Finally got a chance to read through most of this! I cannot wait for The Great (or Grand as it's apparently officially called now) Dehardcoding!
It sounds like there are several things that will have to be taken care of by modders because there's no automated way of changing things such as weather events and fast travel locations. This reinforces an idea I had on another thread that we should probably try to release and "unofficially" recommend an unofficially official mod that takes care of some of these things. Obviously the game should run fine regardless, but I imagine it would be good to have a well put together mod that shows how content creators
should be extending existing systems and do some of the initial work for them. Plus, if everyone is basically expected to have this, like the MPP, it would hopefully help with mod compatibility.
rocky1138 wrote: ↑28 Jun 2018, 05:29
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don't think this is the right approach. As much as I want OpenMW-CS to be feature-complete, forcing everyone to wait could stall development and even force a hostile fork. With FOSS stuff, I feel like getting as many people involved as quickly as possible is imperative. The features will grow with more people, not less.
It sounds like, since the main intended draw for post-1.0 will be opening up the engine, and none of those features matter without CS access to them, both need to be released at the same time.
@Zini, I know the graphics section still needs to be filled out, but I do think a significant portion of the population will really only be interested in OpenMW if it reaches graphical parity with MGE. I know that's not something a lot of people here on the forums are as actively interested in, but a lot of people on reddit basically say that until we have shadows, shaders, and distant statics, they're not interested. Obviously we've made some good progress when it comes to these, but wanted to put in my two cents for that section.
There is one thing that I think might be good to consider adding to the plan, especially since it doesn't sound like opening up the GUI to editing may ever happen fully: Controller UI. With the original Xbox release and the recent rerelease on Xbox One, a bunch of people are probably used to playing with a controller. The UI is pretty terrible for this play style as it stands, and I imagine it would be better to implement it now before the GUI becomes more accessible to content creators.
I also had a few thoughts about things further down the timeline. You mention OpenMW 2.0 and stage 1 and 2 multiple times throughout the plan. I know this is putting the cart waaaay before the horse, but do you have an idea for what 2.0 should allow people to do? Having a clear goal for 1.0 was really helpful both for answering questions and guiding development, so by the time 1.0 is released I think we should have a good answer for this figured out and added to the FAQs. Personally, I think a great goal for 2.0 would be to have feature parity with Vanilla+MGE+MCP+MWSE. I know some parts of that would be moving targets, but it would be easy for someone with little knowledge of the project to grasp.
On a somewhat related note, I think it would be very beneficial for the stages to be at least mostly planned 1 or 2 stages ahead of time. This is less for general clarity and more for content creators. If I'm a content creator and I really want to make X mod that requires Y feature, I'd want to know if Y feature is planned to be worked on in the next stage or two. That way, I can postpone working on that part of my mod until that feature is available, or go ahead and try to devise a workaround. Obviously with this kind of project there wouldn't be any concrete deadlines, but it's still nice to know if a desired feature is even on the devs radar as needing to be addressed.
rocky1138 wrote: ↑28 Jun 2018, 05:29
If OpenMW-CS has some really long-living incomplete features, consider a bounty. The money can come from crowdsourcing. I know I wouldn't mind throwing a few dollars here or there to see it get finished.
This sounds tricky to hash out properly, but if we could I would certainly chip in for a few things. Do we have an official position on bounties? Most recent thread I know of that talked about them in detail is this one:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3802&hilit=bounty but didn't seem like there was a final decision.