When to fork?

[ezzetabi]

Hi everyone,
I wrote few mods for Morrowind and I am very interested to this project because Morrowind is one of my favorite games ever; but with few annoying flaws.

The two flaws that annoy me most are the level-up system and the skill system.
In order to make the game more as I would like it I wrote those two mods:

Yet another level system mod and
Failure Based Learning

Of course I also posted them in the planetelderscrolls site because someone other might appreciate. And according to the comments the idea is indeed liked by someone.

Unfortunately both mods suffers from the ugly scripting system of the original Morrowind engine. Yalsm might go crazy if your stats become damaged. Fbl uses sounds to detect failures, it is unreliable and it does not blend with game at all.

So, I was thinking to make a fork to OpenMW project to apply those two modifications to the level-up and skill system directly in the engine.
Fork is a strong word, but I just mean to take an official version, make a patch (that would be relatively small), wait the next official version, repeat.

So, my questions are:
- is there any idea of when it would be reasonable to think to this?
- is there an official policy about forks? For example, considering it is a such small modification can I host it in openmw.org?
- it would be more reasonable await that the scripting system is improved compared to the original one?

[sirherrbatka]

When it will be playable.

But It would be whole better to focus on improving scripting so it won't get crazy (+the ultimate goal is to put game mechanics into scripting system, not into code - it will take a while though).

[Zini]

Agreed. I have a lot of ideas for improved scripting for OpenMW 1.x. We will certainly move away from a lot of hardcoded stuff, which will allow much more customised game mechanics. Forking for this purpose would be kinda pointless, because at the point when you can meaningfully fork, we can also start to make these improvements.

[psi29a]

Sounds like a post 1.0 openmw 'wishlist' idea. It could go into a mod for openmw.

[ezzetabi]

Both the modifications can made in the scripting system instead of the engine if it would be possible to:

- set reliably the base (before the game applies enhancements and damages) value of Attributes and Skills to any number even greater than 100.
- change the actions needed to increase the Skills. (In most cases from successes to failures)

Those are two show stoppers in the original Morrowind scripting system, of course it would even easier if something more would be present.

For example: if mods could simply disable the caps and reduce how much experience you gain doing the actions proportionally the current base value of the Skill the yalsm would become much simpler.

Some operations would be easier with some more math functions like log or mod.

About BrotherBrick comment: there shall be a section of OpenMW mods in the future?