Please keep the menus paused

[TheCatLord]

Greetings!

I have looked at the posts on this forum and many have suggested that the game should run while in dialogue, reading a book or looking at the inventory and so on. I would be very grateful if the old way of no time passing while in any of the menus was kept on as default. Here is my reasoning:

I want to take my time as I read the various texts. I really don't want to read through a complex dialogue of a modded companion and notice that three days have passed in the meanwhile. The pausing makes it much easier to tell what time it is. If you want to change the time - say, for role-play purposes - you can just use the rest menu to wait a while. Some enterprising modders take it into account that time does not change while in the menus. I think I have seen a mod that makes one or more hours to pass when you open a book. With this project, the same idea could be modded into opening any menu, but it would be in a more controlled fashion. Regardless how it is done, it does have a huge potential to break time-based quests.

What if I just want to quickly sell my stuff? Imagine you grabbed a whole lot of loot from a chest and now you're running away from the law. The inventory is cluttered with all kinds of things and you decide to sort through it at the nearest fence. Do you really want to spend those last few hours of precious night time trying to sell things you don't need? Imagine the same situation again, this time while you are a vampire.

If you use a calm spell to talk to a hostile NPC in the middle of a fight, you would have to have a click-fest of persuasion to make them talk to you if the clock would keep ticking while in the dialogue window. You would not have time to read the responses or the actual dialogue because the NPC would be already attacking you again. I don't think the calm spell should have a time component at all when it comes to people, just a magnitude (strength of the effect that determines who is affected and how much). I'm fairly certain most people are not raging maniacs and would rather stop and talk it out than kill - spell influence or not. It does not take that long to drop your weapons and say: "Please, calm down. I am not who you think I am!" but the game does not support that directly. The calm spell and persuasion are the only options. Of course, one could add the possibility to yield in combat, but I think it might undermine the value of speechcraft.

Although I'm sure the OpenMW re-implementation of the game engine is much more efficient than the original, it might still have a slight effect on how well the game runs if it does not stop while in the menus. At the very least, it should stop while looking at the main menus to save or change settings, since you are not actually playing while there.

So, please keep the game paused while in the menu. If the project some day supports otherwise, make it an entirely optional feature.

Humbly,
The Cat Lord

[sirherrbatka]

make it an entirely optional feature

How you could think that It will be done in any other way?

[Okulo]

Don't worry, TCL. The Features and Suggestions you're seeing in these forums are mostly post 1.0. We'll stick to what vanilla does until that time (with some very rare exceptions). We're not close to 1.0 yet.

A lot of people feel the way you do about this issue anyway, so assume that if this is going to be implemented in OpenMW, it would be entirely optional.

[garvek]

There are also scripts which rely on game paused, not mentionning the use of inventory to look for potions in the middle of a fight ...