openmw.org

I have all these random tools, animkit, bsa registration utility, Morrowind Graphics Extender, etc.

So will openmw be able to take on the functions of these tools? needing tools just to deal with BSA's and animations seems kinda decrepit to me, and MGE's functionality could easily be absorbed by openmw, MGE being not much more than some new shaders and distant land generation, stuff the two newer games both handle out of the box.

To my knowledge, The Morrowind Graphics Extender, Code patcher and the Script Extender will be obsolete. I believe there is more, or will be in the future. Everything is possible.

We definitely need to make a list of all the tools being buried by openmw so that new players know what they need, confusing.

Well, AFAICS virtually everything that is made to run on Morrowind.exe or read info from or write info to Morrowind.ini is useless. So, the more interesting question is which tools (in the means of 3rd party products) will still work? Everything that works on single ESP/Ms should be fine (e.g. Enchanted Editor or Mod Translators). You can get Wrye Mashs BAIN system to work as long as Wrye Mash can find a Morrowind.ini in the same folder as its own mopy folder even if the file is else useless, its plugin and savegame manager are useless or broken (depending on your point of view). Maybe you can get MWMM or NMM to work at least in a similar fashion, not using both of them, so I can't tell. I also have not yet tried to run TESTool yet but most likely merged objects and merged levelled lists won't work correctly, cleaning might do.

And concerning the distant land rendering MGEs distant land generator is a pretty brilliant tool, try to get at least a similar distant land view in Oblivion, it takes RAEVWD plus a couple of tools and a lot of time to do what the distant land generator does in a few minutes to get a result that is half as good and there is hardly a way to configure it at all. MGE creates meshes and textures from whatever is inside your data folder and does not require you to do anything besides running the wizard.

Ultimately every 3rd party tool should become obsolete (not necessarily with OpenMW 1.0).

Everything that works on single ESP/Ms should be fine

Can't guarantee that. We will extend the format after 1.0 and I have no idea how these tools will deal with that. Even now OpenCS saves a variant of the ESP/M format. Admittedly the difference is minimal and in theory doing "rename, load into TES-CS, hit compile all, save" should restore full compatibility. But that is not going to stay that way after 1.0.

Okay, my writing was a bit sloppy at that point, I should have said they will do for everything that was done for the original Morrowind.

That is actually an interesting point. it will take a while before OpenMW/OpenCS can replace all of the existing toolset. Of course and software that interacts with Morrowind.exe is out of the window the moment you start using OpenMW. But tools that are used to modify content files may still be usable for a while and could serve as a gap filler until OpenCS has fully caught up. I am thinking about things like TESAME. If someone wants to monitor the compatibility of such tools with OpenCS generated content files, feel free to leave the results in our wiki.

Ok so a rough list of what is obsolete, and not (yet):

*Morrowind Code Patch
*Morrowind EXE Optimizer
*Morrowind Graphics Extender (Will openmw have a solution for distant land?)

Ones that are up in the air still yet:

*Animkit
*BSA Registration utility
*Morrowind Patch 1.6.5
*GOTY Script Tidy


All of the above are utilities i keep for my own game, im sure there is more than that, but thats what i have.

*BSA Registration utility

Wont work cause it alters Morrowind.ini, but you can easily OpenMWs edit config file manually (as you could have done with Morrowind.ini).

You could re-import the Morrowind.ini file. But there is no GUI option for that yet. Unfortunately the development of the launcher is lagging behind a bit.