Open Mod Manager (OMM) - Successor of OvGME

Retrolux · Mar 13, 2022

Hi fellow RD community & modders,

I wanted to share that there is a new mod manager that is active in development by the same developer that created OvGME. Its called "Open Mod Manager" (OMM) and it improves on all aspects that already made OvGME & JSGME great to use. Its open source and usable for any game you like.

Quick Feature Overview:

Supports zipped (saves space) and folder mods (OvGME legacy mode)
Non destructive mod installation with automatic backup of overwritten & overlapped files
Remote mod storage access on the webserver for easy download/update your community mods.
Mod versioning and dependency options to other mods
Nice mod presentation with a proper icon, text and categories (markdown)
And many more features

Source & Download:

GitHub - sedenion/OpenModMan: Open Mod Manager - Open source and generic Mod ("Modifications") manager.

Open Mod Manager - Open source and generic Mod ("Modifications") manager. - GitHub - sedenion/OpenModMan: Open Mod Manager - Open source and generic Mod ("Modifications") manager.

github.com

Quick start guide:

https://wiki.amsunofficial.net/en/omm

This is a screenshot on how it looks for Automobilista on my local install:

Currently I am manually repacking mods locally into OMM ready packages to save space. But you can also use your currently extracted mods (OvGME) in OMM as well.

I hope that more modders will prepare their mods to be OMM ready when it is more widely used. This would make it way easier for the user and have some kind of standard that makes mods plug in play.

Cheers

Durge Driven · Mar 13, 2022

Retrolux said:
I hope that more modders will prepare their mods to be OMM ready when it is more widely used. This would make it way easier for the user and have some kind of standard that makes mods plug in play.

Well I have been saying that ever since JSGME but GTL GTR2 modders got rightly offended lol

What makes people stray from the correct designated naming of cars and tracks in each sim I will never understand

Retrolux · Mar 13, 2022

Sometimes its hard to change your habit and workflow that you already have set when creating and packaging mods. So its understandable. I just hope that it is at least a few modders will try it out and see the benefits that it also brings when making mods.

Retrolux · May 11, 2022

Here is a video I prepared to guide you through Open Mod Manager. It has also chapters for modders and communities.

jgf · May 11, 2022

Retrolux said:
....

I hope that more modders will prepare their mods to be OMM ready when it is more widely used. This would make it way easier for the user and have some kind of standard that makes mods plug in play.

Cheers

That depends on whether "OMM ready" is compatible with people not using a mod manager.

Some years ago I played the old rpg Oblivion, for which there was the Oblivion Mod Manager. Mods compiled for use with this were absolutely useless to anyone not using the manager, and requests for a normal zip of the mod were usually met with scorn and derision - "I'm not wasting my time to pack up this mod separately for people not using the manager" ....yet it was formatting and compiling the mod for the manager that takes the extra time, otherwise just highlight the files and "add to zip".

Now, I neither condone nor condemn such managers, I only warn against going down the elitist path of attempting to enforce a proprietary format "for the good of the community", when that good is better served by files universally available.

(FWIW, I do not use managers simply because I do not know what they are doing in the background, whereas when I manually install something I know exactly what went where, what may be overwritten, what ini or cfg files are edited, etc.; and I've backed up where necessary and know where the backups are located. It's like those sites where you try to download a file but instead get a small exe which you are expected to click and it will download the file; it may, but what else is it doing in the process.)

jgf · May 11, 2022

Durge Driven said:
Well I have been saying that ever since JSGME but GTL GTR2 modders got rightly offended lol

What makes people stray from the correct designated naming of cars and tracks in each sim I will never understand

We meet again on this topic, lol. I doubt anyone was offended, just not everyone likes manager programs.

I thoroughly agree about filenames, I'm nitpicky enough that I'll waste time renaming cars, and correcting references in associated files, just to have continuity throughout the sim. And don't get me started on track names. "ThisTrack", "_ThisTrack", "This_Track", "09ThisTrack", "ThisTrack2005", scattered all up and down the menu.

Retrolux · May 11, 2022

jgf said:
That depends on whether "OMM ready" is compatible with people not using a mod manager.

Actually that is the good thing about the "OMM ready" mods that they also can easily installed as usual by extracting the contents manually in the game folder. (OMM creates automatic install instructions appended to your mod description as well)

OMM is open source and just really does that what you would do by manually extracting mods into the game folder. But it also backups every file that is overwritten in the process and restores it after that.

Peppelino · May 11, 2022

Thank you, Retrolux.
Having used JSMGE many years
ago, I would like to give it a try.

Retrolux · May 12, 2022

Hope you will enjoy it as much as I am. You should be able to use the JSMGE mods (as folder mods with OMM as well and pack them into zips to save space.
Let me know what you think.

Retrolux · May 15, 2022

Open Mod manager is now out of beta with the 1.0 release version. Best time to try it out

https://github.com/sedenion/OpenModMan/releases

C_Stephens · Jan 1, 2023

Hi retrolux, started trying out OMM after years of using Ovgme. Been having a problem with creating the packages. All goes well till I get to the save process, when i select save it creates the zip and everything appears fine except all folders contain no content. All txts filed and folders show as 0kb? Something goes wrong in the zip process, any ideas or a FAQ I can read up on?

Retrolux · Jan 2, 2023

C_Stephens said:
Hi retrolux, started trying out OMM after years of using Ovgme. Been having a problem with creating the packages. All goes well till I get to the save process, when i select save it creates the zip and everything appears fine except all folders contain no content. All txts filed and folders show as 0kb? Something goes wrong in the zip process, any ideas or a FAQ I can read up on?

Hmm thats odd. You can try to ask the developer through github in the link I posted.

My guess would be that you try to write to disk where OMM is not allowed to write to. You can try to start OMM as admin to see if it then works.

C_Stephens · Jan 3, 2023

Ya i found a couple of forums he used in developing, did a bunch of reading, uninstall, reinstall repeat but on the 3rd try and choose default install directory this time I can happily say it's working lol. That seems to be the easy part, now it's making my mods into packages. She's time consuming there..

Retrolux · Jan 4, 2023

Nice to hear that you got it working. Package mods with OMM is usually pretty straight forward once you did your first ones. The video posted above might give you a good starting point. Alternatively you can use the wiki tutorial I wrote for the AMSU community: