There's always room for MOAR
Posted: 27 Aug 2014, 14:47
Last week's news of an asset replacement project was well received. A whole bunch of people reported in, offering not just their skills, but also their opinion on the exact nature of the project and any possible legal ramifications, what with OpenMW being around and all. In the end they settled on making this project (tentatively called Morrowind Original Asset Replacement, a.k.a. MOAR) a mod for Morrowind, but the OpenMW engine should be working fine with it too. If you want to contribute too, why don't you check out their brand new project site or their guideline thread? Or just join the discussion thread and see what people are saying.
But back to OpenMW in particular. Some more work was done on the user interface. On the hardware there has been some experimentation with support for gamepads. The experiment resulted in a semi-victory: Wireless 360 gamepads worked fine, but PS3 dualshock controllers did not. That means that support isn't quite in yet and that more deliberation on how to handle joystick input is required.
On the software side, various fixes have been done, too. The centering of this and that line of text, resizing buttons here, tooltips there; stuff that's pretty much in your face every time you play just needs to work well. Small niggles need to be ironed out. For example, you can now use the scroll wheel to leaf through the books and you can properly place tooltips on the local map, just like in vanilla Morrowind. Combat has also been expanded a bit. If an NPCs fatigue reaches zero, they will get knocked out. But not just that - you will be able to pick their pockets when they're out cold.
All these little things add up and considering that MyGUI just released an update that fixes a memory leak in OpenMW, there is talk among the developers of pushing out OpenMW 0.32.0 soon. And that's always good to hear.
But back to OpenMW in particular. Some more work was done on the user interface. On the hardware there has been some experimentation with support for gamepads. The experiment resulted in a semi-victory: Wireless 360 gamepads worked fine, but PS3 dualshock controllers did not. That means that support isn't quite in yet and that more deliberation on how to handle joystick input is required.
On the software side, various fixes have been done, too. The centering of this and that line of text, resizing buttons here, tooltips there; stuff that's pretty much in your face every time you play just needs to work well. Small niggles need to be ironed out. For example, you can now use the scroll wheel to leaf through the books and you can properly place tooltips on the local map, just like in vanilla Morrowind. Combat has also been expanded a bit. If an NPCs fatigue reaches zero, they will get knocked out. But not just that - you will be able to pick their pockets when they're out cold.
All these little things add up and considering that MyGUI just released an update that fixes a memory leak in OpenMW, there is talk among the developers of pushing out OpenMW 0.32.0 soon. And that's always good to hear.