PC GameSource Blog

For years we have been enjoying a well-sorted list of Oblivion mods thanks to the wonderful BOSS (formerly fcomhelper). But Fallout 3 users have been left in the cold, with sparse, scattered, and/or conflicting information about where their mods should go in their load order.

Early on this year, the developers at our partner SingularityShift (eg. mostly myself) released the first pre-beta of FOMS, whose final version (0.6.6.1) was released in April. FOMS used XML templates to facilitate sorting and management of conflicts, dependencies, and related information for Fallout 3 mods. It was very basic with a very limited UI that provided just enough functionality to sort and manage mods, but it had some inherent issues in the fact that it was developed with hand-written tools in a scripting language that has some serious limitations.

Recently, SingularityShift released the first alpha (Alpha 1) of FOMS 2, which is a complete rewrite taking advantage of the robust features of the .NET Framework and WPF to provide a greatly-enhanced sorting experience, including a Template Manager to create and manage XML templates, live conflict/dependency/message tracking, robust backup/restore options, and more all driven by a flexible Preferences system that will ultimately allow users to customize many aspects of the application.

Given that it was a first release, users have uncovered many bugs and submitted many wishlist items and feature requests. Now, FOMS 2 Alpha 2 is nearing its release, and some of its new features that have been recently unveiled are:

• Refactored windows and unified resources for a smaller size, tighter code, and better performance and stability
• The Template Manager is being dumped and replaced by Template Studio, allowing much-enhanced functionality such as template downloads, backups, merging, cleaning, upgrading, and much more.
• Conflict/Dependency recommendations and resolving are now included, so you don’t need to hunt through your list to find and fix the conflicts/dependencies yourself.
• Many smaller fixes and improvements for a better overall experience.

Keep your eyes peeled for the new release!

As always, you can follow along with the software’s development at its project site.
You can discuss it with other Fallout 3 users at Fallout3Nexus and don’t forget to watch the official site at falloutmodsorter.com for release information and more details!

(If I have some shame, can it really be considered a shameless plug?)