Nexus Mods Hires Mod Organizer Developer to reinvigorate NMM

Published: October 14, 2016 2:13 PM /

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Robin Scott, known as Dark0ne and the creator of the Nexus Mods website, has announced he is adding Tannin42 to his development team to help work on the Nexus Mod Manager (NMM). Tannin42 is the creator of Mod Organizer, a powerful tool for advanced modders to mod Bethesda games such as The Elder Scrolls (TES) and Fallout. To help understand the significance of this, allow me to provide you with a quick summary.

Nexus Mod Manager, created by the development staff at Nexus Mods, is the successor to several fan-made and maintained TES and Fallout mod managers. Their purpose is simple, to streamline the installation process and later on ease the process of uninstalling them. This, in turn, would prevent and undo mistakes that normally wouldn't be easy to revert. NMM combined those efforts and collected these mod managers under one program, as well as continuing development of them. Eventually NMM would also start supporting games other than those of Bethesda, including ones such as Dragon Age: Origins and The Witcher 3.

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The reason this is important to remember is because of Mod Organizer (MO). Created by Tannin42, MO took a different approach to handling mods than NMM did. NMM continued to build on an older system of simply being a manager that installed the mod files for you. MO virtualizes this process and tricks the game into thinking the mods are installed in the regular Data folder. In reality, these mod files remain in a different location, sparing the Data folder from being cluttered, while giving the user the option of enabling or disabling mods on the fly.

If you are interested in learning more about Mod Organizer, well-known modder and Youtuber Gopher has created a video series that explains and later on guides you through the installation process of Mod Organizer.

When Mod Organizer 2 started development, it became clear that Tannin42 had trouble balancing his demanding job and continuing development. No easy feat, as he did his own bug support on his Github page and did his best to respond to new developments or issues. One example of this was when Fallout 4 incorporated the Bethesda.net modding system and changed a few things behind-the-scenes of the mod loading process. Because of this, any Mod Manager for Fallout 4 was rendered unable to sort the load order, requiring developers to hastily update their systems. The change was something Bethesda gave no warning or information about.

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In response to Dark0ne's announcement, Tannin42 has released the following statement

Dear MO users,

As you may have already read on the Nexus news, I've recently joined their ranks. If you haven't read it yet: Yeah that happened.

Over the coming weeks and months we will keep the community informed on what we're planning and working on for the future of NMM but right now many of you may be more concerned with what this means for MO.

First I want to assure you that the primary reason of Robin hiring me was to take advantage of my experience with MO and to integrate it into the Nexus offering, not to kill off MO. And the primary reason for me to take the job was that it will allow me to invest serious time into creating a better modding experience when previously it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to find time and motivation to work on MO in my spare time alongside a demanding job.

Obviously I won't be working on MO any more which unfortunately means that, unless someone else picks up where I left, MO v2 won't appear in a stable version. I know that will appear as a loss now and I apologize to everyone who was looking forward to a new release.

I do hope however that you trust me, and everyone else at Nexus Mods, to understand what you liked about MO.

I'm confident that with what we're planning you won't be missing MO for long.

With these two now combining forces, Nexus Mod Manager may possibly be rebuilt with the benefits of both NMM and MO, resulting in a Mod Manager that may be the most powerful and user-friendly to date.


Quick Take

I was delighted to see Tannin42 had created a beta of the next MO to provide Fallout 4 modders a starting chance. His new employment means that he can dedicate more time to create an awesome modding tool, hopefully with renewed vigor. With the current outlook of things, it seems we may enter a new era of modding for the TES/Fallout games.

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