Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

OpenMW: Porting Morrowind to an open source engine

soulburner

Cipher
Joined
Sep 21, 2013
Messages
809
I didn't check how playable this is in terms of completing quests and stuff because the performance is really bad, both on nVidia and AMD cards - it's stuttering like hell even on a high-end PC. So for me - it's unplayable yet.
 

Akratus

Self-loathing fascist drunken misogynist asshole
Patron
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
0
Location
The Netherlands
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Do you guys realize someone could implement top down turn based combat if the game becomes truly moddable? That might make Morrowind my favorite game of all time. Asuming it's well programmed, to deal with height differences in terrain or interiors, and all the other technical issues that would stand in the way of it.
 
Last edited:

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
Do you guys realize someone could implement top down turn based combat if the game becomes truly moddable? That might make Morrowind my favorite game of all time. Asuming it's well programmed, to deal with height differences in terrain or interiors, and all the other technical issues that would stand in the way of it.

I'd like to see the result, at least to satisfy my curiosity. However, I doubt that Morrowind's 3D environment translates well to top-down perspective without making some rather big concessions.
And the number of enemies would probably have to be scaled back a bit, too, otherwise it would get too repetitive in tb-mode.

Personally I'd settle for an improved real-time 1st person combat with better feedback on the underlying mechanics and some good amount of balancing.
 

deuxhero

Arcane
Joined
Jul 30, 2007
Messages
11,324
Location
Flowery Land
Yep, scrawl responds to my reports on bugs.openmw.org almost immediately. Speaking of which - if you're using the unpatched CD data, you can thank me for reporting issues relating to missing GMSTs (for example, enemy health bars and difficulty sliders that were patched in later). I'm guessing most people are just testing with the patched Steam data.

I actually use my CD copy, I just patched it after install because I didn't really see a reason not to.
 

commie

The Last Marxist
Patron
Joined
May 12, 2010
Messages
1,865,249
Location
Where one can weep in peace
Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2
I'd like to see the result, at least to satisfy my curiosity. However, I doubt that Morrowind's 3D environment translates well to top-down perspective without making some rather big concessions.
And the number of enemies would probably have to be scaled back a bit, too, otherwise it would get too repetitive in tb-mode.

Personally I'd settle for an improved real-time 1st person combat with better feedback on the underlying mechanics and some good amount of balancing.

What are you talking about? Fighting ten thousand cliff racers in visceral TB combat is a heavenly idea!
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Do you guys realize someone could implement top down turn based combat if the game becomes truly moddable?
More like turd-based.
TB doesn't exactly help depth with single character - with no party to synchronize all it does is removal of fine grained control and timing and preclude precise maneuvering, including stuff like jumping on stuff or otherwise navigating 3D space.

And...
I doubt that Morrowind's 3D environment translates well to top-down perspective without making some rather big concessions.
This.

Not to mention being unable to actually peek into weird places at weird angles or to levitate or dive to otherwise hidden spots would effectively kill the exploration.


That might make Morrowind my favorite game of all time. Asuming it's well programmed, to deal with height differences in terrain or interiors, and all the other technical issues that would stand in the way of it.
Improving an exploration centric game with sucky combat by removing exploration and making combat even suckier? I don't see how it could possibly go wrong. :stupid:
:hearnoevil::gumpyhead::pete:
It's exactly the kind of thing a committee of suits who have never even seen a computer game could have come up with.

tl;dr
Updated my retards.txt .
:updatedmytxt:


Personally I'd settle for an improved real-time 1st person combat with better feedback on the underlying mechanics and some good amount of balancing.
Fuck balancing.
Make it better feedback, NPC spellbooks rivaling what player can make in the spellmaker and actual AI.
The AI is the single worst thing about Morrowind's combat.

The only bit of combat balancing I'd add would be nerfing levitation somehow, for example by having it dispelled by any action (like invisibility) and by taking damage.
Maybe tweaking spell collision and speed.
 

Akratus

Self-loathing fascist drunken misogynist asshole
Patron
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
0
Location
The Netherlands
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Well obviously top down combat with a single character isn't worth the effort.
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
clueless suit said:
I have learned recently that the products our company makes are computer games. Now, I've never actually seen a computer game up close and I don't intend to but I got some interns to plot some stuff for me (and later to explain the results) and it seems that being "turn-based" and "isotonic"... "isometric"? Are you sure? ...correlates positively with the game being considered a "good RPG". I don't know what an RPG is but I've heard its the type of game we're specialized in making so we clearly need to make our next game in the series isotonic and turn-based.
 

Doctor Sbaitso

SO, TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS.
Patron
Joined
Oct 22, 2013
Messages
3,348
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Grab the Codex by the pussy Serpent in the Staglands
I predict that the developers will one by one back out due to shifting priorities that comes with the long passage of time. The project will end in a half-baked state and fans of the idea will carry on wishing that someone would invest the massive amount of effort required just to get on par with vanilla in an entirely new engine.

That is a really pessimistic view but this history has played out many times. I'd be glad to be wrong.
 

Untermensch

Augur
Joined
Apr 16, 2012
Messages
280
Location
Croatia
So it looks like they'll be switching from OGRE to Open Scene Graph.
https://openmw.org/2015/announcing-switch-openscenegraph/

Ogre3D is the rendering engine used by OpenMW since our very first release. Now, the OpenMW team is announcing the move away from this engine.

Over the course of our alpha versions, Ogre3D has proven extremely useful, enabling rapid development. Thanks to Ogre3D, you can already play a more or less complete game of Morrowind in OpenMW, today, and that is an incredible feat in and of itself.

However, to get OpenMW into a polished state and to add the last few missing features, we have difficult tasks ahead of us that would either require creating a fork of Ogre3D that behaves the way we need it to, or switch to a more suitable engine. After much discussion, we have settled on the second option.

Why switch?
There isn’t one particular show-stopper, but rather the culmination of many different issues.

One blocker for our 1.0 release is the poor framerate compared to vanilla Morrowind. This comes down to scene management and render API bottlenecks in the Ogre3D 1.x series, which are well understood by the Ogre3D team and have since been addressed in the 2.x series. The original plan was to port OpenMW to use Ogre3D 2.x, which is a big undertaking since the programming interface changes are significant. However, we have some fundamental concerns about this port:

  • Tag points: We are using an Ogre3D feature called “Tag Points” to stitch together the various parts of Morrowind’s segmented bodies. This feature is no longer supported in the 2.x series, so we would have to implement complicated workarounds.
  • OpenGL3 requirement: The Ogre3D 2.1 branch has dropped support for OpenGL2 hardware. Even though OpenMW was never meant to run on hardware that originally ran Morrowind, we concluded that it is still too early to drop OpenGL2 support, as it would affect a significant portion of our users.
  • Material system: Ogre 2.1 features a redesigned material system written with AZDO (Approaching Zero Driver Overhead) optimizations in mind, but at the cost of making custom materials difficult to write. We will be doing that extensively in OpenMW, especially considering user-authored modifications, so we would rather have a more flexible and easier to use material system.
On top of these concerns with the latest Ogre3D versions, we’ve also had some longstanding issues:

  • Resource system: Ogre3D forces the use of a global resource manager, but we need one resource manager per document in OpenCS. Another problem is that all resources are expected to have a unique name, which leads to some unnecessary work on our side, and could rarely cause user-defined resources to conflict with internal resources. This is also an issue well understood by the Ogre3D team, and a “Resource System Redesign” project addressing these points has been started in 2013, but is unfortunately not completed yet.
  • Material stencil support: The NIF format used by Morrowind can specify “stencil settings”, but the Ogre3D material backend does not support these settings.
  • NPC width scaling: NPCs in Morrowind have a “weight” property, which should be scaling the NPC on its local X-axis. OpenMW currently ignores this property, because the Ogre3D 1.x skeleton system does not support non-uniform scaling.
A new engine
In light of these issues, we’ve looked around for alternatives and found the OpenSceneGraph, which appears a perfect fit for the features required by Morrowind and OpenMW, while also delivering high performance. We’ve carefully evaluated all needed features and verified that they can be found in the OSG source code, or can be easily added by a plugin. A detailed roadmap for the port will be posted in the near future, and updated regularly so you can follow along the progress.

One notable difference is OpenSceneGraph supporting OpenGL only. Ogre3D having inbuilt support for OpenGL and DirectX may be considered one of its strong points. In an ideal world this would result in greater choice for the user while requiring no extra effort from the OpenMW team. Unfortunately this is not quite true; writing shaders does not work in a render system agnostic way. In addition to that, we have found some OpenMW bugs only manifesting themselves when the Direct3D backend is used. So we are in fact happy about this change, as we do not have the manpower to maintain support for two different rendering systems, and most of our developers are working on Linux and thus unable to test the Direct3D renderer anyway.

Pre-emptive FAQ
Q: How long will the switch take?
The good news is that Ogre3D is a rendering engine and we’re only using it as such. The OpenMW code is structured using different subsystems, and this change will, for the most part, affect only the “mwrender” subsystem. Rendering code makes up roughly 8% of our codebase.

Q: What will happen with OpenMW using OGRE in the meantime? Further development (new features), maintenance/fixes only, complete obsoletion?
We will continue developing the OGRE branch as usual, with new features and bugfixes, so long as the OSG port is still in development. We know that OpenMW already has lots of players despite its alpha state, so this is very important for us.

Q: What about the different OpenMW platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android)?
We will continue to support all these platforms.

Q: The gallery on the OpenSceneGraph website looks really basic. If this engine is so great, why are there no fancy games made with it?
In terms of features, OpenSceneGraph is every bit as powerful (or even more powerful in some aspects) as Ogre3D, so it surprised us to see there are not many games made with it. OSG founder Robert Osfield has his own theory on why this may be the case:

As a general note about Games and OSG vs Ogre, I suspect it’s partly
down the roots of each project and the culture that grew up around it.
OSG grew from the vis-sim world and over the years grew into a
general purpose and highly portable scene graph library, with it’s
community coming form the professional simulator, large scale
visualization, VR and scientific markets. Whereas Ogre from the start
was graphics API for Games, it too though can be used for more things
than games but and culturally games looks to have remained it’s
heartland.

Q: I am worried about Direct3D support being dropped, because I get much higher framerates with the Direct3D renderer in OpenMW compared to the OpenGL renderer.
We are aware of this performance difference and know that it can be attributed to the poorly implemented OpenGL renderer in Ogre3D 1.x. Valve has shown that a proper OpenGL renderer can be every bit as fast as Direct3D, or even faster.

Final thank you note
We owe a great deal to Ogre3D and hope to have made up for it with the numerous patches we’ve contributed.

We want to thank all Ogre3D contributors for their great work, everyone on the Ogre3D forums for all the support and encouragement we’ve gotten from there, and a special thanks to Kojack for helping us debug a DDS texture issue.
 

Bahamut

Arcane
Joined
Jul 11, 2008
Messages
1,196
Got kinda mixed feelings about this switch, time will tell if the call was right
 

Akratus

Self-loathing fascist drunken misogynist asshole
Patron
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
0
Location
The Netherlands
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I heard bad things about Ogre3D anyway, in how well it works for such a project.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
I guess the 1.0 release is again out of reach for the time being...
 

Konjad

Patron
Joined
Nov 3, 2007
Messages
3,930
Location
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Hi guys, I was really looking forward to this project in 2006/7. How is it? Is it done yet? Better than vanilla? *checks the site* oh...
 

deuxhero

Arcane
Joined
Jul 30, 2007
Messages
11,324
Location
Flowery Land
I predict that the developers will one by one back out due to shifting priorities that comes with the long passage of time. The project will end in a half-baked state and fans of the idea will carry on wishing that someone would invest the massive amount of effort required just to get on par with vanilla in an entirely new engine.

That is a really pessimistic view but this history has played out many times. I'd be glad to be wrong.

That's why Open Source is great for this: Even if they just disappear tomorrow, someone can grab the code and keep working on it. You don't need to find someone and get the code (or worse: Permission) from them,
 

Invictus

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
2,789
Location
Mexico
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Let me see if I got this straight; they switched rendering engines because they were getting worse performance on modern pc where the main and perhaps onyl point in all this bullshit was to have a game that ran better on modern systems? Jesús I can think of so many things these poor saps could have spent their time on rather than this...even if they manage to get it running on par it is still kind of worthless anyway
 

Doctor Sbaitso

SO, TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS.
Patron
Joined
Oct 22, 2013
Messages
3,348
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Grab the Codex by the pussy Serpent in the Staglands
I predict that the developers will one by one back out due to shifting priorities that comes with the long passage of time. The project will end in a half-baked state and fans of the idea will carry on wishing that someone would invest the massive amount of effort required just to get on par with vanilla in an entirely new engine.

That is a really pessimistic view but this history has played out many times. I'd be glad to be wrong.

That's why Open Source is great for this: Even if they just disappear tomorrow, someone can grab the code and keep working on it. You don't need to find someone and get the code (or worse: Permission) from them,

These projects tend to be derelict before they are handed off. Don't want to be a bummer and I get what you are saying (I've spent decades in the Linux game). Just relaying some cold experience. Of course I wish them every success, but almost invariably these things fail.
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,967
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
Let me see if I got this straight; they switched rendering engines because they were getting worse performance on modern pc where the main and perhaps onyl point in all this bullshit was to have a game that ran better on modern systems? Jesús I can think of so many things these poor saps could have spent their time on rather than this...even if they manage to get it running on par it is still kind of worthless anyway

Well, hopefully the change is simply part of the process of learning how to get things right, since it's relatively minor and not an OH GOD WE'LL HAVE TO BEGIN FROM SCRATCH fuck-up.
 

Doctor Sbaitso

SO, TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS.
Patron
Joined
Oct 22, 2013
Messages
3,348
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Grab the Codex by the pussy Serpent in the Staglands
True CK. I don't mean to piss on the project but I guess I have. If devs are watching here, keep on keeping on and ignore assholes like me.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
From time to time I remember one of those vaporware open source projects and check out if there's something new.
Turns out, there is: The OpenSceneGraph port is now playable (albeit without most advanced rendering features for now).

From the update:
Code:
                       OpenMW     OpenMW-osg
Framerate avg.         49         75
Loading time avg.      7s         3.4s
System memory avg.     344.6mb    277.1mb
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Nice work all around. Important bug fixes and improved precision over objects far away from world origin from vanilla morrowind too (this is what causes everything to break in super large worlds).
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
Location
Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Nice work all around. Important bug fixes and improved precision over objects far away from world origin from vanilla morrowind too (this is what causes everything to break in super large worlds).
I still have trouble understanding why would anyone use floats for coordinates in a vidyagaem.

32 bit int coords are enough to pretty much map a planet-size cube with around mm precision.
64 bit int coords let you do the same with reasonably sized solar system.

Why the fuck use floats anywhere but possibly in the rendering stage?
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom