As I said over on the ESMStore thread, I've been lurking for about a week on the OpenMW forums. I don't know that I'm really interested in becoming a continuing developer on the OpenMW project, but you certainly have my attention now, and I've been making enough changes to the code that I don't think I should put this off any longer.
I'm a malware reverse engineer by profession, and originally thought I could contribute some in the formula reversing area. Weird Sexy's repeated requests for assistance there prompted me to start reading the forums. But Hrnchamd seems to have that well under control. Hrnchmd: I'd love to gossip some privately about tools and techniques, but I didn't think it would be appropriate to "taint" the forums.
I've been programming in C and C++ for years, although not daily, and recently it's been mostly Python. Based on conversations from the forums I suspect that Zini and several others will classify me in the dangerously amateur but possibly useful category.
Step one is knowing your limitations I guess. I have no 3D programming experience, and no particular desire to develop any. I'm a fan of Qt, have some very limited experience with it (a few small test apps), and a desire to learn and use it more.I'm a Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim fan, and have played all three, although not nearly as extensive as most serious modders. I've played with all three construction sets over the years, and have a reasonable understanding of modding in these games. I've done some modeling Sketchup. I've never released a mod publicly because I've found the environments so grossly deficient for what I wanted to do that I usually gave up after a week or two.
What I am especially interested in is -- modding the game play elements of the Edler Scrolls games to add exactly the kinds of things that aren't easily modified in a mod.
New skills, new attributes, fundamentally different approaches to dialog, fundamentally different combat, etc. In general this means that my interest in OpenMW really only starts after we've reached the version 1.0 milestone. I admire the laser focus that Zini has helped provide to this group, and I think that the clearly identified goal of a playable Morrowind is exactly why this project will succeed while many other open game platforms will not. That said, I'm still really interested in OpenMW as a generic open game platform.I'd like to help move the project forward in the interest of getting to version 1.0 sooner. I think there might be an overlap in the opencs editor. I'm very interested in correcting the many deficiencies present in the Bethesda editors, many of which have already been enumerated in the editor thread. I'm completely comfortable with the design documented in the editor thread (which is almost exclusively about the user experience), but I do have some opinions on the ESMStore issues that are currently being discussed. I'm also happy to abide by a very strict rule that everything must work with the existing Morrowind data -- provided that there's some leeway to choose to do things better in our implementation.
Finally, I should warn you that I'm a bit of a flake. I frequently latch onto projects that get my undivided attention for days or months and then I'm on to a new obsession. For example, OpenMW has received more than 20 hours of my time in the last week. Fortunately, most of my obsessions revolve around game design in some way, and rarely abandon any of them permanently. It's more like getting distracted.
As a result I am unwilling to commit to much responsibility or place myself in the critical path for any major features. Because of my specific interests, I'm not generally willing to take arbitrary assignments required to move OpenME towards version 1.0, at least not yet. Most on my contributions would need to be self selected, although I'm perfectly willing to discuss them in detail on the forums, agree on a shared design, make concessions, etc. I will deliver on what I commit to, although you may find it difficult to extract commitments for more than week or two of work.
So that's me. If you're still interested in having me as a developer, I think I might be interested as well.
[If this post ends up being a duplicate I apologize. I think there was an error, but once I had clicked again it was gone.]
