Fundamentals

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Okulo
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Fundamentals

Post by Okulo »

Those who have the ability to build OpenMW from the OpenSceneGraph branch have probably already tried it. The new OpenMW is streamlined, fast and of course, most importantly, very functional. It's not very pretty yet, though. The Ogre version has a bunch of shaders, including Scrawl's own gorgeous "Shiny" shader which makes the water look incredibly good, but they couldn't be easily ported to the OSG version. But that's just eyecandy, and though that is one step back, it's only temporary. Add to that the fact that with its huge progress in terms of speed and the many fixes that it brings, the whole OSG port represents three steps forward. In fact, it's far along enough to be included in the next release. So get ready, 0.37.0 will be the version that brings OpenMW-OSG to the world!

At the time of writing, 0.37.0 closes a whopping 138 issues on our tracker. As mentioned in the last post by Scrawl, NPCs are finally the right size. Raindrops won't make fire see-through anymore and fire no longer make stuff look black. Your followers also won't be squealing when you touch something the wrong way, so no more "friends" ratting you out to the popo just because you took something that is technically not entirely yours.

Newcomer Kunesj has created a fun little extra that has been integrated already: the crosshair and tooltips can now show if something is owned or not. It doesn't work as well as it should yet, so for now it requires editing some configuration files to enable and configure this feature, but it's a good start to something that a lot of players will welcome.

There's been some work on OpenMW-CS. NPCs should now have a whole lot more stuff for you to edit, including faction rank, level, skills, and the like. UI nags such as the starting size of the main window and a cancel button closing OpenMW-CS rather than returning to the last screen have been resolved. You can now also sort your search results, which should make the global search function even more useful than before. And, oh, bonus! - we also have a pretty colour picker now!

So as you can see, the team is marching on, but besides the engine and the CS, two other projects have seen the light of day.

For the first one we should give a shout-out to TravDark, the creator of Ashes of the Apocalypse mod, and Envy123, the creator of an unofficial expansion to AoA called Desert Region 2. These two creators have generously allowed their work to be expanded and revamped so that they can be run as stand-alone games on the OpenMW engine. To this end, content in these mods needs to be replaced, and such an effort has already started. In order to be stand-alone, however, it requires replacement of all assets made by Bethesda and work from other modders. That's a ton of work and a solution needs to be found.

Which brings us to the other project: a bare minimum package for game developers. As OpenMW is merely an engine, it doesn't only run Morrowind. To have a working game on OpenMW, you need some bare minimum files, such as a sky and some animations. Enter the OpenMW Game Template project, a project which aims to provide a minimum package to run OpenMW. Aside from being a good foundation for game developers to work off of, it's also a fantastic test run for OpenMW. When people try to create their own game, they could into run all sorts of issues and with the tight connections the Game Template project has to the development team, these basic issues can be documented and/or resolved before they can get in the way of the developers of full-fledged games.

So there it is. Two new projects on the side, the CS getting expanded, and OpenMW proper switching to a whole new graphical engine with major fixes and speed as a bonus. Plenty to be excited about, even in this late stage of development!
Last edited by Okulo on 28 Jul 2015, 14:51, edited 1 time in total.
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psi29a
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Re: Fundamentals

Post by psi29a »

Followup on AoA, while there is quite a lot of work put into it, we can't work on it any further until we can replace the Bethesda assets it uses. It also makes heavy use of other mods that need to be accounted for. So almost all effort is being put into the OpenMW-Template project which we can later use to help AoA get back on its feet again.
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Okulo
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Re: Fundamentals

Post by Okulo »

Ah, thanks. I'll fix that. Amazing how you triple check and still miss these things.
Davefilms
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Re: Fundamentals

Post by Davefilms »

What about OpenMW for ES-IV? Can this game be ported to OpenMW too?
SquireNed
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Re: Fundamentals

Post by SquireNed »

Davefilms wrote:What about OpenMW for ES-IV? Can this game be ported to OpenMW too?
In short, no.

In a more complex answer: Yes, but only by drastically changing OpenMW or the original Oblivion assets. You've got incompatible model formats (at the very least), though those could perhaps be worked around. You've also got different .esm and .esp records, both in terms of the structure of the data and the contents.

You'd also have to deal with scripting; I don't know how much the scripting language Bethesda uses changed between MW and Oblivion, but I'm guessing that it begins with "a" and ends with "lot". Now, you could probably automatically convert that, or write a similar parser to the one that OpenMW uses and simply retool it to read Oblivion's scripts, but once again you're looking at a massive project, more or less the scale of OpenMW itself, given the potential for the increased complexity of Oblivion to cause a lot of headaches down the road.
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cc9cii
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Re: Fundamentals

Post by cc9cii »

I would like to think (hope?) that one day this would be possible. Currently I can scan and read records in from TES4 files, including Skyrim, (navmeshes only) but of course there is so much more beyond that.
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psi29a
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Re: Fundamentals

Post by psi29a »

The original tesannwyn [1] supports TES3, 4 and 5 land/terrain formats, technically it can import/export between them.


[1] I have an open-source version that is TES3 only, but I might be able to convince the author to open up the rest.
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cc9cii
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Re: Fundamentals

Post by cc9cii »

I think importing terrain from TES4 won't be very difficult. I'll see if I can get a sample up and running in opencs.
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DestinedToDie
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Re: Fundamentals

Post by DestinedToDie »

It should be perfectly possible to import an Oblivion mesh with nif importer in Blender and export as a Morrowind mesh. But at this point, you are including all Oblivion meshes in a download for it to work. Isn't that copyright infringement?

Edit:

"» Wasn't Morroblivion shut down by Bethesda?
Several years ago, at the beginning of the Morroblivion project, the project thread was shut down on the official Bethesda forums, and hosting of it on TES Nexus was taken down at Bethesda's request, due to some apparent licensing issues with using textures from Morrowind in Oblivion.

These legal issues have now been circumvented with mesh and texture replacers, and community development of the project is still going on here at Morroblivion.com."

https://tesrenewal.com/morroblivion-faq

So you'd maybe have to replace all meshes and textures. I've never played Morroblivion so don't know how it is. Play and find out. :)
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cc9cii
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Re: Fundamentals

Post by cc9cii »

In fact the imported navmesh is from the Skywind project. Importing terrain is a little more difficult because the files are not available for download at this point.
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