Observations on 0.34

[ghales]

I've been trying 0.34 and I've found only two new bugs (already reported). However, listed below are a few things I noticed that are different from vanilla Morrowind, but which may not count as bugs.

Spawn Rate
The OpenMW wilderness is empty compared to Morrowind. In Morrowind, you are constantly attacked by creatures, and if you re-visit a cell you have cleared, creatures will re-spawn almost immediately. In OpenMW, there are fewer creatures and they re-spawn rarely. I walked from Aldruin to Ghostgate and got attacked by one Cliffracer. About five game days later, I walked it again and was not attacked once. In Morrowind, you would run into a half-dozen cliffracers every time you made this trip.

Bodies
In Morrowind, corpses eventually disappear. In OpenMW, they stay forever.

Light Spells
Light spells are underpowered compared to Morrowind. A 20 point light spell in Morrowind casts more light than a 50 point light in OpenMW. Torches look about the same, though. This might be graphics hardware dependant. I am using an NVidia 550 Ti with proprietary blob driver.

Climbing
I can climb much steeper slopes in OpenMW than I can in Morrowind.

Ranged Spell Speed
Ranged spells travel more slowly in OpenMW. I find it very easy to dodge spells cast at me.

Save Game Size
OpenMW save games are bigger than Morrowind saves. I have a level 9 OpenMW char with a 12M save file. My level 13 Morrowind char has a 4M save. It makes a big difference when loading and saving games. Does OpenMW save all the same data that Morrowind does? For example, dead bodies?

Overall, OpenMW is looking great. Combat, particularly, has improved tremendously since the last version I tried (0.31). Thank you to all the devs; you guys are awesome.

[scrawl]

OpenMW save games are bigger than Morrowind saves. I have a level 9 OpenMW char with a 12M save file. My level 13 Morrowind char has a 4M save. It makes a big difference when loading and saving games. Does OpenMW save all the same data that Morrowind does? For example, dead bodies?

There are a few reasons why the saves are bigger.
- The save format isn't optimized yet. Storing of actor skills/attributes is very inefficient.
- The OpenMW format is more verbose than the original format (uses more subrecord names rather than raw data). This is to make the files easier to debug in a hex editor. But eventually we might want to optimize this part too.
- MW will eventually "forget" about most actor state after a while (the infamous "72 hour bug"):

The "72-Hours Bug": A Brief Explanation
(Thanks to DinkumThinkum, Emma, Iudas, Qarl and others for this information.)
The so-called "72-Hours Bug" is not really a bug at all - nor is it necessarily 72 game hours.
The time is set by fCorpseClearDelay (see "Game Settings"), which defaults to 72, and which
also controls the delay before non-persistent corpses vanish. After the specified time, some
temporary data is cleared to improve game performance.
Examples include:
• Talked to PC flag (dialogue) is reset.
• ForceGreeting: an actor will not be available for a ForceGreeting after the specified
time unless "Corpses persist" is checked in the object info box.
• Actor stats and skills are reset to editor/autocalc levels.
• AI resets: e.g. an actor in combat with the player but with a low fight setting will no
longer attack.
• Targeted scripts on non-persistent objects lose their targeting.
• OnActivate may be reset (see function description for more details).

Some of these resets may actually be considered features but the "Actor stats and skills are reset" looks problematic. Not sure if we want to implement that.

In Morrowind, corpses eventually disappear. In OpenMW, they stay forever.

Related to unimplemented fCorpseClearDelay - file a bug please.

I can climb much steeper slopes in OpenMW than I can in Morrowind.

Ranged spells travel more slowly in OpenMW. I find it very easy to dodge spells cast at me.

Wasn't aware of these. Could you post reproduction steps? I.e. coordinates for a problematic slope / ID of a problematic ranged spell.

Light spells are underpowered compared to Morrowind. A 20 point light spell in Morrowind casts more light than a 50 point light in OpenMW. Torches look about the same, though. This might be graphics hardware dependant. I am using an NVidia 550 Ti with proprietary blob driver.

Create a bug please.

The OpenMW wilderness is empty compared to Morrowind. In Morrowind, you are constantly attacked by creatures, and if you re-visit a cell you have cleared, creatures will re-spawn almost immediately. In OpenMW, there are fewer creatures and they re-spawn rarely. I walked from Aldruin to Ghostgate and got attacked by one Cliffracer. About five game days later, I walked it again and was not attacked once. In Morrowind, you would run into a half-dozen cliffracers every time you made this trip.

Create a bug please. I know that OpenMW can't respawn creatures if they have been moved to a different cell. This is related to the unimplemented "keep track of object cell movements" feature.

[ghales]

In Morrowind, corpses eventually disappear... Related to unimplemented fCorpseClearDelay - file a bug please.

Done.

Light spells are underpowered... Create a bug please.

Done.

The OpenMW wilderness is empty... Create a bug please.

Done, but are you sure? Some people would consider fewer cliffracers as an improvement.

I can climb much steeper slopes in OpenMW... Could you post reproduction steps? I.e. coordinates for a problematic slope

You can see it everywhere, but it is very noticeable on slopes with increasing steepness. There is one just outside of Seyda Neen on the way to the smuggler's cave. With identical new characters, I can get higher up in OpenMW than in Morrowind.

Ranged spells travel more slowly in OpenMW... Could you post... ID of a problematic ranged spell

I think it's all of them. When I was sniping creatures with fireballs or lightning bolts, it seemed to take a long time to travel to the target. When an Ash Slave stopped in front of me and repeatedly fired off whatever it was, it was so slow I just sidestepped until it ran out of Magicka. But I didn't measure the speed.

Do all the spells have the same speed? If so, it should be easy to time them over a fixed distance.

[matthewfarmery]

I have also noticed how empty the world is, and dungeons also don''t seem to respawn with enemies, I also noticed sometimes that tombs don't seem to always spawn ghosts,

as for fewer cliffracers, I can see the advantage of that, but then again, it wouldn't be true to the spirit of the original game if there were fewer. (but maybe there numbers can be reduced by a tad, as they can get a bit too annoying if you travel in those regions.

[scrawl]

Turns out that levelled creature spawning completely broke (oops). Fixed now. However this would have been an issue in 0.35 only as far as I can tell. Did you mean to name your thread "observations on 0.35"?

[matthewfarmery]

Turns out that levelled creature spawning completely broke (oops). Fixed now. However this would have been an issue in 0.35 only as far as I can tell. Did you mean to name your thread "observations on 0.35"?

that would explain a lot, and why I not seen any monsters for a while, but good that its fixed.

[psi29a]

Turns out that levelled creature spawning completely broke (oops). Fixed now. However this would have been an issue in 0.35 only as far as I can tell. Did you mean to name your thread "observations on 0.35"?

that would explain a lot, and why I not seen any monsters for a while, but good that its fixed.

But did mean observations on 0.35 as scrawl suggested, or did you just get done looking at 0.34? Because we are in the RC phase of 0.35 now... release is right around the corner.

[matthewfarmery]

my own observations (apart from some minor issues (one been me a plonker ) has been a really enjoyable game so far, I played the original so many times, so its nice to see this game getting a nice lick of paint. I had zero crashes so far, (awesome!!) and hope it remains like that, (considering how crash prone vanilla was)

hopefully the fix with spawning levelled creatures will make make into tomorrows windows nightly build (from ACE's links) as I don't really want to try and build this from source. (stuff like this is a big limitation of mine)

still, while I not really got too far into the game, I am enjoying myself playing this awesome game again,

hopefully I will start playing in a world should be populated a bit more, I did notice that I wasn't seeing any monsters in places, (I should have reported this, but I not really been in that many dungeons to really notice a problem) apart from a couple of tombs and no ghosts.

also its good to see the gamma slider make it into the releases, as some places are really dark to see in, so that does help a bit.

I'm still seeing some town guards running into fences, Pelagiad is one place I have seen this, (should I do a bug report about this? or would this be part of the AI and pathing issues? as my saves which I could provide shows this clearly, (bug removed the link as that issue was me not been in the right place, (as I was tired when I played the game then)

still, I will see if I can see other issues and report them, so far, openmw has been really stable, (windows) which is awesome, and like I said, vanilla was a pain in the backside to play due to that.

hopefully once more features start to make it into the game, (like bodies disappearing over time) and over commands, and hopefully dungeons will respawn too. then this game will be well worth playing again.

just my two cents.

[psi29a]

@matthewfarmery: You've missed answering the question two times now... shooting for a third?

That, or you've trolled both Scrawl and myself.

[matthewfarmery]

I'm talking about the 0.35RC, I used the latest build from ACE's post, so the none spawning issue I have seen in 0.35,