OpenMW: Porting Morrowind to an open source engine

[Severian Silk]

Would you recommend OpenMW for someone who is playing MW for the first time?

Also, which OpenMW compatible mods should I use?

 

[Gord]

I think OpenMW should be fine for that by now, although it's still missing a few (non-critical) things. It's also quite easy to set-up.

I'm not really an expert on the matter, but overall mods that don't require MWSE (scripting extension) or make use of engine-bugs should work.
Graphical mods like textures or model replacements are usually fine, with one exception: pre-OpenMW bump maps will look very wrong in OpenMW (but only few mods use them).

Currently, if you insist on a highly pimped MW, it's better to mod vanilla MW instead of OpenMW.

 

[DraQ]

I think OpenMW should be fine for that by now, although it's still missing a few (non-critical) things.

How does the feature parity look currently?

 

[Gord]

How does the feature parity look currently?

Tbh, I don't really know.
I've been following it loosely for the most time and only recently started to play a bit with the latest version.
It works, seems to replicate the vanilla gameplay quite closely and it should be possible to finish the game, as far as I can tell.

But judging from the video overviews in the official channel, there are still a lot of small things (classified as bugs) that don't work exactly like in vanilla Morrowind.
Nothing major, but it's not a completely faithful replication yet.
Although it won't be a 100% replication anyway, they won't replicate all the vanilla bugs or exploits, for instance...

 

[Outlander]

So apparently the main modder guy is in poor health and decided to slow things down, however some other dudes took it upon themselves to continue development:

https://openmw.org/2016/heroes-openmw/

 

[NeoKino]

Cant wait till this thing is finished, I have a Crazy reBalance mod in the vain of BTB/Hotfusion/Wakim in the works and I want to mess with OpenMW script extender functions.

 

[Santander02]

More excited for this than that Skywind crap and more likely to be finished than the Daggerfall enhancements (sadly)

 

[IDtenT]

It already looks like a release version to me.

 

[Drax]

I think is mostly playable already.
I'll wait for a couple more releases for a new playthrough tho, I wanna see if they start improving things like character animations and so on.

 

[Santander02]

Support for complex mods is the do or die for me, the reason I haven't touched Skyrim SE is lack of the Script Extender compatibility.

 

[Akratus]

Why would you need the SE anyway? Worthless graphics enhancements, lack of mod support as you say, no extra content or gameplay improvements. .

The only positive wold be the 64 bit exe and related performance improvements, but I hear Bethesda's incompetent programming leads to little or no benefit, or even worse performance. So what's the big fuckin deal?

 

[Drax]

I wouldn't underestimate the performance improvements, that's the ONE feature that's actually worth the SE, in my PC there was considerable fps difference with vanilla.

 

[Santander02]

I hear Bethesda's incompetent programming leads to little or no benefit, or even worse performance.

This is not true, performance and stability is improved significantly:



Notice how it is pointed out that when trying to render high number of npcs the original game would crash 4 out of 5 times, and then when it worked fps dropped to like 15. Stability crashes is one thing that makes me pull my hair while playing this game, so while you are indeed correct there is nothing different about the SE that you couldn't get with mods, the one thing we can't, 64bit support, is actually very worthwhile. Naturally I would have never bothered to consider getting the SE if it weren't free already for LE owners, which is the only version of Skrym I bought nearly 4 years after the initial game's release at 75% discount.

 

[Old One]

I think is mostly playable already.

It is, unless it's gotten worse since I tried it several versions ago. Even then it was already playable to completion and more stable than the original.

I guess I'm going to wait for shadows to be re-implemented before I try again. A game looks kind of strange without shadows.

 

[throwaway]

Daggerfall enhancements (sadly)

Do tell

 

[Drax]

It's a pity about DaggerXL, since the overall project to provide a modern engine for several old classics (like fucking Blood and SW - Dark Forces) is great. I don't know why the retard doesn't opensource it.

 

[Drax]

What’s this? I can see the Ghostfence all the way from Ald-Ruhn and my fps is above 10. This is OpenMW and not MGE XE, right?

This is OpenMW alright and what you’re seeing is made possible by the newest addition from scrawl – distant terrain. This new feature is available in the latest OpenMW commit and if you’re on windows, you can download it from Ace’s nightly builds to try it out yourself.

So what does it do? In short, it simplifies the land mesh, nothing else. It doesn’t touch on scripts, NPCs and statics, but having simplified land certainly lightens the workload to a point where we can have some wiggle room with our view distance.

You may have noticed that I’ve taken use of this in some of the screenshots and loaded enough statics to create the illusion that there are objects as far as the eye can see. You can only spot empty land if I purposefully look at something very distant.

I must admit, I cheated a little to boost my fps. There is an additional feature called small object culling, which makes it so that objects too tiny are not rendered and my computer’s performance is spared. I used this rather aggressively, as I am working with a few years old laptop, but someone with a dedicated gaming rig might get better results while culling less.

Finally, I would like to share my last screenshot, as well as how you can set this up. After downloading and installing the latest commit, find settings.cfg and add the following lines:

[Camera]
# Determines how much land is rendered. Add another 6 or 66 to it.
viewing distance = 6666.0

# The default is 2, but you may want to change it to 16 at the highest. Improves performance.
small feature culling pixel size = 2.0

[Cells]
# This loads statics, NPCs and scripts around you. You may want to set this to 2, 3 or 4.
exterior cell load distance = 1

[Terrain]
# The on-switch to distant terrain. Set this to True.
distant terrain = True

Vehk approves.

 

[Drog Black Tooth]

Just tried this, for the first time ever.

Not sure how feature complete is it, but man oh man, does it run well. And the whole thing is aspect ratio aware. All movie clips, all UI backgrounds, loading screens, etc get letter boxed in widescreen, unlike the original engine that just looks fucked at modern resolutions. Even the journal looks nice! And the fonts are crisp sharp.

Runs very smooth, loading times are minimal.

Yeah, this is probably the best way to play Morrowind vanilla. Kinda like Quakespasm for Quake 1. Just the original game on modern systems, no bullshit, no software rot, top notch performance. If you're nostalgic about the first time you played Morrowind, this thing captures that feeling rather well.

 

[Drax]

OpenMW 0.42.0 release video:

 

[Perkel]

I like how he explained that 0.42 isn't 42% complete.

 

[mogwaimon]

Just watching that video made my skin crawl and gave me the itchies. I haven't played Morrowind since the Xbox version like 12 years ago....now that I know OpenMW can play the game start to finish and even supports some mods I might have to go back.

 

[Perkel]

Just watching that video made my skin crawl and gave me the itchies. I haven't played Morrowind since the Xbox version like 12 years ago....now that I know OpenMW can play the game start to finish and even supports some mods I might have to go back.

You might wait for 1.0

0.42 is still plagued by shitload of bugs from minor ones to critical ones. Just in this update alone they fixed people following you where before you had to load earlier save if by any chance following failed.

 

[Gord]

Have played around a bit with the distant terrain settings.
Together with the new water shader it can still slow down the game to a crawl quite quickly (not too shabby system here, either).
Still, at low-moderate settings, it's already quite an improvement.

0.42 is still plagued by shitload of bugs from minor ones to critical ones.

I'd say that if one wants to play MW right now, OpenMW is a good option. Still you are right in a way - I always think it's a bit "funny" how they still fix one or two bugs with each iteration which are somewhat major issues or deviations from vanilla behavior.

Another thing is if you absolutely need a mod which requires MWSE or relies on fancy engine hacks. Those obvioulsy won't work with OpenMW.

 

[Perkel]

I'd say that if one wants to play MW right now, OpenMW is a good option. Still you are right in a way - I always think it's a bit "funny" how they still fix one or two bugs with each iteration which are somewhat major issues or deviations from vanilla behavior.

Another thing is if you absolutely need a mod which requires MWSE or relies on fancy engine hacks. Those obvioulsy won't work with OpenMW.

I am not a big fan of Morrowind but best version right now to play it is still vanilla one. OpenMW still has a lot game breaking issues from outright spells not working correctly to script failures which often can happen when you don't notice it and you "uncover" shit doesn't work like it should hours into game.

I mean just 0.42 version fixed followers bug which basically brakes all quests in which people follow your character when you try to sleep.

 

[Gord]

Still, it's considered (in principle at least) fully playable as far as the MQ goes. So it's not all bad.