Proposal for getting this project done

OpenMW's very own demo, template and game to show off everything that OpenMW is capable of.

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AngeredWalrus
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by AngeredWalrus »

johndh wrote:I'm certainly in favor of having more direction on this probject, but are there enough people working on this to warrant more than one management position? This sounds a little like the army of Oz. :P
I think you've hit the nail on the head there, johndh.


Given the questionable legality of using assets from other sources (and those not compatible with the CC-BY-3.0 license), I'd agree that asset creation should remain a priority, given that there is little that can be done on the ES until at least some basic assets are available.
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psi29a
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by psi29a »

Don't put the cart in front of the horse. ;)

The project isn't directionless, it is just slow because of the time it takes to create assets necessary to make a demo.

The highest priority is having a fully working and animated person... for the player and for the NPCs involved. Without this, there will be no demo.

I'm also not sure the project will ever be 'done'. OpenMW will continue to evolve which likely means more features to demo.
Lamoot
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by Lamoot »

The project isn't directionless, it is just slow because of the time it takes to create assets necessary to make a demo.
To chime in, there are bottlenecks in the assets pipeline that also contribute to the time and effort it takes to put something in OpenMW. viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3551
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johndh
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by johndh »

psi29a wrote: The highest priority is having a fully working and animated person... for the player and for the NPCs involved. Without this, there will be no demo.
I'll take the blame for this one. My main computing machine is toast and I haven't prioritized building antediluvian versions of Blender on my Pi yet. I should be up and running... soonish? A basic rig and decent-looking model are good to go already. I'd like to find out if anything fancy like controller bones or IK solvers will work, but mainly it's the animations themselves that are missing. If somebody wants to take the lead on that, I'll gladly upload what I have so far. Otherwise, I'll tentatively say I should have something working this week, but I'm working with a weird architecture here so I can't make any promises.

While y'all are waiting for that, Moonboy should work fine as a placeholder for most things.
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psi29a
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by psi29a »

johndh wrote:I'll take the blame for this one.

...

While y'all are waiting for that, Moonboy should work fine as a placeholder for most things.
No one is assigning blame! Everyone is doing their best with what time the have to work with. I'm also dragging ass on getting the new template and island out. :)

Moonboy is great (thanks destined!) for the time being. It is already used in the template and I've tested it also as an NPC that hits pretty hard...

A replacement to Moonboy is still critical since we'll have it as a basis for creating things to wear and be used by it, not to mention genders. It will likely be the most heavily used asset of all. No pressure! ;)
maqifrnswa
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by maqifrnswa »

awesome post!

I agree with the OP statement: Games are creative works of art, and good art is hard to produce by committee. There needs to be a community that buys in to a leader's vision and trusts that leader's decision. I liked the breakdown of responsibilities. As someone that has been around many open-source projects (and games), I wanted to add some points/suggest tweaks:

1) This was implied in the OP, but important to emphasize: there should be a separation of engine maintenance and game design responsibilities. In practice, Zini and the openmw team are managing an engine for multiple games. Each game may want engine tweaks or new functionality. To tweak the engine you have to either (a) convince an openmw developer it is worth their time to do or (b) convince the openmw team that code that you wrote specifically for your game is worth merging in to openmw. If you go (b), then you need a technical director to manage that.

2) Each game is a work of art, essentially a movie production. I think the Production Director, as described, might need to take a higher level role. I picture the Production Director actually being the top of the org chart, as the "Game Director" -- the person whose overall vision is being implemented, and whom the community trusts (i.e., the Zini of the game). Storyline/storyboard, art vision, thematic elements go through that person. The Art Director, Music Director, Technical Director, Story Director, and any other Director role needed will all working to implement the vision. It's not that the Game Director is a creative dictator; building consensus is probably necessary to keep everyone motivated.

Regarding assets:
You might be able to sketch out a game, for yourself, without distributing it, while using Bethesda assets. But it's hard to build a community around it since no one else can see it or work on it. Having at least placeholder assets that are CC-BY-SA allows the community for form around a leader's vision.

So perhaps the example suite's art director can create and manage a burn-down list to a minimum viable asset pool while the game director lays out the game framework. After that, game director takes over and coordinates building the game while the art director contributes the assets needed for the game director's vision.
DosBuster
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by DosBuster »

I should clarify, by using assets from Morrowind I mean only in terms of placeholder ones, nothing released in a press fashion will have Morrowind assets. Sure, someone could come into this forum and see them but we never publicize anything containing morrowind assets. I understand if people have different feelings but the issue still remains: Gameplay is still a higher priority over asset creation, there are also a variety of technical questions we have to ask ourselves before we can create assets.

What is our polygon limit?

Do we attempt to utilize a Physically Based Material system? Someone on these forums is working on such a thing and while it won't work or look good on Morrowind's assets with new assets it will make quite the difference.

What's our colour palette? What's our style?

Those are questions that must be answered before we run off and just create assets, therefore, I propose we focus on getting the gameplay systems down first and then use that to figure out what assets need to be made.
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DestinedToDie
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by DestinedToDie »

DosBuster wrote:I should clarify, by using assets from Morrowind I mean only in terms of placeholder ones, nothing released in a press fashion will have Morrowind assets. Sure, someone could come into this forum and see them but we never publicize anything containing morrowind assets.
I really want to kickstart this project, but can we please just use these assets instead? - viewtopic.php?f=28&t=3520

I made a huge guide that even a complete beginner can use to export Blender assets like that into the game: viewtopic.php?f=33&t=3330

Now what you do on your local computer is none of my business, but do not attempt to distribute Morrowind assets or show any screenshots of using them here. We do not want to hear about it, nor do we endorse such activity and I will personally delete any posts containing talk about having Morrowind assets in ES, screenshots and attempts at distribution. I don´t believe in banning myself, but there are some ban-happy moderators on this forum, just so you know.

Sorry for the threat-ish sounding warning. But just to drive home the point - we are very serious about copyright.
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PeterBitt
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by PeterBitt »

DosBuster wrote:Gameplay is still a higher priority over asset creation, ...
What gameplay are you guys even thinking about? A 1:1 Morrowind copy in regards to gameplay? I guess you plan on sticking to Morrowind gameplay, but whats the goal? An island with backstory, quests, mainquest and stuff, so a proper little game. Or just a simple engine showcase with nice assets and engine feature showcases, but no real gameplay?
The setting must be something medieval with magic I gather?

What if someone would come up with his own idea for the whole example suite? What if that guy would make the concepts, art assets, world design, backstory and main questline all by himself, in the beginning at least?
That guy would be me by the way. Not that I have any concrete plans, but I have big interest in such a project and should be able to pull it off for a smallish island with limited content. At least get some basics done which might attract helpers.
Here is the latest model I made, I should be able to make all models at that quality or better: http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/44314/?

This is no promise by any means, just wanted to check if it makes sense to think about.
If you guys are open for such proposal, I would go and think about something for a while and sketch up some basic design, back story, plot and questline.
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DestinedToDie
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Re: Proposal for getting this project done

Post by DestinedToDie »

PeterBitt wrote:What if someone would come up with his own idea for the whole example suite? What if that guy would make the concepts, art assets, world design, backstory and main questline all by himself, in the beginning at least?
That guy would be me by the way.
PeterBritt for president!
PeterBitt wrote:
DosBuster wrote:Gameplay is still a higher priority over asset creation, ...
What gameplay are you guys even thinking about? A 1:1 Morrowind copy in regards to gameplay? I guess you plan on sticking to Morrowind gameplay, but whats the goal? An island with backstory, quests, mainquest and stuff, so a proper little game. Or just a simple engine showcase with nice assets and engine feature showcases, but no real gameplay?
The setting must be something medieval with magic I gather?
The official goal is to showcase the engine´s features with nice assets. The engine will eventually get features which are not used in Morrowind, and OpenMW-ES will showcase them. Normal maps being 1 example of what we already have. Now I don´t know what gameplay Dosbuster has in mind. From what I can imagine the gameplay will be quite similar to Morrowind, just with different assets. There´s hardly any gameplay to code, aside from some small scripts.

I was thinking about seeing what plan Dosbuster comes up with, maybe it´s way better than anything we could think of. But here is how I see the workflow: https://bugs.openmw.org/projects/examplesuite/roadmap

In each release, we make some models. These are used to showcase a few engine features taken out of the engine bugtracker. Releases would be small, but manageable. No set story, I was going to leave that to whoever goes through the work of making assets. The showcasing is the more important aspect here anyway.

That being said, if you´re first to take the bull by the horns and make the assets, questlines, world design, then you´re pretty much king here and get to decide how things are done.
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