I have officially started my latest project, ALOA, which is just beginning to take shape. For those of you that do not know, TES4:Oblivion is a popular RPG (Role Playing Game) published by Bethesda Softworks, along with the free and full featured, Construction Set (as in, the actual game developer level design software).

The modding community is rather large and as the game has been out a while now, many large "overhaul" mods have surfaced but load order is important; though, it is out of the scope of this topic, at least for the time being. So the need for "noob friendly" software has increased drastically and I plan to satisfy that need.

Baically, the game loads mods in order of date modified. There is already a nice database and even an accompanying app close to what I want my app to be a better version of, FCOMHelper, named for "FCOM: Convergence". Which is basically a combo of all the overhauls, hence the picky load order.

I like FCOMHelper, though I believe it is limited. It is not really easy to use, has no GUI, requires the use of a separate batch file to run, outputs to a text file, and overall, could be improved. I plan on using a modified version of the FCOMHelper database; of course, with permission, I even requested source code for date changing code, the guy is pretty friendly & reasonable.

Right now, I am working on the underlying code to manipulate the dates, find the files, parse the database, etc. I will then tackle the GUI and maybe later, add functionality for adding unlisted mods (i.e. ones not in the database). I would simply position them accordingly in the database based on category (e.g. overhaul, tweak, user interface).

If anyone skilled in GUI coding for C++ would like to assist in this project, it would be much appreciated. Right now, I have the code to basically go through the database and recognize flags (e.g. comments, compatibility errors, warnings) and also send the strings to the LoadOrder function to set the date modified.

BTW, I know the name is lame, it is a working title. I just had to make a name for the topic. In my IDE it is still "ModOrder_CON", the CON for console version.