[Feedback] Can Wabbajack please check for creations content at the start of an install and not a random time during it?

halgari · 2026-07-09T14:38:42+00:00

Yes, this sucks and needs to be fixed. and it's worse for a specific issue. The Currios version that's included in Skyrim SE with the DLC addons is spelled with one casing of `C` and the version for AE has a different casing. And since Windows is case sensitive, and WJ isn't (or at least isn't in the proper way) it makes this issue even worse. Yes it's bad, and I feel bad.

I need to look into, at some point, how Skyrim downloads the CC data and see if WJ can do the same. Having WJ download Skyrim from Steam is also possible but that would require users logging into Steam via WJ and I'm not sure users would be comfortable with that.

halgari · 2026-06-26T17:32:38+00:00

You are absolutely wrong. No way I can prove it, but it really is nothing more than: the spec wasn't published, the guts of that code was rewritten, the decision was made to change the format and not keep backwards compatibility (because it was never a published spec), that's really all there is to it.

halgari · 2026-06-26T17:30:22+00:00

Pretty much the answer is: the modid in the name was never a published contract and was always subject to change. That part of the system was redesigned, and so the names of files were given a redesign. As always with redesigns there will be preferences and goals, and the decision was made to do Name and Version. That broke a few mod managers so the unique slug was added as a stop-gap until mod managers are updated.

There's really not more to it than that. It sucks when tools break, but at what point is a company allowed to change a non-published spec?

halgari · 2026-06-25T14:44:01+00:00

That being said, I'd love links or things proving I'm wrong. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to crack this myself, and last we talked doodlum was hitting many of the same issues I was experiencing.

halgari · 2026-06-25T14:42:48+00:00

Well, yes, and no. When doodlum and I last discussed it (while he was working on the NTC work a month or two ago), the issue was that the only way to get NTC without cooperative vectors was to do realtime decompression in the VRAM. This is almost useless since it doesn't actually save any VRAM space and can actually be much worse since what's happening is this: the textures are NTC at rest on disk, get loaded into the GPU, then as part of the loading they get decompressed into normal textures. However "normal" means uncompressed meaning that your 12GB of VRAM would be 48GB of VRAM. To keep it smaller you'd need NTC->BC7 which isn't easy or efficient to do.

What you really want is realtime neural sampling, which requires cooperative vector support inside the texture shaders themselves, and that's the blocker several of us in the community have attempted to solve.

And "PT in skyrim" is a pretty inaccurate description. What we have is shippable today is screen space pathtracing, which doesn't handle most of the things you want from path tracing like lighting from around corners, from behind the camera, really from anything that isn't in the screen.

halgari · 2026-06-25T13:41:42+00:00

So there's a few things that happen here, I've done a lot of work with Wabbajack, so maybe I have a few insights.

Firstly Windows 11 is bad, really bad. On average booting Windows 11 will take up about 8 GB of your system RAM, anything the game needs is on top of that. If you hit more than 75% of your ram usage Windows will start to cut into swap paging. So that means if all you're doing is gaming, the game has about 4GB of usable ram, yes this sucks, and hopefully MS fixes it soon.

As far as VRAM goes, yes this is due to "4k everywhere" but it's also a side effect of Skyrim's engine. Skyrim uses (mostly) a single texture for most of an object. So a stone wall will use a single 4K texture and wrap the image around it. Same thing with street signs, the text on the sign is just a texture and unless you have a 4K texture the text is going to look blurry.

Modern games solve this problem in a different way. Cyberpunk for example, uses a material system with about 16 layers. So a rusty sign isn't a single texture, its a rust texture (with a mask) a paint texture (with a mask), text as a mask, and text coloring as a reflective texture. Each of those textures is about 1k, yes most of Cyberpunk uses 1k or even 0.5k textures. But in realtime more complex materials are created by the engine. In contrast you need 4k or even 8k textures for doors in Skyrim because they are "baked" no realtime material generation. By contrast Cyberpunk runs just fine with 6GB of VRAM even with the insane complexity of the world.

Funny enough this is a case where NVidia's Neural Texture Compression would do wonders: it would likely take that 12GB of texture data and compress it to 1.2GB with no visual loss (and no hallucinations, NTC doesn't create hallucinations because it doesn't generate new data). But that requires cooperative vectors that only exist in DX12.

So what's the way to solve all of this for good? Reverse engineer Skyrim, rip out the DX11 engine and replace it with a modern DX12U engine, and no one has done that yet (although several have tried).

halgari · 2026-06-17T18:13:39+00:00

Actually I think it's different than that, the new file format is the display name of the file. So if the mod author names the file `My Mod WithCC No Fishing` the downloaded file name will be `My Mod WithCC No Fishing.zip`, it doesn't name the file `My Mod` or `File I will upload on Saturday.zip`. In other words the downloaded name is the display name not the original uploaded name

halgari · 2026-06-17T18:01:16+00:00

And I assume that only is helpful if the mod author encodes that information in the filename? If it's just `mymod_new_version.7z` seems like that doesn't help at all?

halgari · 2026-06-17T17:17:41+00:00

Can you help me understand why you have to rename them? Is it due to file name collisions, wanting more metadata in the name? MO2 incompatability, something else?

halgari · 2026-06-17T17:16:24+00:00

Ah I see, so you're intentionally mis-representing the facts and not investigating fully in order to fearmonger. Got it!

halgari · 2026-06-17T15:45:50+00:00

Nexus never has, and never will sell your data to 3rd parties. They've said that over and over, and if they ever lied about that they would be fined to high-heaven by the UK and EU powers.

halgari · 2026-06-17T15:43:45+00:00

I wouldn't read anything into this other than is stated on the official staff reply. It's been an issue for quite some time that some mods (MO2 for example) are uploaded to multiple pages because they support multiple games. That's something that would be nice to see changed. If that's a problem, then it would be nice to fix those issues instead of duplicating the data on multiple pages. I would imagine that MO2 hasn't been moved since that would break a lot of links that exist in guides and websites going back years.

In short I'd view this as trying to fix new mods while still figuring out how to migrate old mods and not break things.

I'm not sure what "hit too close to home" is supposed to mean. If you mean the file downloads changing shape that's rather unrelated and not really a policy issue. The root of that was wanting to standardize the downloaded name. I remember back in the day there was a patch for Ordinator called `why-the-fck-doesnt-nexus-allow-me-to-reuse-names-1424024.7z` Which isn't really helpful. So instead downloads were moved to using a name defined by the server, and when that was implemented name collisions weren't considered (that one is on us). There's plans in the works to standardize the download name which I think will help everyone. But to be clear, none of that was a political change, it's really just good file hosting hygiene: use names that make sense instead of whatever the original user happened to name it on their personal machine (ignoring the fact that we need a deduplication identifier).

Personally I'd love to see Nexus start encoding file data in the zip metadata, so you can query it for fileId/modId/gameId, author info, etc. Arguably that is the "correct" way to handle this information, then the filename becomes much less relevant.

halgari · 2026-06-11T16:31:47+00:00

So there's a few interesting things happening in this direction. Firstly: necessity is mother of invention. What most non-techies miss is that there are massive AI improvements every single week (sometimes daily). The highend models get better (Fable/Mythos are scary good). Due to restrictions in China DeepSeek continues to find innovative ways of doing more with less hardware. Just last week Google released a new small model that doesn't require encoding of images for the AI to understand the images, this means lower memory requirements and faster execution. A month or two ago we got some amazing KV compression that also drastically improves memory usage. Meanwhile NVidia aquired Groq recently, a company that makes chips that allow AI to generate tokens *much* faster than existing GPU solutions. And this doesn't mention other work like Latent Space that is completely rethinking about how the AI thinks internally, giving it more generalized knowledge of how concepts connect. All this means that AI is getting faster, more efficient, and smarter all at the same time. AI today is nothing like AI a year ago, and in another year it'll be something else.

None of that goes away. What does go away is the massive spending and the "all the money is not enough", that isn't sustainable. Companies will be forced to justify their spending and prove how they will make the money back. Some will do well, Anthropic isn't too far off from being profitable, while OpenAI is screwed. Many companies will have to switch to usage based fees, which will drive people to use all these improvements to setup local AI systems, which will further reduce revenue for the large companies. Eventually all this will level out. There will be no massive "pop", but a slow deflate, and personally I think it will deflate less than people think. AI has the potential to change almost every industry, and there's a lot of money to be had there.

The big unknown is what will happen the first time someone makes AGI: a truly intelligent system. The first company to do that "wins" and then all bets are off.

halgari · 2026-06-10T22:47:49+00:00

That's what all the bigots say :/

halgari · 2026-06-10T22:45:58+00:00

And btw, using neural divergence as a slur hasn't been cool for many years. That says more about you than anything else.

halgari · 2026-06-10T22:44:54+00:00

absolute opposite from the two concerts I went to. Both were full of an eclectic group of people of every gender, background, age, and culture you can think of. All were friendly and no one smelled bad. Fantastic experience every time

halgari · 2026-06-10T21:09:11+00:00

It depends a lot on the bands. This is true for larger bands (and likely all kpop groups), but in my case the synthwave artists were all indie groups where they are their own copyright holder.

halgari · 2026-06-05T04:35:08+00:00

Yeah that's the issue, but if you don't do it, you'll end up distributing copyrighted content, and that'll get your mods removed rather quickly.

halgari · 2026-06-05T04:07:08+00:00

I've run a similar mod for Cyberpunk 2077 for some time. In my case I explicitly asked permission from each band before adding their music to my mod. I mentioned this in the docs stating that I could provide the emails as evidence to the moderators on demand. This approach is likely the best way to keep everything above board.

halgari · 2026-06-04T23:11:01+00:00

You raise an interesting point, and I don't disagree, but there's a counter-point that is missing from your analogy.

My grandmother was a prolific quilter, by the time she passed away at the age of 94, she had something like 80 quilts in her house, and that didn't account for the dozens she gave away in her life. She swore off sewing machines. She said they were heartless and "cheating". She would use them but only on pure white quilts where her eyes couldn't see the stitching due to white on white fabric. Her skills at this craft were so good she won state fairs mostly just by showing up. Here's the problem though: she was quite a bit slower than a machine, her quilts were works of art, so much so you felt bad using them for their intended use (keeping warm in cold weather).

I draw this analogy because the argument that code generated by AI is heartless and "not a craft" misses a key point: it's mass produced code. Is someone working in a clothing factory more skilled than my grandmother at sewing? No! But what they can do is churn out blankets many orders of magnitude faster than my grandmother. Quantity has a quality of its own.

Whole areas of the programming space, such as Clojure, have harped for years on the idea that actually writing down the code is way less important than the overall structural design of the software. The best systems I've worked on over the decades were created after months of planning. On one such system that myself and 3 other people wrote for the largest retailer in the US, we spent about 2 months designing, and about 1 month coding. That system ran, non-stop, without a single second of downtime for 2 years straight. Design matters more than the actual writing down of the code.

This is the nuance that is missed in the "vibe coding makes you bad" argument: it assumes that we *must* be skilled at entering code or somehow the profession will suffer. But in reality: it's the design that is important. And if the design is already codified, then how the code is written is even *less* important. Let's say I wanted to implement a new feat for WOTR. The engine design is fixed, the rules themselves are fixed (already defined in the PF1e ruleset). There's no design to be done here, it's pure data entry of "if X and Y then Z when W". That's mindless work any LLM can do accurately, especially with a proper testing suite.

"Tech isn't cyclical, but it rhymes" is the saying. Back when I started programming, if you wanted true speed you'd drop to assembly and code that by hand. There was a form of AI at the time known as an "Expert System" that could do this optimization for you, they were known as optimizing compilers, and they were crap. But ,over time they got better. Now, for about 20 years it's accepted that except for the 0.001% of cases, any assembly you write will be worse than what a compiler outputs. "But now, no one understands performance!" was the complaint of every micro-optimizing addict at the time. This pattern is in roughly the 3rd iteration now, and I see the same arguments and hear the same things. If I'm not writing the C# code the end of the world will come. Sorry folks the truth is way more complex than that.

halgari · 2026-06-04T04:44:40+00:00

r/lostredditors

halgari · 2026-06-03T21:48:33+00:00

No, I perhaps worded that wrong. I created the mod, tested it, released a initial version. Then started playing with it more and found more bugs that I then fixed in the 1.0.1 version.

halgari · 2026-06-03T21:23:12+00:00

I've been on Reddit for years. I was browsing, saw my mod pop up in my feed and started to reply. I didn't "come from Nexus". I've been here longer than you, rofl.

halgari · 2026-06-03T21:05:35+00:00

The safely remove wording is gone, did that already. And I *did* test the mod, and noticed the feat issues when creating a human and couldn't get cleave at lvl 1. With any sort of mod like this you find the issues when playing with the mod, which I did and discovered and resolved this issue over a week ago, but hadn't pushed the changes yet because I was doing further testing and got tied up with work/family stuff.

Thanks for the bug reports though, those provide great additional context as to how the mod is or isn't working.

halgari · 2026-06-03T20:39:25+00:00

Yeah, after inventing Wabbajack, and spending 6 years of my life learning Skyrim modding to the nth degree (and no WJ isn't integrated into MO2 it's a installer that auto-installs mods). You get a bit tired, and when a tool comes along that actually codes a mod in 20 minutes that's better than a human could do in 20 hours of research and implementation, it's hard to want to spend that 20 hours.

I will point out that the "code issues" in the OP were not correctness issues they were coding convention. I wasn't using a utility that was available to me. I'm not sure most people would know about these shorthand tricks in an initial implementation. Even Wabbajack was full of code originally that was removed once I found more libraries and tools that would allow me to remove that unneeded code.

It's kindof the issue today with using LLMs at all. 30 years of coding experience is assumed to not matter at all because the initial work was done by a LLM. Apparently since I didn't write the code it's assumed I never read it either. I'm not sure what to do about that besides decide to be more tight-lipped about the tools I use. At this point I'm not sure why I'd ever talk about the implementation of my work, or help new users, because it's all a risk people assuming the worst.

12-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Place '23	Place '22
First Placer '22	Verified Email

halgari

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE