Help us plan OpenMW's future

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Thunderforge
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Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by Thunderforge »

It's hard to believe that OpenMW 0.1.0 was released just over 10 years ago! What began as a barely functional ESM viewer is now a complete replacement for vanilla Morrowind and a complete engine for creating original games. There are still a few features that need to be polished, like shadows and AI recastnavigation, but the project is almost ready to become version 1.0, signalling to the world that OpenMW has full parity with the original Morrowind engine.

But that doesn't mean that our work is complete. OpenMW's project leader Zini, with feedback from the project's most active contributors, has produced the first draft of an enormous design document detailing the next steps that they think the project should take. The major focus is on improving modding capabilities (including "newscript" support, most likely Lua) and beginning the process of de-hardcoding game mechanics to allow mods to drastically alter gameplay.

Now we need your help. We'd like for as many people as possible to review this post-1.0 design document and provide their feedback. Have a change that you'd like to make? Submit either a Merge Request on GitLab or a Pull Request on GitHub. Want to talk about it with other contributors? Discuss it on our forum. This document is far from set in stone and will change as the project evolves.

Let's work together to plan how OpenMW will enter into its next ten years!
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Thunderforge
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Re: Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by Thunderforge »

If you'd like to comment on something specifically within the post-1.0 design document, I recommend that you create a new topic for whatever your concern is in the Organization and Planning subforum. The document is over 25,000 words and this topic is going to become overwhelming if people are talking about scripting, image formats, de-hardcoding, new features, and everything else.
sg1efc
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Re: Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by sg1efc »

Cool 8-)
claudekennilol
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Re: Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by claudekennilol »

> signalling to the world that OpenMW has full parity with the original Morrowind engine

What about mods that have scripts with flaws in them that work with vanilla? Do all "vanilla" mods work with Open MW now?
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wareya
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Re: Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by wareya »

OpenMW still has tons of minor mechanics/gameplay bugs, and some major ones.
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psi29a
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Re: Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by psi29a »

claudekennilol wrote: 02 Jul 2018, 13:55 > signalling to the world that OpenMW has full parity with the original Morrowind engine

What about mods that have scripts with flaws in them that work with vanilla? Do all "vanilla" mods work with Open MW now?
Broken scripts are broken, OpenMW-CS can help detect these broken scripts.

OpenMW 1.0 is not yet released, so no, not all "vanilla" mods work with OpenMW currently, but a majority already do.

We want to eventually have a 2 week long mod-hack-a-thon where we focus exclusively on Morrowind mods. Users, modders and developers helping to make that final push to cover as much ground as possible. It would be an event managed here, reddit, irc and discord but we hope to promote it across other platforms.

So we would love to see the community rally around OpenMW, at all levels, to help give it that extra polish for a vanilla drop-in replacement.
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Zini
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Re: Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by Zini »

claudekennilol wrote: 02 Jul 2018, 13:55 > signalling to the world that OpenMW has full parity with the original Morrowind engine

What about mods that have scripts with flaws in them that work with vanilla? Do all "vanilla" mods work with Open MW now?
Let me make this clear once again. There is a class of scripts that aren't just scripts with flaws in them, but that are flat out broken. Both in Morrowind and OpenMW. But how these two engine handling these defects is different. Morrowind is basically just winging it by ignoring all problems, which may result in a behaviour that is either obviously broken or subtly broken or by accident works as expected. OpenMW on the other hand will always yell at you and stop the problematic script.

We provided a few workarounds for cases where the original meaning of the script is obvious and we may be able to add some more of these workarounds. But it is unrealistic to expect us to make OpenMW fail exactly in the same way as Morrowind in every single case. Besides, these scripts are defective. They need to be looked at and fixed; even if they seem to work in Morrowind. Ignoring these defects is what got us in this mess in the first place. In the long run everyone will be better off with not ignoring almost every single kind of script defect.
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by AnyOldName3 »

When we have working NewScript and a working OldScript to NewScript converter, it might be a good idea to also have an OldBytecode to NewScript converter, too, even if it's implemented as a third-party CS plugin rather than a first-class feature. That would allow people to get their subtly broken behaviour back without polluting our clean implementation of everything else.
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Zini
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Re: Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by Zini »

Wouldn't do us any good, since we also need to compile/translate the code in OpenMW. And if people need to take a mod through OpenMW-CS to translate it, they can as well go ahead and fix it. I doubt that the slightly broken behaviour (as you describe it) is desirable; at least not if you can have non-broken behaviour.
Chris
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Re: Help us plan OpenMW's future

Post by Chris »

In some cases though, the broken behavior is entirely a result of the CS' compiler's lax validation of scripts. That is, in such cases the bytecode itself came out fine, it's just a mess when trying to interpret the source text.
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