openmw.org

A while back I promised I would post my post 1.0 plan sometimes in Spring. Here is a little progress update:

It has taken a bit longer than expected, but I am still kinda on track for Spring. I worked on the document on and off for the last six month or so and I am sitting now on 73 pages.

The first draft is nearly finished, except for the AI part which gives me a bit of trouble (may need to tinker with it a bit longer). After that I want to do at least one revision and then hand it over to scrawl for review and for adding in his own stuff.

Below is a little sample. Its a markdown file that should be compatible with github. The pdf document the screenshot is taken from was made with pandoc.

Awesome. I will enjoy reading the whole thing once you release it

our goal here is to make

I do believe you meant to write "not" somewhere in there.

Saw the thread title and jaw dropped.

Never thought I would ever get so hyped over a 73+ page long project planning document. But really, I have been following this project almost daily since late 2012 (around the release of 0.18 IIRC). OpenMW is like a part of me now. Haha.

Been lurking here since 2013 but I decided to make an account to chip in here; I think the only reason people don't use OpenMW is because it doesn't have graphics as nice as MGE XE. That's the only reason. Even if a mod came out that turned OpenMW combat into M&B combat, people would still prefer the vanilla engine because of MGE XE's graphical features. In my opinion if you really want to get people to use OpenMW over vanilla you need to focus on at least graphical parity with MGE XE. That's why Skywind is so big in the TES community, I know we scorn Skywind here but people care more about graphics than anything else. AnyOldName's shadows are a big step forward and I see grass being discussed here too; even something like grass spawning via texture than manual placement like how MGE XE currently does it would really be something to boast about, especially with how popular Tamriel Rebuilt is. I'm sure you all know how jarring it is going from Vvardenfell with working grass mods to Tamriel Rebuilt with old broken grass mods or no grass at all.

Just my opinion, I'm not a programmer or contributing to OpenMW in any way, just a long time fan of the project.

Hm, sounds like we'll need a release video for this one.

Well now I want to read the whole thing, bit of a tease here. Is there any plan for priority of features post 1.0, or is it just whatever people want to work on?

The big two things I hear that keep people from OpenMW are MGE XE features and MWSE support (or rather, the desire to run mods that require MWSE). I also hear concerns about how hard it is to set up and test, which I've been trying to address with Launcher improvements.

I'm glad to see that improvements to modding tools are a major focus, as that addresses the second concern. But like mistermoonshine said, MGE XE parity is the other major focus.

I've been waiting for this to hit the public so I can better plan my personal project. Knowing where we're heading would prove useful I think.

> I do believe you meant to write "not" somewhere in there.

Not really, but I think I need to improve the wording a bit. Its still only a draft.

> Well now I want to read the whole thing, bit of a tease here. Is there any plan for priority of features post 1.0, or is it just whatever people want to work on?

Prioritising doesn't work well with a volunteer based open source project. So yeah, people will still work on what they want to work on. Obviously some features depend on other features, so there is a certain order to it. But once the basics are out of the way the feature space should open up wide and developers will have plenty of tasks to choose from an extensive list.

Regarding graphics: That is one reason why I want to hand over the document to scrawl before we publish it, because graphics aren't my strong point and he is our resident expert on that topic.

Regarding MWSE: As discussed before that isn't an option, but this design document should come fairly close to cover all features of MWSE. We can hope that at least some of the MWSE mods will be updated for OpenMW eventually (trivial in some cases, a lot of work in others).

That's an amazing job, I'm loving that LaTeX look. I'd really enjoy reading through this - let me know if you need a proofreader