Greetings from another project

[garvek]

Hello all,

I work on DungeonHack project. We are currently trying to reborn and using your engine was among the possible options we are analysing.

Since we know that you're already pretty busy with your own stuff, we don't want to be some kind of evil leecher whining for features, but rather try to contribute in any way we could, so it could be some kind of mutual benefit (I hope).

How I see the thing:
- get sources and try to build it. (Done on windows, already)
- figure out how the stuff work
- ask questions (not too much, I hope ^^')
- figure out how to change the code to start adapt, or find fixes
- contribute (yes, I know it comes late in the list )
- decide of some deadline to figure out if we can finally fork out of here, or should try another way.
- if the fork is decided, fork. And contribute back as we find stuff that could be usefull (I hope) to you.

I hope it sounds sensible, I'm not very good at project management when it comes to games and open sources (my background is low level programmer, where project leading and development are quite different).

Any comments welcome.
Cheers

[ElderTroll]

Welcome Garvek,

That's very interesting to hear. How many programmers does the Dungeonhack team have?

Of course, our team has tunnel vision for version 1.0, so we can't code any features for your project. However, if your team decides on using our engine there are many tasks left in OpenMW that can benefit both projects. These include implementing combat, skills, attributes, magic, AI, etc. Take a look here to see what's still left to be done http://bugs.openmw.org/projects/openmw/roadmap. Another benefit would be the option for Dungeonhack to use Morrowind community-made art assets as placeholders for prototyping your game.


There are fully functional engines like Arx Liberatis; though its software is dated and it lacks the wealth of tools created by the community's of both Morrowind and Ogre3d.

[garvek]

Currently we 4-5 artists and 1 dev. We already have a little pile of assets but no solid base to use them on. BTW to use them in OMW do you have to convert them to NIF at the moment ?

A former programmer of our group developped an incomplete engine whose roots where pretty close to OpenMW in terms of dependencies used. Which has as good side effect that I'm famillial with pretty much of the libraries: Ogre, MyGUI, Bullet, OpenAL, ... I don't know Audiere but I don't think it is a big trouble.

I'll have to first understand how is structured your code, then I may try to import some features (like fireballs).

[1Samildanach]

Unfortunately it's currently Garvek and a few irregulars. Sadly, real life and co kicked in before critical mass did. So we've got a somewhat functional engine* that was in the middle of being rewritten (cleanup and some structural changes) by someone who had to move on, lots of art assets, some active artists, and a community that dates back a long way (if you remember Darkmouse's Daggerfall engine, some of us were around for that).

In other words, we're a bit worse for wear at the moment, which is why we're thinking about joining forces with you guys. It wouldn't be the first time we switched to a completely different engine, and we've got a history of not taking death for an answer .

*Procedural terrain, a few locations, an enemy, a sword you can kill said enemy with, a fireball you can burn said enemy with, and some other stuff I forget.

What we're hoping to do is help build up OMW's features until we've regrouped and the engine is at a stage where it makes sense for us to (ab)use it for our own purposes.

I suppose the ideal is actually to keep our changes compatible with your goals, since that would give your modders more toys and would remove a little effort-duplication. Of course, that is only beneficial if the effort of not breaking Morrowind compatibility etc. remains small, and we're quite happy to fork at some point down the road.

Probably the main features we're interested in implementing are terrain, dungeons, and quests that are random or procedural (Daggerfall style, but done better), as well as a completely different gameworld. There are other things we've discussed in the past, and I'm sure more will pop up in the future, but I would say those are the core of what we want in a game.

EDIT: Oh, and dynamic NPC's. A minor addition to the list, I know.

[sirherrbatka]

welcome

the plan is to work mostly on editor after openmw 1.0.0, until it will be usable. The problem is that we don't have that many features (well we can improve graphics) that we can add without new esp/esm and for that we need any editor.

The work on editor didn't even started at the moment. It makes us sad. But my guess is that you guys would need new editor and data file as well.

[ElderTroll]

That sounds great. I'm sure we'd all like to reach a point of playable engine sooner rather than later. The developer amongst your clan should have a look through the source and then register and grab a task that's relevant to Dungeonhack's progress.