Need help with newbie guide load order

[66f776945f4aeDweller]

I've reinstalled System Shock 2 and have been setting up things with the newbie guide, but Four Hundred and Quest Note Notifier are not included in the guide's screenshot despite being in the modlist. So I don't know where in the load order they should be, and I could use some help. (Though I think Four Hundred goes where AccFam is in the guide's screenshot?)

My load order, for reference:

1. SS2 Flora Overhaul
2. Tacticool Complete
3. Four Hundred
4. SS2 Rebirth
5. SS2 Vaxquis Vintage Song Remake
6. SS2 Black Egg
7. Vurt Goo (Impact Blood)
8. Vurt Goo (Dripping)
9. Vurt Goo (Grub Pod Vanilla)
10. Vurt's SS2 WormPod
11. SHTUP beta 2
12. Obj_fixes
13. SCP_beta6
? Quest Note Notifier

[66f776945f691voodoo47]

quest note notifier can be 1 and it will be fine. basically it's SCP all the way down, then obj fixes, SHTUP and then it doesn't rally matter.

[66f776945f86bJDoran]

Since there are so few mods for System Shock 2 (as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of mods for some games, such as Doom, Skyrim, the GTA games, etc), then wouldn't it be possible to maintain a simple file that contains the correct order for the mods, and would be used by ss2bmm.exe to automatically place in order the mods that are present? And when a new mod is made available, then this file could be updated by one of the moderators or SS2 experts on this forum.

[66f776945f97cvoodoo47]

this has been considered, but would probably be just a lot of pain for next to no benefit in the end.

just remember what I said in my previous post and you'll be fine 99% of times.

[66f776945fb31ZylonBane]

Has it been considered? This is the first I'm hearing about it, and it sounds like a ridiculous, impractical idea. Someone would have to update such a thing every time a new mod was released, and they'd have to test it with every mod to satisfy its compatibility guarantee.

Hell no. It's fine just to remember that huge mods go at the bottom and smaller, more specific mods are usually fine bubbling around on top.

[66f776945fc40voodoo47]

yes, very sure I was thinking about the manager snapping the big three into their proper places in the manager dev thread in at least one post. decided to not pursue - I am capable of sane decisions every once in a while.

[66f7769460163sarge945]

The way Wrye Bash works is that it maintains a list of tags for each mod (which the authors themselves provide), and these tags contain information about compatibility and load order, like Gameplay mods will go after Graphics mods, etc. Mods can additionally include a list of known incompatible mods (both in terms of strict incompatibility, and which mods have to be loaded before/after the relevant mod), which Wrye Bash will warn you about. It's a clever system, and allows it to maintain and organise lists of hundreds, if not thousands of mods by essentially making mod authors responsible for maintaining their own compatibility information.

But I agree with ZB here (ZB and I agree on something? GASP!!!), this is not worth the effort. Due to the nature of DML, "load order" is, most of the time, not really relevant unless multiple mods are editing the same properties on the same objects, and if they are, you're likely to run into issues regardless of load order, because one of the mods is going to have issues. This becomes even worse with Strings files because one mod is going to break another mods strings, there's nothing that can be done about it. The only other relevant compatibility note is that, if you're using Alarming Cameras and RSD together, you need to use the Alarming Cameras fix that was shipped with RSD, which contains the strings from both mods combined into one file.

I would support some work being done in the mod manager to allow it to detect conflicts between mods by analysing DML, but it's also probably not worth the effort unless someone decided to take it on as a personal project or whatever. That said, if someone is going to be working on mod compatibility in the mod manager, it would be much better if they could add better string file compatibility, because that's an issue right now and will only get worse over time as more mods include modified strings.

In general, gamesys mods go at the bottom. SCP, and Secmod are the only really relevant gamesys mods right now, as most other ones are deprecated. Then Obj Fixes and SHTUP (and Portrait Fix if you're using Secmod, unless it was included in a recent version I don't know about). Then map mods, the only relevant example is Rickenbacker Automaps, which was made obsolete by SCP 5 but is still useful for SCP 4. Then everything else.

If you're looking for a mod-list that mostly works well together and has a lot of compatibility, I made a guide which you can read here. I'm not sure if it's all in order for SCP b6, although I did update it for SCP b5 so it should still mostly all work.