[Feature Request] Better Categories

[twizz0r]

The problem

Categories and Groups can be a great tool for large installs, yet there are several issues that make them harder to use than necessary.

Environment

• Mod Organizer Version that exhibits the issue: All
• Last Mod Organizer Verison that did not exhibit the issue (if applicable): None
• Desktop OS/version used to run Mod Organizer: N/A

Details

Categories:

Mods are not categorized in a standard way on Nexus, making the pre-loaded categories an obstruction to a useful organizing tool.

Categories should have backup, restore and delete all functions making it easier for MO users to roll their own categories and maintain them.

Categories should also have some sort of re-order function: a move up/move down type system would work as would a priority number system. Dragging categories to reorder them would be ideal.

A Deactivate Category option would be great as well since the only current method of removing unwanted categories is to delete them outright.

Context Menus:

Context menus should act coherently. Currently the Primary Category only works for a single selected mod while the other context menus works on groups of selected mods. il.

Link to Mod Organizer logs

N/A

[MacSplody]

Option to remove all categories from all selected mods. Ability to add & view sub category on main panel. So one could have a main category of Models & Textures, and have a sub category for weapons, items, armour, U.I et cetera.

So currently the default categories look like this. Right click menu: https://imgur.com/3wObMiY Categories panel in Information: https://imgur.com/9EErcFr

I changed mine to use a similar approach to Mod Picker, this is how it looks so far. Right click menu: https://imgur.com/eZjknbA Categories panel in Information: https://imgur.com/xNdZ9to

[Al12rs]

To make categories a more useful feature:

General Features

• [ ] - Add option to edit the categories list from ModList context menu All Mods>Edit categories.

• [x] - Add option in settings to disable automatic Nexus categorization to allow users to more easily categorize their mods they way they prefer.

• [ ] - Overhaul category based view to first show all the categories ordered by category priority (position in the category list), then show all uncategorized mods sorting them by whatever column is currently selected (might be hard to do).

• [ ] - Allow drag and drop in category based view to move mods from one category to another.

• [x] - Make default category list be specific for each game. The new Nexus API allows to fetch the list of categories for a given game with endpoint /v1/games/{game_domain_name}.json, so we can use that to populate initial categories.

• [ ] - Add option in modlist context menu to add selected mod to "New category", then let user define the new category.

Edit Categories Dialog

• [ ] - Make edit dialog show nestled categories.

• [ ] - Allow drag and drop in edit dialog to nestle categories in each other.

• [ ] - Add description to each field, allow sorting for each field.

• [ ] - Add button to add new category (instead of only being right click>add).

• [ ] - Add option to import category list from an external file.

• [ ] - Add option to clear category list.

• [ ] - Add option to export category list.

Issues to fix:

• [ ] - #184

I will add here other improvements to the system as they come up.

[Silarn]

Current plan for revamp:

• Create base 'generic' category set
• Use any current category setup as the 'base' categories
• Add Nexus category mapping integration
  • Triggered when downloading via Nexus
  • If unmapped, ask user to set up a mapping for the category, import all nexus categories, or just the current category
  • Can be turned off to leave categories unmapped and set no category on install
  • Can import categories on-demand from category configuration screen
  • Essentially this maps a detected Nexus category ID to a MO2 category ID

This means there are no more default category IDs stored in the local category setup, and mappings should be pruned if a category gets deleted.

[Silarn]

Update:

The category_revamp is a WIP branch to fix this problem. I've already implemented fetching the category structure from the Nexus API, importing those categories into MO2, and creating a GUI to map the nexus categories to MO2 categories.

Remaining issues are:

1. Handling existing instances that did not have categories saved. We will need to load the old presets to maintain existing categories.
2. Monitoring Nexus downloads for unrecognized categories and prompting the user to update the mappings.
3. Allowing users to apply current category mappings to unmapped mods that were already installed.

[boycad]

Bump for an ordinal property to categories, as mentioned above. Alphanumeric by name would work though.

Each mod should be able to have two categories, in my opinion.

One more thing: You are focusing on using Nexus categories, but I have personally never found a use for those when modding.

For large installs I always use a guide, which is written in categories, or section headings. Usually mods in a guide fall under one or another section heading. So, in this use case, I would like to have the same categories as the guide in my MO2. Here is an example of a custom "categories.dat" file, made by a guide author, Gernash: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/17371/?tab=files

He calls them "Preset Dividers".

However, mapping Nexus categories to custom categories wont be helpful for this case, because there is no relationship between the Mod Guide's categories and the Nexus categories. Each Nexus mod could and quite possibly does come from a different Nexus category than the one before or after it in the same section, in the guide.

Fair enough. I dont know what other functionality you may have implemented for 'categories', but it would be nice if mod authors could provide a .dat file with their "Preset Dividers", to which I manually am able to assign mods as I download them, and if thats all it does in this use case, thats still pretty good.

But 'Categories' can potentially be very powerful for use with guides. Because guides are originally structured according to an equivalent of 'categories', potentially more information could be attached to categories, or used with them. For instance, if a .dat file was able to populate a category with links, then we would have a larger part of the guide coded directly in to the users MO2 instance, and guides could be partially condensed into .dat files.

Which would be good.

[Silarn]

So my category revamp is slated to release with the next update. It primarily focuses on allowing you to import and fully remap the Nexus categories (or disable them altogether) with no hard-coded predefined categories. There are a number of other more general category improvements listed here that can still be implemented.

[twizz0r]

I'll be an interesting test case as I use separators to categorize my install and categories as tags. I did notice some oddities when I first had to convert categories.dat but I didn't document them at the time. I'll make a point of repeating that and report in #testers,