Ok, it’s ready for testing. I mentioned a couple of months back that we were putting the finishing touches on the next build of NMM that will become 0.50.0. This latest build features a new feature, mod profiling.

Profiling is the ability to create and manage multiple different playlists for each game we support so you can switch between your playlists before running the game.

What’s the point? Well, if you’re the type of person who likes to do multiple different playthroughs of your game then it should make managing your specific mod lists for each playthrough that much easier. If you like to roll a warrior, a mage and a thief, for instance, you can create different profiles for each of your characters with mods specific to that character’s playthrough, as well as mods used by all the playthroughs.

Because this new functionality has required an extensive rework of how your mods are stored both within NMM and within your respective game folders we are releasing this build as an alpha of our beta. That means that, unlike our normal release method, we are not going to be instantly sending out an update notice to all users of NMM and we aren’t updating the download links on the NMM download page. Instead the direct download link is in this news thread.

It’s our hope that we can get a small group of brave and willing individuals to install this alpha build and let us know if they run in to any errors or glaring mistakes, and what those errors are, so we can get them fixed before making a general release. We’ve extensively tested this update ourselves on our own systems but we just cannot test for every single eventuality possible across all the thousands of mods available and across all the thousands of possible hardware and software combinations there are in the PC world. We need your help for this, because if we don’t get some help then we’ll release it as part of the beta and THEN people will be sorry if there’s major bugs we couldn’t find that break things! If some users are particularly helpful then I will chuck some Premium Membership time their way to say thank you.

If you’re ready and willing to test this build there’s a few things you should know. First of all you should hope for the best but plan for the worst and be accepting of this possible fate. The worst case scenario would be losing your ability to use NMM at all in the short term (hopefully a maximum of a few days before a hotfix can be sent to you). Next, because we’ve completely reworked the mod installing method NMM needs to completely deactivate all your current mod list and attempt to reactivate them one at a time. That should be fine for unscripted mods but any scripted mods you have will have to be reinstalled again (i.e. go through all the scripted installers as they pop up and choose all the available settings again). NMM will prompt you for each scripted mod you have. Everyone is going to have to do this anyway once we finalise this release and send it to the masses so this isn’t a special step for the alpha alone ergo the choice is really whether you want to do it now or do it later (or never update NMM again).

We’re hoping that this profiling system is pretty intuitive for the average user of NMM and that isn’t not going to need too much explaining. We’ll assess user feedback on this matter and work on documentation if necessary.

But without further ado and with ample amounts of warnings and gratitude the direct download for this alpha build can be found here.