openmw.org

After taking the decision (seven years ago ) to teach myself to create mods for Morrowind, I started Friday by doing some Tes3-CS tutorials. I find it easy to use, but I don't know if I should learn OpenMW-CS instead.

OpenMW-CS is analogous with Bethesda CS. If you know how to use one, then the other will come easily for you. It is notable that OpenMW-CS aims to improve on the modding experience and already has some pros over CS, such as being able to quicklaunch the game straight from your camera position in the view window. However OpenMW-CS still lacks some features such as landscape editing, making CS the only choice if you want to work on that specific area.

Try both, and see which you prefer.

Being realistic, TESCS is probably the safer option for now, as OpenMW-CS has a few gaps not yet filled. Also anything you start in TESCS can be transferred to OpenMW-CS to finish, whereas the reverse isn't necessarily true.

In the longer term, OpenMW-CS will be clearly better, with feature like filters which TESCS doesn't offer, and post 1.0 it will support the additional features added to OpenMW which TESCS won't.

I think the main item missing from OpenMW-CS is land editing - work on that is proceeding, and I hope it will be available in 0.43.

Loriel

Thank you both! I’m glad they are so similar. I’ll keep learning TES-CS then, but keeping an eye on new OpenMW-CS releases.

One other point is that Bethesda stakes a claim on any file you make with their CS (even if it's probably the case that they have no legal grounds to do so) making it difficult to do things like selling your mods or original games created with the TESCS. That shouldn't be an issue with files you create with only the OpenMW-CS, as long as you don't let any of Bethesda's IP sneak in by some other route.

Also consider that OpenMW-CS does quite a bit more verification on the mod to make sure it's correct. Especially for scripts, TES3-CS is notorious for allowing all sorts of syntax errors that may or may not work anyway, while OpenMW-CS will be able to tell you where issues are so you can fix them. I believe there are also a few scripting enhancements OpenMW allows (IIRC, you can use variables in certain places that vanilla requires explicit values) that TES3-CS might not accept.

I prefer OpenMw-cs eventhough its not fully complete yet. The reason is because of the script editor, its really neat and does the coloring. Not only that, its also easier to edit an object. But if youre going for terrain and house building go for the tes3cs. Most of my .omwaddon mods can be opened in tes3-cs after changing the extension of the plugin. Though i believe that would not be possible in the future,.

Thank you for your responses, guys. I’m liking OpenMW-CS more and more. (I'm still learning TES-CS at the moment though )