Suggestion - mod uninstall on vortex uninstall

[VortexFeedback]

Vortex Version: 1.3.22 Memory: 31.88 GB System: win32 x64 (10.0.19041) There have been several people recently on discord that have uninstalled vortex and later returned and found mods still in their game folder. Can an implementation be made that during the uninstall phase, all mods are uninstalled (or at least the option is there and enabled by default) so that these users dont see this issue as often?

Reported by: Yggdrasil7557

[TanninOne]

That would then lead to some people being absolutely shocked all their mods are gone after uninstalling Vortex which is much much worse because you can't just fix that. When you uninstall MS Office, would you expect it to delete all the documents you created with it and the templates you set up and so on? When a user uninstalls Vortex they may be doing so with the plan to reinstall Vortex or they want to continue playing the game as it is but not intend to add/remove any further mods or they want all mods to be gone. We don't know, it will be different between users and no matter what we do, some will complain. The current approach at least doesn't irreversibly get rid of your entire setup.

Besides: With the need for a separate staging folder per game and the game directory - potentially multiple mod directories for some games, uninstalling mods is quite complex. Properly cleaning up mods is - I would say 75% of what Vortex does (going by complexity). That is not something we can't just put into the uninstaller. Vortex needs to work and be set up correctly before we can uninstall mods correctly - whereas uninstalling Vortex has to be possible even if Vortex is broken, so that you can cleanly reinstall it.

[yggdrasil75]

perhaps the better way of doing this then would be an option to disable all mods and run a normal disable event for all mods for all games if the user allows it. that way the mods themselves remain intact, and only the links are removed. a user can easily reinstall vortex and keep going without issue.

either way, I feel it should be an option in the uninstaller, not something that vortex always does when uninstalling. many programs have popups during the uninstall saying "do you want to remove all configuration files?" which deletes settings files, temp files, and any other extra files. no it doesnt delete user files made using the program, but it does remove non-user files created by the program.

[TanninOne]

Ok, I'll revive this issue to track this general topic, but I will say now that this isn't going to happen quickly.

Here are a few things that need to be considered:

1. We have limited control of the uninstaller to begin with. We currently use a framework to manage installer/autoupdater/uninstaller . Creating more custom uninstaller is possible but it's also another construction site. Additional work and new things that can break
2. As I said: The functionality to purge or uninstall mods can't be put in the uninstaller for so many reasons. The most obvious would be: How would the uninstaller know where the games are even installed? We use extensions, many of which third party provided, to find the games and set up their modding support. So, the actual purge/removal of mods will always have to happen in Vortex. What we can do is add an option to Vortex, something like "Vortex --purgeAllGames" and "Vortex --uninstallAllMods" that the uninstaller can then optionally call, but this would still require Vortex to be functional and it may require the Vortex UI to come up so we can ask the user questions (e.g. to solve stuff like permission problems)
3. Vortex will generally only purge the game currently being managed. Technically it should already be possible to purge any game but tested that is not.

[yggdrasil75]

alright, in that case, how about a notification saying "mods will remain deployed after uninstall, if you want to remove mods, do so before uninstalling"?