OpenMW support for other games: Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout and more

[Biboran]

Yeah, well, that's nice and all, but I strongly suspect porting meshes and worldspaces will be among the least problems to make an OpenOblivion engine happen.

Hope it be not separate engine like OpenOB but just OpenMw can run both games

[sjek]

or fork. depends on dehardcoding. also multiplayer is coming kinda nice.

haven't played oblivion past the intro but the last line ought to be security issues on what different functions you can bind to keys and how much of the game inner mechanics and interactions can be written to txt file or what will evolve to contain the de hardcoded info as a mechanics rather than toggle settings .?

[Atahualpa]

Yeah, well, that's nice and all, but I strongly suspect porting meshes and worldspaces will be among the least problems to make an OpenOblivion engine happen.

Hope it be not separate engine like OpenOB but just OpenMw can run both games

Apart from the obvious technical disparities, Bethesda does not want anyone to mix their game content, i.e., an OpenTES engine to support all TES games is not possible. -- I don't know whether it would be feasible to keep a hypothetical OpenOB on a par with OpenMW, or better handle them as different projects.

[SquireNed]

Yeah, well, that's nice and all, but I strongly suspect porting meshes and worldspaces will be among the least problems to make an OpenOblivion engine happen.

Hope it be not separate engine like OpenOB but just OpenMw can run both games

Apart from the obvious technical disparities, Bethesda does not want anyone to mix their game content, i.e., an OpenTES engine to support all TES games is not possible. -- I don't know whether it would be feasible to keep a hypothetical OpenOB on a par with OpenMW, or better handle them as different projects.

Again, though, we run into the issue where it's not technically illegal, unless you cross certain boundaries.

Having the engine only load Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim assets at a single time is the safe bet, but that's not something one can necessarily be expected to enforce. Simply not supporting the mixture of assets should be enough to keep Bethesda happy, since trying to play with multiple systems in play at the same time is going to be problematic (how would Morrowind handle an Oblivion NPC? Probably catastrophically wrong).

With that said, to get a meaningful Morrowsky experience, you would need to recreate every creature and NPC in Skyrim in Morrowind's system, which is insane and is where those legal issues would come up.

[Biboran]

I'am not programmer but I think from morrowind to fo4 they use same engine with some updates.
And yeah, just not allow to run them both as one game will be enough for bethesda.

Spoiler: Show

Aslo there was mods that make fo3 and FoNW one game

[psi29a]

Bethesda does not want anyone to mix their game content, i.e., an OpenTES engine to support all TES games is not possible. -- I don't know whether it would be feasible to keep a hypothetical OpenOB on a par with OpenMW, or better handle them as different projects.

It is possible, because someone who provides a CD (for example) and OpenMW didn't accept the EULA given by Bethesda as you bypassed their installer. The result of which means that they are not beholden to the mixing of content clause. The law around "Shrink-wrap Licenses" is still very grey here but the courts have emphasized that the end-user must be presented the license, in full, for it to have any legal weight as a license.

If you wish to keep to the spirit of the EULA clause, you can still have a OpenTES engine that handles content from multiple games which was the original idea when making OpenMW using "OpenEngine". The OpenEngine still lives on in OpenMW but it has been gutted as OpenMW has focused more on Morrowind.

It would be the end-user who would have to go out of their way to 'mix and match' content between games. OpenMW has no control over what the end-user does.

So yes, it is possible legally. Technically is another issue.

[DestinedToDie]

Someone has already done this (Morrowind + Oblivion + Fallout 3 + Skyrim + Fallout 4).

Only they have more of a world viewer than a functional game engine. So it makes sense to stick with OpenMW. Also there have been mods that try to recreate the entirety of Morrowind in Oblivion, or Skyrim in Oblivion. So simply making some NPC mod is smaller in scope.

It's a matter of time and effort... but the effort is perhaps better spent at getting OpenMW to version 1.0 and beyond.

[cc9cii]

A small update with basic terrain: https://youtu.be/dC1EF-5cvRQ

[psi29a]

A small update with basic terrain: https://youtu.be/dC1EF-5cvRQ

Nice work!

[Atahualpa]

Oh, that reminds me of the release commentary for v0.14.0. I had never been so excited about terrain -- until now.