OpenMW Game Template

[DestinedToDie]

Psi can you upload your OpenMW build and pm me the link? Otherwise we might be going back and forth for a while.

Edit: In addition to 3 fingers there is some further weirdness. For now I'm going to recreate it.

Edit2: Skeleton is done! Awaiting upload link so I can test if it crashes in Psi's template. Presuming it doesn't, we're off to testing animations. Edit3: Now that I think of it, I will probably need to cut my dummy into bodyparts to test animations.

Fun fact - the Bethesda skeleton has asymmetrical legs.

[psi29a]

I'll try to upload something this evening... I'm actually in the middle of a house renovation.

[DestinedToDie]

Now for some serious weirdness. Upon converting to nif file, some bones are moved to align with other bones, and some bones disappear off the face of Nifskope's viewport. I was initially very frightened, but I tested this for a good few hours and noticed that if I import only the skeleton of my dragon, it also has bones going off the grid and realigning. The dragon animation worked despite seemingly missing bones.

Now if I assume correctly, these bones are simply in ghost mode and accompanied with an animation will work as intended. If not, then this means a full stop. With the Nif format there will never be new NPC skeleton and animations and thus there will never be an original game on OpenMW. If so, we'll have to wait until after OpenMW verison 1.0 for the engine to accept other formats.

For those interested in what our new skeleton might look like, he's there in the left! As you can see, he has all sorts of weird bones, such as chest (which pokes out from around the belly area), shield bone, weapon bone, wrists(which are actually above where the wrist should be), upper arm(forking away with forearm from Bip01 UpperArm), etc . I don't know who from Bethesda conjured up a skeleton like that. The right picture is with the missing bones after exporting.

http://i.imgur.com/dd3Pc3z.png

Fun fact 2: It turns out that although you can't see it in Base_Anim.nif, the nif also contains an invisible mesh skinned to the skeleton, as well as a shadow mesh (used for creating shadows, I suppose). Anim1st seems to have a mesh just like that, except visible.

Edit: I hope I don't have to recreate this.

http://i.imgur.com/ToqHvg8.png

If anyone has any idea what the purpose of this might be, then feel free to let me know.

[psi29a]

Our very first release:
https://github.com/OpenMW/openmw-templa ... late-0.1.0

any bugs, suggestions, additions... please post them here.

Full disclosure: I'm a software engineer, not a designer so if you can do better with the textures... please do!

[Chris]

Edit: Maybe I should also mention Base_Anim has only 3 fingers, Base_Anim1st has 5. Edit2: I think Base_Anim1st is used for animations for when you're holding a weapon.

base_anim1st is used when in first-person, where the camera is much closer to the hands and so more detail is desired. and base_anim is used for third-person and NPCs. At the time of Morrowind's release, having fewer moving bones helped ease the CPU/GPU load, but I don't think OpenMW requires it to be that way. A modern game/TC would likely prefer to have all 5 fingers in both cases.

[DestinedToDie]

We will see. I will test first animations with 3 fingers, then add 1 more finger to see if the engine complains. Indeed, I'd rather have both skeletons identical. If everything goes perfectly, then maybe we can even drop the Bethesda skeleton naming and make our own custom skeleton with no oddities and a different amount of bones? Though I'm not sure what in the engine dictates it, or is it this very Base_Anim files that does?

Edit: Because I'm not a software engineer, I want to get this right.

1. everytihng in ./data goes into ~/.local/share/openmw/data

I assume this means C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local. Or am I wrong and I need to create a local folder inside the OpenMW folder? Edit2: I think i figured it out. In Windows 8 the directory is actually my games/openMW/Data.

Edit3: Archive Morrowind.bsa not found. I think I did all the steps mentioned. Perhaps I need to delete these lines:

fallback-archive=Morrowind.bsa
fallback-archive=Tribunal.bsa
fallback-archive=Bloodmoon.bsa

Deleting these lets me launch the game. However when I click new, the game crashes. Can you send me your conig file psi? I assume all the fallback lines have to be deleted, but then I get an error on startup.

[psi29a]

I am using the latest build from master (0.37), if that helps. Yes the fallbacks all need to be commented out.

"The extension cfg is not allowed." <-- can someone fix this?

I'm attaching my configs from ~/.config/openmw

Once we figure out how it 'works' on each platform, we can write a better installation file. Obviously a lot of this is due to the fact that OpenMW isn't yet primed for content distribution: like everything in one archive and, no more placing files into special directories.

What does the game crash with? OpenMW shouldn't just "crash", regardless of what is missing. It should properly exit with an error message about why. I would consider that a crash.

[psi29a]

Not enabled in latest release, but just testing this morning... new icons and textures.

I still need to replace a few and give attribution to http://game-icons.net/, they make awesome SVG graphics.

The help-text still needs to be more generic and remove references to Morrowind where capable. Release 0.2.0 should have all initial icons and corrected text.

[DestinedToDie]

Ok, there must be something obvious I'm missing here.

http://i.imgur.com/ltxyK5j.png

data="C:\OpenMWGame\openmw-template" Line is at fault. If I change it to the original one which points to data="C:\Bethesda Softworks\Morrowind\Data Files" my game loads fine and I can go into new game, but of course it uses Bethesda's Nightsky among other things. If I rewrite that line, OpenMW wants me to rerun the installation wizard.

Could not find the Data Files location.

The directory containing Data Files was not found.

Run installation wizard.

Edit: Okay, so I got it to load OpenMW font, but when I click New Game, it just crashes, nothing in console. Btw, it launches only if I deleted the fallback .bsa-s, unlike what I see in your config file psi. Right now this is too obscure for me to get running.

My current setup:

1. everytihng in ./data goes into C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Games\OpenMW\data
2. everything in ./font goes into ./resources/mygui/
3. everything in openmw-template goes into C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Games\OpenMW\data
4. Delete fallback bsa-s in config file. This stops the launcher from giving bsa errors when I click Play.
5. data="C:\Users\Username\Documents\My Games\OpenMW\data"
content=openmw-template.omwgame

In config file.

When I launch the game and click New:

http://i.imgur.com/TyuR4rZ.jpg

[psi29a]

Some tips:
* use notepad++, never notepad. This will auto-detect line-endings and convert on the fly.
* try running openmw from the command line, not from the launcher.
* if you do run from the launcher, you can safely ignore the "Could not find the Data Files location". I get that too, but doesn't stop me from hitting cancel and then selecting openmw-template.omwgame and launching it.

As for errors, I do get these:
Music Error: Resource 'music/special/morrowind title.mp3' not found
Failed to open video: Resource 'video/morrowind_logo.bik' not found

but I do not get the OGRE exceptions... I suspect that is something specific to the windows build? Ace, can you verify that things don't go wrong when a file is missing? I would hate to find that the windows build is so brittle.

You can always try renaming openmw-template just to just template to see if windows barfs on the dash (strip). Be sure to update your config file to point to the right location. Or you can just move your current data dir C:\Bethesda Softworks\Morrowind\Data Files out of the way and copy the template files over. That way when you run openmw, it won't use Beth's assets but the templates.