Need Help Managing your Mods??

[SpaceSmith]

Hey guys, so I've been part of these forums for a while now. And I have had much experience with games that require tons of mods and incase anyone did not know, I would like to direct you guys to the best mod manager I have found. Its free as well. (I am sorry if this is in the wrong forum, if so could a Mod please move this topic somewhere? Albeit, I think it should be a sticky, the whole program makes testing and managing mods easy as 1,2,3 and no more "I need to uninstall and reinstall the whole game to clean out mods"

I first found it on the Subsim forums (I used to play alot of Silent Hunter 3-5), its called JoneSoftGenericModEnabler, also called JSGME for short. Basically, all you do is go into your base folder for your game, in the case of KSP its KSP_WIN. And install the program, its only the one file, you also create a MODS folder (Or whatever you set it to be) and place all of your mods in there (you must be careful as to how you order them, the folders need to be correct.

So for say a part pack, inside the MODS folder, it needs to be set up in a folder structure of where it would go, Mods/PartPackName/GameData/PartPackName/Parts&Plugins/. The reason for the PartPackName being in there twice is the very top folder is the name of what you see in the JSGME program to enable it, from GameData down, that is what JSGME uses to place the files in the correct spot.

After you have put all of your mods into the MODS folder, double click JGSME and all of the names should be on the left screen. Highlight the ones you want, and click the right arrow, it should move them to the right side. Now all of your mods are intalled, want them uninstalled? Do the reverse. Its very simple and intuitive. It ALSO tells you before hand if there are any conflicts or overwrites by mods to previous mods. Which is handy, it helps me find out if I am having conflicts which ones it could be. It makes the whole testing your Mod Soup out so much easier. AND it can be used for any game pretty much as long as the way its mods are installed work about the same. So yeah, there ya go incase you don't know, just google it and it should come up with about 4-5 hits.

Casey

[NathanKell]

This is dangerous advice because it's order-depenent: if multiple mods change the same file, or one mod mods another mod, you have to be careful about the order in which you apply them (and be careful about un-applying, too, since some changes may be reverted wrongly).

[SpaceSmith]

Yes very much so, but the thing about JGSME is with the click of a button you can re uninstall everything in a snap. It remembers where the files came from and puts them right back. So you can tinker with ease to see what your mod soup is doing and what specifically is causing problems (I had a prolem with Kerb Paint cancelling out RPM and KSI MFDs internal changes and I was able to figure it out and reload within 5 minutes instead of deleting, and re copying.) Also, if one mod writes directly over another, the GUI greys out that mod until the mod on top of it is removed and then the greyed out mods changes are what take effect.

Edited July 7, 2014 by SpaceSmith