Grass?

[BadManiac]

I know grass wasn't in vanilla Morrowind, but after having played with MGSO and MGE XE, with it's animated grass, I can't go back, it makes such a huge difference. Are there any plans to implement grass in OpenMW at some point?

[SquireNed]

Not in OpenMW proper: OpenMW is an engine rewrite from scratch.

As far as supporting grass as a third-party addon, I'm not entirely sure how it's typically done in Morrowind, and if MGE/MGSO are using features that OpenMW doesn't have because of scripting or because of limitations in vanilla Morrowind that may no longer be limitations in the OpenMW engine due to changes in .nif handling or whatnot. You probably could do it, one way or another, but I'm not savvy enough on the engine side to help with any suggestions regarding that.

[jirka642]

It looks like it will be eventually implemented sometime after version 1.0.
Source: https://trello.com/b/8b5CkONV/openmw

[Atahualpa]

It looks like it will be eventually implemented sometime after version 1.0.
Source: https://trello.com/b/8b5CkONV/openmw

But doesn't that only enable methods to create/render grass and stuff? It doesn't say anything about actually implementing grass.

[jirka642]

But doesn't that only enable methods to create/render grass and stuff? It doesn't say anything about actually implementing grass.

I don't see difference?...
This post from scrawl about grass may help you answer that: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2066&p=30335#p30335

Usually in games grass is done using a procedural animation in the vertex shader, which comes at an almost zero performance cost. This is one my first post 1.0 goals. A similar animation technique can also be used for trees.
Another thing I want to add is automatic placement of grass and/or vegetation based on the terrain textures. I believe Yacoby wrote a tool to do this, but it would be better to support this right in the engine.

[Atahualpa]

Yeah, I referred to that feature. At scrawl's Trello page this is called "Randomized vegetation layers":

Automatic placement of grass and vegetation meshes depending on terrain textures.

For me, it sounded like modders will be able to add grass - or vegetation in general - through specifying some parameters on the/their terrain textures. But that won't actually add grass to the game from the beginning unless we (scrawl) come up with default values for all vanilla terrain textures. That's what I meant. If implementing the possibility to create grass on-the-fly also implies default settings and thus animated grass even on unmodded setups, that sounds good to me.

[BadManiac]

That sounds really promising. Thanks for your replies.

Guess I'll continue my current play through in MGSO/ MGE XE. Only got mamaea left before I go get Sunder and kerning and go confront Dagoth-Ur. While my Khajiit is on the TR mainland stealing everything that isn't bolted down