Morrowind Mod:Mlox

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mlox
Author john.moonsugar, Dragon32
Current Version 0.60
Links
Download Nexus, Great House Fliggerty
Project Website Google Project

Mlox is the Mod Load Order eXpert, a tool originally developed by john.moonsugar that is designed to help people manage large collections of Morrowind plugins, it sorts plugins based on a very simple set of ordering rules that comprise a partial order over the set of plugins using a standard topological sort.

mlox also provides advice on plugin conflicts, missing pre-requisites, and general information of interest based on the user's particular set of plugins.

Download mlox[edit]

Google Code stopped projects from adding new downloads so mlox has to be downloaded from these locations:

Morrowind Nexus

Great House Fliggerty

You only need to download the mlox application from those links. There are two options, you only need one of these:

  • mlox-exe-VER.7z if you have Windows and do not want to install Python (this is a substantially larger download).
  • mlox-VER.7z if you have Windows with Python26 and wxPython installed, or if you want to run on Linux.

Just in case you'd like to install the Windows pre-requisites for this version, here they are:

https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6.5/python-2.6.5.msi install this version or newer as earlier versions only support US version of Windows and code page 437

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wxpython/wxPython2.8-win32-ansi-2.8.7.1-py25.exe there are later versions of wxPython but mlox needs the ANSI version

Unpack the application archive in your Morrowind directory. You should see a mlox directory in the same directory as Morrowind.exe.

Versions of mlox previous to 0.59 required you to manually download and install the mlox rule-base. Version 0.59 of mlox added an automatic checking and downloading of the mlox rule-base.

Note: On Windows 7 (and maybe Vista), if you installed Morrowind in the default location "C:\Program Files\...", you may need to turn off UAC to get mlox to recognize your activated plugins in Morrowind.ini.

Features[edit]

  • Optimally reorders your load order to avoid known problems.
  • Warns about missing pre-requisites
  • Warns about plugin conflicts
  • Prints notes for things you might want to know about a mod, but were too lazy to read the Readme, or even find the info in some post somewhere in the Internets :)
  • User customizable via a rules file. Just create an mlox_user.txt in your mlox directory, and start adding your own rules.
  • Runs on Windows or Linux :)
  • Can also check someone else's load list from a file:
   mlox.py -wf Morrowind.ini
   mlox.py -wf someones_load_order_posting.txt

or just paste the list of plugins into the Active plugins pane of the GUI. (mlox understands output of Wrye Mash and Reorder Mods++)

(Note that mlox does not tell you if you have missing Meshes or Textures, it is only a load order tool, and does not report problems with resources.)

Customizing your Load Order[edit]

mlox allows you to customize your load order by adding your own sorting rules to a file called "mlox_user.txt", which you put in your mlox directory. Then, all you need to do to get your load order re-sorted correctly is press the update button in mlox. It can't get easier than that.

You can add any of mlox's rules to "mlox_user.txt", but for people that want to customize their load order, the [Order] rule is probably all that is needed. Here is a simple example:

Let's say you want to make sure that mlox always puts plugin "Foo.esp" before "Bar.esp". Just create a simple text file called "mlox_user.txt" in your mlox directory (using Notepad or whatever) containing the following:

[Order]
Foo.esp
Bar.esp

From now on, when you press the mlox update button, mlox will make sure that this is the order for those 2 plugins. Note that the [Order] rules in mlox_user.txt (your personal rules) take precedence over the rules in mlox_base.txt.

You should also be aware that the [Order] rule only specifies relative order, so in the example above, it does not mean that Foo.esp must come immediately before Bar.esp, only that Foo.esp must load somewhere before Bar.esp.

Documentation[edit]

The complete documentation for mlox comes as simple text files included in the mlox download, you can browse them on-line directly from the Google Code repository:

  • mlox_readme.txt provides a guide to getting started and introduction to usage. Important Reading
  • mlox_rules_guide.txt explains the syntax of the mlox rules, and how to write them yourself if you want to customize mlox.
  • mlox_guts document describes mlox's inner workings and how it does its job.