openmw.org

We had to roll our own animation system on top of OSG because OSGAnimation didn't let us bind the number of matrices we wanted to the number of bones we wanted to bind them to (or something along those lines - basically, OSG made an assumption that all animations would be formatted in a certain way and Morrowind's aren't). I think only Scrawl ever worked on our system, so there'll have to be some investigation before anyone works out how to adapt the animation that OSG's Collada plugin reads to our system.

akortunov, he worked on a few animation related PRs maybe he knows more about it.

IMO you guys should forget LUA scripting for the newscript (if you guys didn't already) and use AngelScript instead, imo is a very good scripting language (btw used by Frictional Games on their games), also imo not much harder then LUA, with the added benefit that its syntax is very similar to C/C++. Why is this important? IMO It would be much easier for anyone coding on AngelScript to migrate to the engine c++ has well, a good scripter could potentially become a new OpenMW engine contributor, if you use LUA with a totally different syntax to C/C++ it will be harder for them to migrate to the engine c++ code. Just my two cents.

Sorry guys, but OpenMW forums a few weeks ago:

"Guys, y'all should stop thinking about oldscript+, Lua is the way to go because MWSE is now using Lua"

OpenMW forums last week or so (I have no concept of time right now, been working like constantly lately):

"Seriously guys, LUA?! Lua sucks. You need to go with [insert scripting language here]"

I thought the main reason we ditched oldscript+ was because of lua support on MWSE, to get some nice compatibility between the engines? Might as well just go for oldscript+ IMO, which at least had a kind of finished plan for the implementation, if we're not going for lua.

For the most part Zini - you understood me

Zini wrote: ↑06 Jul 2018, 10:15 For your campfire example one could imagine a new type of tool (flint & steel?) that the player can equip (take into his hand) and then perform an "attack" on the camp fire. Or he could drag the item from his inventory on the campfire and light it that way.

This is exactly what I hoped for with that

Zini wrote: ↑06 Jul 2018, 10:15 Note that we will have proper support for scripted spell effects now, so a "bash-in-door" spell should be possible.

but the idea of this should be like an attack (bashing the door in with a mace) more so than a spell

ST
PS - thank you for all that you have done with this, and for taking the time to answer my questions

pretty sure that other than peoples personal favorite flavors of language (which is very subjective), the ONLY reason we wanted something other than oldscript+ would be for this:

lysol wrote: ↑10 Jul 2018, 14:30 ...Lua is the way to go because MWSE is now using Lua"[/i]

So... [shrug] I thought the consensus was Lua or oldscript+

ST

silentthief wrote: ↑10 Jul 2018, 15:01 pretty sure that other than peoples personal favorite flavors of language (which is very subjective), the ONLY reason we wanted something other than oldscript+ would be for this:

lysol wrote: ↑10 Jul 2018, 14:30 ...Lua is the way to go because MWSE is now using Lua"[/i]

So... [shrug] I thought the consensus was Lua or oldscript+

ST

Exactly. I mean this discussion can go on forever if we want to. But do we?

Then let's steer this back to the design document and comments there up:
https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/blob/m ... -stage1.md

By the way... I managed to get Astroboy (collada/dae example) moving via daenim which uses OSG.
https://github.com/sbarthelemy/daenim

Using my latest OSG on the PPA, you can compile daenim and also see the animations for yourself.

We can use that as an example for getting dae/collada animated files into OpenMW.

https://youtu.be/ptoeb6RqFdk

The disadvantages of OldScript+ were:

• We have to implement and maintain the whole VM ourselves instead of including an off-the-shelf module and passing it some function pointers.
• We have to provide all the documentation and support, including 'How to use OldScript+ for people who've literally never programmed anything before' and answering questions from people who've literally never programmed before. Until a body of support threads have been created and can be googled, we have to answer everything by hand. IMO, this will be a gazillion times more work than the actual implementation of any option.
• If all of the problems with MWScript get fixed, it's basically a new language, at which point we've lost all the advantages of OldScript+ and have a shitty version of NewScript.
• If we don't fix all the problems with MWScript, then they get inherited by every from-scratch game made for OpenMW and also OpenOblivion etc. If we actually want to convince people to make games in OpenMW, we should try and minimise the amount of baggage for the sake of backwards compatibility.
• There's no chance of a common API with MWSE.

The common MWSE API is likely to require a big rework of both projects anyway and is unlikely to support any existing mods. NullCascade has already implemented things that OpenMW won't and OpenMW will implement things that are completely impossible without source access to the vanilla engine. It might not be impossible to refocus MWSE's efforts on a different language, though - if AngelScript is as easy to integrate as people are saying, a like-for-like port of NullCascade's Lua work should be much simpler to create than it was for NC to write the Lua version in the first place, and should be equally as easy to maintain and extend going forwards.

This is a decision which will determine if OpenMW remains a way to play Morrowind, or becomes the basis for new pet-project games, other open GameBryo/Creation Engine reimplementations and real games plenty of people will spend actual money on. I don't think we should be thinking in terms of the next one or two years of implementation and maintenance work, but five to ten. We don't want to pick something that people won't like once they've forgotten about today's top mods and why we wanted to maintain compatibility with anything that people don't really use any more (be it the vanilla engine, MWSE, or Morrowind as a whole).

Thanks for making such a good argument. I guess it makes sense to have this debate anyway then.