Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

General discussion regarding the OpenMW project.
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SchvanysEpitome
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Joined: 05 Nov 2017, 08:06

Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by SchvanysEpitome »

Hello all, I have been following the OpenMW project since around 0.37. Not long at all I know. Recently I have seen lots of people bickering back and forth. People hating on each other and name calling. Specifically, excessive amounts of hostility both towards OpenMW as well as MWSE. Quite frankly I just don't get it. Why do people feel the need to put other people down? We're both playing and modding the same game we all have come to love, Morrowind. Perhaps the reason boils down to mod incapabilities? Resulting in mod authors diverting their time to two different versions of Morrowind? One that's compatible with vanilla morrowind or one that's compatible with the more dominant hacky wacky of getting things done? Maybe the constant nagging of mod authors to convert thier mods to be compatible to OpenMW? Obviously I am a bit biased towards OpenMW because I support everything about it, but that does not mean that I hate MWSE or that I don't use MWSE. There's no need for such hostility, bitterness, or negativity. I guess I just wanted to spread positivity towards OpenMW with this discussion. Users of OpenMW please remember to consider the time mod authors put into thier work before asking if they could make an OpenMW. I will not put out any names but perhaps that would help alleviate some of the negativity surrounding OpenMW. Sorry for the rant I just feel like this is a needed discussion. And please, don't go out of your way to put down MWSE or OpenMW.
kuyondo
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Joined: 29 Mar 2016, 17:45

Re: Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by kuyondo »

People hating on OpenMW now because it lacks the fancy stuffs of MGE and MWSE. Mod authors and the loyals that utilize MWSE are worried that one day the majority of the Morrowind community would switch to OpenMW.
But thats probably normal. MWSE and MGE has been around for more than a decade, a lot of effort has been made to improve it, and lots of good mods have been made out of it. So there are reasons for them to worry.

As soon as I discovered OpenMW in v0.39, it has been my engine ever since. I really didnt mind the graphics or modding capabilities it lacked. It was the stability and performance that caught my attention. Moreover, since its open sourced, i dont really need to worry about graphics and modding capability. Those things will come.

There are quite a handful of popular mod authors out there that rejects OpenMW outright. So it would be better to test the mods on our own, and then post the information in here(mod compatibility subforum), rather than asking them.
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psi29a
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Re: Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by psi29a »

No one hates MWSE, it's great for extending the capability of Morrowind. It's creator, NullCascade, is a member of the of the forum here.

The fallout was about the future of OpenMW's scripting future post 1.0 which was a technical discussion that got side-tracked (hijacked?) by a long running thread about GitHub's acquisition by Microsoft. The result of which saw a respected developer rage-quit for having not only his view-point trashed but also his work on the project dismissed by those who haven't contributed anything to the project. This is a shame considering that this, for many people, is a labour of love, a open-source project that people have literally poured years into.

How would anyone feel to having strangers come into your house and start shitting on your rug? That's the question.

The outcome has been:
* OpenMW continues on, actually more active in the past two months then in the last six months.
* Many new developers have stepped up and are contributing regularly.
* Working tightly with the largest morrowind modding projects: TR, PT and PC; see what would improve their lives during development with regards to replacing CS with OpenMW-CS.
* The future scripting language is Lua[1] matching that of MWSE. Meaning that mod compatibility is a matter of implementation, using those functions that are common to both projects.

So OpenMW is still moving forward regardless.

[1] discussion about other languages exists, the OpenMW developers are convinced that Lua is still the future.
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Zini
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Re: Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by Zini »

Its really simple: As a general rule people are horrible. Not all the time and not everyone, but if you get together a sufficiently large group of people it is inevitable you get to see the horrible in some of them. Seriously, people are the worst.
lambda
Posts: 70
Joined: 11 Sep 2016, 17:10

Re: Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by lambda »

Its really simple: As a general rule people are horrible.
I 100% agree with this (for theological reasons). And then I would add, for the sake of intellectual honesty, and I am the worst of the worst.
LordInsane
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Joined: 17 Jul 2018, 15:01

Re: Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by LordInsane »

psi29a wrote: 24 Jul 2018, 08:25* Working tightly with the largest morrowind modding projects: TR, PT and PC; see what would improve their lives during development with regards to replacing CS with OpenMW-CS.
Just a minor question here, by PC do you mean Province: Cyrodiil? If so they are part of the Project Tamriel umbrella, so wouldn't need to be mentioned separately from PT.
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psi29a
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Re: Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by psi29a »

My excuses, just PT and TR then.... currently. :)

Obviously... if there are other people 'dealing' with the CS and would like to work with us to make their lives easier, please come forward. We want to hear from and work with you!
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lysol
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Re: Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by lysol »

I think the most negative attitudes have settled a bit now. Psi summed it up nicely.

However, from time to time, i notice people on discord and similar that say that openmw has failed, that it was a too ambitious project for a non profit team and that mwse (which these people for some reason think is some kind of enemy to openmw) will make the project irrelevant. I have a few things to say:

- OpenMW is still going strong, so it has obviously not failed.
- It is not too ambitious. First, because the game is fully playbale already. Second, because it is not a unique project at all. Look at other projects such as openrw for gta 3, openra for c&c strategy games, openrct2 for roller coaster tycoon 1 & 2, spring engine for total annihilation + many original foss games and many more projects.
- MWSE is not an enemy. Since NullCascade took over that project, it has made impressive stuff happen in Morrowind modding. And while this is great, I doubt this will bring to vanilla stuff like ocean waves in water (can be implemented now through osg) and navigation meshes. Could be wrong of course, but even if they actually can implement this, it can not be done natively in the code, and mac and linux users will not be able to use it.

Not that the last stuff even matters, since mwse is not an enemy. My point is that even if OpenMW never gets as cool as a heavily modded vanilla game, it is still relevant. It is already to many people.
davidcernat
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Joined: 19 Jul 2016, 01:02

Re: Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by davidcernat »

I think it's very unfortunate that some people are unable to appreciate the mountains of work and effort that have been poured into creating OpenMW, and unable to understand how they have unlocked limitless potential that hacking the original engine never could.

That being said, we should not let that lack of understanding affect us, and we should simply dispel it through various impressive demonstrations of OpenMW's capabilities.
NullCascade
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Re: Recent Negativity Regarding OpenMW

Post by NullCascade »

I think a lot of the negativity comes from some different experiences and comments on Reddit/Nexus. The first thing any new mod gets asked on those platforms is "Is this Rebirth compatible?" followed by "Is this OpenMW compatible?" I think this creates some animosity towards them, even though they're both fine projects.

In the case of OpenMW, it should be that project's job to be compatible with Morrowind mods, not the job of Morrowind mods to be compatible with it. Many modders finish them, try them out on the other engine, and they just don't work. This makes people working on vanilla MW hate how unstable and unreliable OpenMW is, while it makes OpenMW modders shrug and just not support the vanilla engine. During this year's modathon more than a few modders ranted at OpenMW and why it wasn't working with their mods.

Another factor is time. I think OpenMW is more than a decade old? The longer development stretches on without any tangible, beneficial deliveries to modders, the more modders will write it off. Plus for the past few years devs have lied and said "It's almost ready! Probably releasing this year!" then not met those statements. It's cool to tell someone you'll take them to the zoo this year. It's not cool to tell them you'll take them to the zoo this year, for the past 5 years, but never actually do so. At the end of the day, it just doesn't live up to its own hype, which sparks disappointment/resentment and makes people think OpenMW is vaporware.

I think OpenMW is well on track for fixing some of these issues, by starting to work more closely with modders. Make them happy, and they'll make you happy. More measured expectations might also help. Instead of pulling an E3 Oblivion Todd and saying that everything "Just works!" be honest with the limitations and progress.
lysol wrote: 24 Jul 2018, 21:48- MWSE is not an enemy. Since NullCascade took over that project, it has made impressive stuff happen in Morrowind modding. And while this is great, I doubt this will bring to vanilla stuff like ocean waves in water (can be implemented now through osg) and navigation meshes. Could be wrong of course, but even if they actually can implement this, it can not be done natively in the code, and mac and linux users will not be able to use it.
Agreed. We're not enemies, and in the long run OpenMW will become the defacto engine. I just think the project is many years out from this still, so there's plenty of time to get in modding without waiting.

As for ocean waves and improved navmeshes, both are possible. MWSE doesn't have the limitations people think it does. The main ones are 1) the time it takes to reverse engineer and dehardcode the feature; and 2) we can't ship a recompiled exe, so changing data structure sizes is annoying. The scene graph can be controlled already to an extent, enabling mods like Glow in the Dahrk and shield wearing/weapon sheathing that are simple, quick to create, and don't have compatibility concerns that the Morrowind/OpenMW scripting paradigm has. And that's just in just the past week or so. I think the main differences between the projects aren't their endgame potential, but how they approach it. The post-1.0 design doc is drastically different than how I'd approach anything, and shows the different directions the projects are heading.
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