applications as you're used to.

Issues:
=====

OMO has only just been released so I haven't been able to identify issues just yet.
However, considering OMO is very low-level (it works as an extremely small virtualization layer above relevant windows API-calls) it's very possible to cause crashes or
fail to work depending on the windows version.
It's also not very efficient right now so with many mods managed by it, slowdowns will probably become noticeable, but this should be able to fix.

Please tell me what you think of the idea of this tool. Is it even useful or is it made obsolete by wrye bash?
And if you try it, please let me know if/how it works for you.

Thanks

Bad idea for your supported directory structure. Oblivion.exe scans everything in the Oblivion folder, not just what's in Data, which is why BAIN stores its packages folder in the next directory up. You might want to move to a different supported folder structure to prevent the directory thrashing this causes.

Other than that, I don't really understand the point, apart from being able to locate resources and plugins that are not in Data and subfolders correctly in the CS. If it only worked for the CS, that would be useful, but working for Oblivion and other utilities doesn't seem to have any purpose... :shrug:

Thanks for the input concerning directory thrashing, I wasn't aware of that. I should be able to fix this without changing the directory structure by making my "mods"-directory invisible to oblivion.

As to the point, well, the main purpose is to allow a nicer directory structure, a simple and quick way to experiment with "installation order" of mods and a simple way to uninstall mods completely. I do realize wrye bash provides similar functionality (and then some) but my approach is different and might have a few advantages.

If your neat tool was available for Morrowind it would be awesome, but since OMO only handle Oblivion I can't see the benefits of your tool. Sorry but I can only concur what wrinklyninja just said.

CSE's 'Set Workspace' does something of that sort.

I released a new version of the tool. It now features a gui and profiles. This allows you to manage a seperate set of active mods per profile and easily switch between them.
Also, the directory thrashing issue should be fixed (though I was never able to reproduce it anyway). As far as oblivion is concerned, the mods-folder (and the new profiles folder) do not exist.

So if say - you have one profile of active mods open - do you see the inactive ones?

If not then how do you accomplish this without directory switching?

You should add support for Morrowind like Leonardo said. I don't know much about Morrowind though so don't take my word but if you ask in that forum they might like it.

@psymon: in the omo-loader you can see active and inactive mods and activate/deactivate them via checkboxes. To obmm, oblivion, the toolset, ... only files from active mods are visible of course.

@poketama: unfortunately I don't own Morrowind and I don't know how much effort it would be to support it. I'll likely release fallout 3 and nv versions, they should be simple to do. Could anyone explain why the tool would be more useful for Morrowind than for Oblivion?

Screenshots of this?

I just posted one on tesnexus

OK so from what I can tell this allows you to shift install order around.

BAIN does that. OBMM does not. FOMM does it and does it on a file by file basis - will this offer file by file altering or only entire packages/archives at once.

So far not seeing the distinct advantage this will have over BAIN.

I already lead the discussion of omo vs. bain on tesnexus so I'd rather not repeat the whole argument again.
Bulletpoints:
- wyre bash is a large package, requires python and wx. omo has all dependencies bundled (except the visual c++ runtime, but i plan to remedy that with the next release)
- wyre bash has a lot of features for managing load order, save games and whatnot. omo is intended to do exactly one thing and integrate with existing tools to do the rest (boss, obmm)
- wyre bash copies files from your mods to the data-directory, omo does not
- wyre bash requires a database to maintain the mapping of files to the mods they belong to, if the database get damaged, uninstallating is unlikely to work. With omo such a database is unneccessary, uninstalling a mod is as easy as removing the directory.

All in all, omo was mostly intended for people who find wyre bash too big or confusing or simply prefer obmm or neither. I did not expect all the wyre bash users to suddenly switch to omo, I intended to offer an alternative with a very different approach to the same problem.