Description
From discord @firehazard#1921:
I have a suggestion regarding how to display conflict information between different archives or between archives and loose files. I understand the archive parsing feature is experimental and has 'known incorrectness', so you'd probably prefer to fix that first. However, if/when that happens I think there's a better way to show conflict info in the UI.
Right now, the way it shows these conflicts is with flags, and when a mod is selected, with different colours (teal and purple). These colours cannot show a combination of different conflict types (eg. loose overwriting loose plus archive overwriting archive). Adding more colours to reflect these combinations would just be confusing. Another problem is that if there is a combination it can be difficult to determine which individual files are provided by archives and which aren't. You could also have an archive that's overwritten by a mod with lower priority, which is also confusing. I could go on.
The problem stems from the fact that archives follow different rules than loose files do. Archives follow right-pane plugin order. Loose files follow left-pane install order. However, the key to solving this problem may be that all archives are loaded before loose files.
Therefore, could you show 'fake mods' in the priority list? Similar to the 'unmanaged' mods shown for anything installed outside MO2?
Have a checkbox that says something like 'View Archives'. When checked it will 'create' a fake mod for each archive you have installed and their priority would follow the order they would be loaded in-game. Have all these fake mods appear before the normal mods in the priority list.
So you could have a priority list that looks something like this...
0 Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch.bsa
1 Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch - Textures.bsa
2 Alternate Start - Live Another Life.bsa
3 Alternate Start - Live Another Life - Textures.bsa
4 - Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch
5 - Alternate Start - Live Another Life
Each would show the conflicts tab as normal but would be fixed in priority according to the load order. You wouldn't need multiple colours to show conflicts and different flags for achive conflicts. Just the normal way of displaying loose file conflicts could be used.
The only problem I see with this (apart from difficulty of implementation which I don't know about) is that it would clutter up the priority list significantly. However, it would make much easier to see and understand file conflicts, and all these archive mods could be hidden by unchecking 'View Archives', returning to the normal mod list.