In game mod manager should update runtime

[ickputzdirwech]

TL;DR

The mod manager colors shouldn't represent which mods are loaded right now, but instead which mods will be loaded if you press "confirm".

What ?

The mods and their dependencies are colored according to their current state:

• Grey for "disabled" (regardless if loaded or not),
• White for "enabled" (regardless if loaded or not) and "loaded optional dependency",
• Red for "enabled but failed to load because of missing dependency", "enabled, not loaded and won't load because of incompatible game version" and "enabled, not loaded and requires not loaded mods"
• Orange for "not loaded optional dependency"

Right now these colors are only updated when you restart the game. Instead they should be colored according to the currently selected set of mods.

My suggestion would be:

• Grey for "disabled" (regardless if loaded or not),
• White for "enabled" (regardless if loaded or not) and "enabled optional dependency",
• Red for "enabled but won't load" (because of missing dependency or incompatible game version)
• Orange for "disabled optional dependency"

The same goes for the list of dependencies. It always shows the dependencies of the currently enabled version. If you select a different version that changed dependencies you won't notice until you restarted the game. Instead the list should be updated as soon as you select a different mod version.

Why ?

It is not very helpful to know which mods are loaded right now if you want to change your mods (and you can see it already before you change anything). Instead the game should inform you how the currently selected mods will interact with each other. The current representation is very confusing. Here are some annoying cases:

• If you enable a mod with lots of dependencies, most of them will be red, even though everything will load fine if you restart the game.
• If you then disable one of the required mods, all mods will stay white until you restart, even though they won't load anymore.
• The same goes for optional dependencies: If you enable an optional dependency it will stay yellow in the dependency list of other mods.
• This also works the other way around: If you disable an optional dependent mod it will be white in the dependency list of other mods until you restart the game.

[ickputzdirwech]

I just stumbled on this bug report in minor issues. It’s about the same issue.