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OpenMW: Porting Morrowind to an open source engine

Theodora

Arcane
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Glory to Ukraine
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Wow, OpenMW is looking great ^^ does anyone know how feature complete it is, or how feasible a playthrough without hacky fixes would be?
 

dacencora

Guest
Wow, OpenMW is looking great ^^ does anyone know how feature complete it is, or how feasible a playthrough without hacky fixes would be?
Very feasible. It’s been stable enough to play the vanilla game for a long time. Scratch that. It’s been MORE stable than the vanilla game for a long time. If you don’t want to do MSE mods, it’s the way to go.
 

deuxhero

Arcane
Joined
Jul 30, 2007
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11,325
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Flowery Land
Wow, OpenMW is looking great ^^ does anyone know how feature complete it is, or how feasible a playthrough without hacky fixes would be?
99%. The remaining differences are very minor and things most players won't run into (things like using Command spells to move a respawning NPC to a different cell and kill it breaks its respawn, which is of minimal issue given only guards and certain bandits in Bloodmoon respawn in the vanilla game and Command spells cost way too much to make one that lasts long enough to change an NPC's cell practical) or things you need to compare to vanilla to notice (these effects differ slightly). The performance gains in the latest version are also incredible: Even in Tamriel Rebuilt's Old Ebonheart (the most unoptimized area in all of Morrowind) I get 25+ FPS and 45+ in vanilla areas. The stability can't be underestimated either (I've only ever had one thing crash the game on me, it was very narrow, and I think it was a mod conflict anyways)
 
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mkultra

Augur
Joined
Feb 27, 2012
Messages
469
Cool, i've been waiting for OpenMW to get stable. I feel like getting into MW again, but I'll probably just end up doing mods for 3+ years straight like the last time (my tress in the video above).

This should fix numerous problems, like that annoying hitch you get every 15-20 seconds (depending on walking speed) where it has to load stuff, took Bethesda quite a while to fix that, even FO3 had some of it, but was to 99% fixable..

2011 video i made to demo my tree/grass mods and MGE:



is MGE implemented into OpenMW? i need to start reading up lol
 
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ironmask

Arbiter
Joined
Jan 12, 2019
Messages
416
This update is quite the improvement. My gameplay in old ebonheart went from 10 fps to 20 fps. 30 fps in some areas. That's with distant land and shadows enabled. Doesn't sound like much but I take it.
 

index.php

Arcane
Joined
Jul 5, 2013
Messages
875
Post-release catchup party! 2021-11-26 - lysol
openmw-150x150.png

Hello again!

While there have been several huge announcements we’ve wanted to share with you lately, we decided to wait with these news until after the release of OpenMW 0.47.0 to avoid stealing too much of the hype. Sorry for that, but we hope you understand. Now, without further ado, let’s dig in!

Lua is merged
Let’s just begin with, arguably, the biggest one. Petr Mikheev worked really hard on this huge contribution, and the extensive code reviews and feedback from the rest of the team were fantastic. The result is that the basic framework for OpenMW’s future scripting language, Lua, was merged into master a few months ago. This in itself doesn’t actually do much for the end user, but modders can already explore its functions. The real power, however, will be unleashed once gameplay mechanics, user interfaces, various graphical features and other exciting things are controllable through Lua scripts, in what we often refer to as the “de-hardcoding” of OpenMW. Some of this is currently being worked on, or even has already been merged, like Urm’s basic framework for a Lua-controlled GUI and Mikheev’s Lua-controlled camera and raycasting.

One important clarification needs to be made, though: OpenMW-Lua will not be compatible with MWSE-Lua, the 3rd-party scripting extender for Morrowind.exe. We aim to make our scripting engine at least as powerful as MWSE-Lua, but since MWSE-Lua is being developed for a different game engine, mods made for it will unfortunately not be compatible with OpenMW. Current MWSE-Lua mods will therefore have to be rewritten, or at least refactored, to be able to function in OpenMW.

And again, to make it perfectly clear: the implementation of Lua in OpenMW is still in its initial stage and will become more powerful as time goes by.

We will discuss Lua more in future blog posts.

Soft particles and sky shaders
If you are like most people, you might feel a bit annoyed by the fact that particles from things like fire look so obviously flat when looking at the source of the flame. Cody Glassman fixed this by implementing soft particles. There’s a video example in the merge request, and the difference is huge.

Cody also recently got his sky shader branch merged into OpenMW master. This is a feature that has been requested for quite a while now by people wanting to do great looking shaders for OpenMW. And now that the sky shaders are here, people like vtastek will be able to play around with the look of the sky, for example making the sky blend a lot better with the fog.

Navmesh disk cache
One exclusive feature OpenMW has is the automatic and dynamic generation of navigation meshes which greatly enhances the AI’s pathfinding. Basically, OpenMW creates a map of the currently active game world that tells the AI where the terrain is walkable and where it is not, preventing situations where NPCs walk straight into walls or jump down cliffs. The creation of this map is done at runtime in a separate thread, so most modern multi-core computers won’t notice any significant performance loss because of this. For people with weaker computers or mobile devices, however, loading times can be significantly longer. Because of this, elsid is working on a feature that will store the navigation meshes in files once they have been created, making the generation of them only necessary once.

Zoomable world map
Ever wanted to be able to zoom in and out on the world map? See more of the world at the same time? Or less of it, with more detail? Now you can, thanks to Cédric Mocquillon’s new feature that allows for different zoom levels of the map, including automatically merged map markers when zooming far out and a smooth transition between local and world map when zooming in. Simple yet so effective and a very nice addition to the engine.

Raindrops keep falling on my head…
…and into the water too. Let’s face it, OpenMW’s raindrop ripples look pretty terrible. Or rather, they were looking pretty terrible, since wareya took the matter in his own hands by making an actual good-looking raindrop ripple effect. You can see how they look using a nightly version or visiting the merge request’s GitLab page. Neat, right?

No more adding mod directories in the openmw.cfg file
Well, unless you want to of course. Anyway, Frederic Chardon has had this merge request up for a very long time, but after a lot of discussion regarding its design, it seems we will finally see it merged soon. This means that you will soon be able to add and remove data directories directly in the OpenMW launcher. Finally!

Magic effects are reworked
Evil Eye has been working relentlessly on OpenMW, and a truckload of MRs merged lately have been his work. One of his bigger projects has been the rework of magic effects. For most people, this probably won’t be very noticeable since there are mostly under-the-hood changes, but quite a few differences to Morrowind’s original engine have been solved thanks to this huge task of his. Check out the merge request here. If you’re a Morrowind purist that has been annoyed with OpenMW handling certain magic effects differently compared to the original, you’ll like this one a lot.

That’s about it. Or really, it’s far from it, but we’ll have to round off this blog post somewhere. Thank you so much for sticking around with us through all these years. We’ll see you again another time!
https://openmw.org/2021/post-release-catchup-party/
 

RobotSquirrel

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Developer
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Aug 9, 2020
Messages
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Adelaide
damn looks like they finally nuked Open Microwave from the playstore.
Todd knows now so hopefully they don't go after the project I'll be super pissed off if they do.

I guess I'll be getting it via the git from now on if people weren't aware already OpenMW works on Android.
 
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Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
damn looks like they finally nuked Open Microwave from the playstore.
Todd knows now so hopefully they don't go after the project I'll be super pissed off if they do.

I guess I'll be getting it via the git from now on if people weren't aware already OpenMW works on Android.
iirc the agreement was always that they keep it off the playstore and bethesda will pay them no mind, was it even put there by the OpenMW team themselves?
 

ADL

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Joined
Oct 23, 2017
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Nantucket

Just saw this video on YouTube and it made me want to mod the game again. Are there any efforts to make modding less of a pain in the ass than it is currently? Unless I'm doing something incredibly wrong, mod managers are completely out of the question.
 

Hag

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Breizh
Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
Navmesh disk cache
One exclusive feature OpenMW has is the automatic and dynamic generation of navigation meshes which greatly enhances the AI’s pathfinding. Basically, OpenMW creates a map of the currently active game world that tells the AI where the terrain is walkable and where it is not, preventing situations where NPCs walk straight into walls or jump down cliffs. The creation of this map is done at runtime in a separate thread, so most modern multi-core computers won’t notice any significant performance loss because of this. For people with weaker computers or mobile devices, however, loading times can be significantly longer. Because of this, elsid is working on a feature that will store the navigation meshes in files once they have been created, making the generation of them only necessary once.

Now that's awesome. No more sitting duck bandits stuck on a rock, no more reload because some argonian following me to Saedrith Mora can't find his way around a fence.
 

Valdetiosi

Scholar
Joined
Apr 18, 2016
Messages
215
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Finland
Not sure about what's PBR Shaders are supposed to do, coloring looks off.
The Volumetric Cloud & Mist though is :incline:
 

ADL

Prophet
Joined
Oct 23, 2017
Messages
3,678
Location
Nantucket
Would it be possible to completely mod Morrowind's combat in this to not be complete garbage? Like making it play like an actual action RPG?
Yes, but that comes after they "de-hardcode" OpenMW in the not-too-distant-future. After that is when things get really interesting. New UX, new combat, new character controls, even new games in the style of The Elder Scrolls III.
 

Hace El Oso

Arcane
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Joined
Jan 5, 2020
Messages
3,114
Location
Bogotá
I’m looking to start a play through of OpenMW and Tamriel Rebuilt. Does anyone have a recommendation for a leveling/xp gain mod to prevent rapid over-leveling for all the new content? And of course something similar for economy balance.
 

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