First of all...

Feel free to discuss here about news on our blog
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Okulo
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First of all...

Post by Okulo »

Hello again. Small update since it's been a while since the last one. The move to OSG has called for a lot of work left and right. Most of it is not exciting enough to get into in a newspost (interesting enough if you want to delve deeper into the development of this project, though!), but there are a couple of things worth noting. First is the object selection via the scene view in OpenMW-CS. Scenes may contain a lot of stuff, and finding the exact item you need may be a hassle. Scrawl and Zini have been working on a way to use the scene window to select objects. Next up is selecting terrain and stuff that isn't rendered in the scene (such as pathgrids and cell markers). You can't move them around yet, though, that's all for a different update.

If you're not a modder, but only play the game, you will enjoy this second bit of news: Scrawl has restored sun flares! Check out the before and after pics:

http://i.imgur.com/mVxl6WZ.png
http://i.imgur.com/oU1zKrY.png

Rather than being a flat disk in the sky, light blooms now. Pretties.

Every step in the direction of beautifying the game is a good one and the team (especially OSG/shader magician Scrawl) is planning to do much more! There's the water shaders, and there are object shaders. The latter may be a bit more difficult than just using an already existing implementation, as performance might be negatively impacted too severely to just plop it in and go, so some work on that is required. After the object shaders are done, work on object shadows can start, something that doesn't seem all that significant, but it's one of those touches that makes a ton of difference once you see it. Definitely more on that in a later version.

Disposing of bugs is, of course, also a staple of Morrowind releases. Counting only the bugs on the tracker - so not including all the bugs that have been fixed as soon as they were encountered - 149 bugs have been fixed so far for this release. The other 40 issues on the tracker that have been closed are things such as small optimizations, a scaleable GUI, and several OpenMW-CS features.

Doing so has left OpenMW with less than 100 issues until 1.0. Of course this amount fluctuates wildly and some issues are relatively small while others are huge. Still, it's great to see the finish line drawing nearer and nearer.

I'm not going to lie to you, though: porting is a toughie and OpenMW-CS has come to that point where nearly all basic functionalities are in place. That means that the next version won't be released next week or even the week after that. But still, the team is working hard: they are committed to pushing out the next release with terrain optimizations and a basic water shader for your enjoyment.

Troubling as the time since our last release may seem, know that the team is still busy and that the work put in the next version brings one of the most significant changes for players since the implementation of terrain and physics. Thanks for your patience and see you next time.
TechNoirMK
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Joined: 19 Aug 2015, 15:58

Re: First of all...

Post by TechNoirMK »

So hyped for 0.37, after
Spoiler: Show
BTW, is overall optimization gonna happen at 1.0?
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psi29a
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Re: First of all...

Post by psi29a »

Let us not forget the new contributors who have been busy testing and fixing bugs in code. :)

The breakdown for this release, based on commits made since last release (0.36.1) are:

Code: Select all

git log --tags --simplify-by-decoration --pretty="format:%ai %d"
2015-05-31 14:21:21 +0200  (tag: openmw-0.36.1)

Code: Select all

git shortlog -s -n --since='2015-05-31 14:21:21'
   407  scrawl
   252  Marc Zinnschlag
   132  Stanislav Bas
    80  dteviot
    26  cc9cii
    24  slothlife
    15  Alexander "Ace" Olofsson
    14  Arthur Moore
    11  Jiří Kuneš
     9  Emmanuel Anne
     8  Koncord
     7  [email protected]
     6  Jeffrey Haines
     6  Nikolay Kasyanov
     3  Rohit Nirmal
     2  Alexandre Moine
     2  Jordan Ayers
     1  MiroslavR
     1  Pawel Kubik
     1  Scott Howard
     1  Sebastian Wick
     1  taras.kudryavtsev
Great work, heroes! :)

As you can see... we've been waiting since beginning of June (end of April) for 0.37... longest 'pause' ever? ;)
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Okulo
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Re: First of all...

Post by Okulo »

That breakdown is pretty cool. Totally going to use that in the future.
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piotrekdg
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Re: First of all...

Post by piotrekdg »

Are you certainly sure that effect is called solar flares? In physics, a solar flare is a sudden release of higher amount of energy. Lens flare, on the other hand, looks more like this: http://img14.deviantart.net/fef1/i/2012 ... 5krgex.png
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psi29a
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Re: First of all...

Post by psi29a »

You're right, the mostly accepted term is 'lens flare' but it is also called 'sun flare', 'sun glare' or 'light glare' in some circles. Sometimes they can also be discrete things:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/script-B ... lares.html

and this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_(shader_effect)

^-- I believe this is what was implemented, also known as light bloom or glow.

@Scrawl: care to comment?
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piotrekdg
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Re: First of all...

Post by piotrekdg »

Yea, I agree, it looks much more like bloom, perhaps there is some lens flare but if so, it's almost unnoticeable.
Kupofasa
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Re: First of all...

Post by Kupofasa »

FANTASTIC work!!! Keep it up guys, knowing the mountain you're trying to climb made me almost shout in excitement at seeing an update post :)
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Okulo
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Re: First of all...

Post by Okulo »

piotrekdg wrote:Are you certainly sure that effect is called solar flares?
I'm totally going to blame that on my Dragon Ball Z binge.
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AlphaMode2
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Re: First of all...

Post by AlphaMode2 »

I'd rather have too many updates than too few. But most people might not agree with me.
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