Testers for a New Graphic Herbalism mod

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Gruntella
Posts: 3
Joined: 11 Jul 2014, 15:05

Testers for a New Graphic Herbalism mod

Post by Gruntella »

I would like somebody to test my mod to see if it is compatible with OpenMW. As well, I may have found some odd things about the Morrowind engine which may be useful to others here, or maybe they are already known. I do not use OpenMW (at this moment) and have not kept up to date on developments here, so please forgive any uninformed statements.

I have a new implementation of Graphic Herbalism that implements theft of owned plants and ore-rocks, removes illumination when a glowing plant is picked, and uses newer improved meshes and textures. It does not use hard-wired replacements of plants or ore-rocks, so it should work with future mods as long as they don't change the object definitions. It does not require MWSE, which I understand is not compatible with OpenMW. My initial idea was to produce a Graphic Herbalism version that works well with Morrowind Rebirth, which claims to be compatible with OpenMW. I am interested to see if my mod is in fact compatible with OpenMW or how I could modify it to ensure it is.

The mod uses a few tricks to get Morrowind to do what I want. I expect they are not necessary, and hope they will not cause any problems, with OpenMW.
1) I replace the default lights that accompany glowing plants with lights that are linked to individual glowing plants. When a plant is picked a command is sent to the associated light to turn off while the plant regenerates. Using PlaceItem with a light has a problem; the Morrowind engine does not produce illumination from the light until there is a cell change. You can remove this problem using a Drop on the light and then moving it to its final position with a script, but using Drop is very slow. I assume the Morrowind engine recalculates a lot of graphics in the cell when a Drop occurs, so when I step out into Seyda Neen there is delay of ~20 sec. while 100's of glowing plant have their lights replaced. Fortunately, local scripts in exterior cells appear to start prior to the cell is actually drawn, so I can use PlaceItem in a local script with no appreciable delay. This does not work in interior cells where the local scripts appear to start after the graphics are drawn. As there are relatively few glowing plants in interior cells, I can switch to using Drop for interior cells without too much delay. By the way, global scripts do not work with this trick as they start later than local scripts and after the cell is drawn for both exterior and interior cells.
2) To simulate a theft I use a trick that Skrawafunda attributes to Logitech. It uses ExplodeSpell to cast an Open on Touch spell on a locked container. If the container is owned it initiates a Trespass crime which appears to the player as a crime due to their theft.
3) I have changed the type of container for plants, ore-rocks, kollops, and kwama egg-sacs, which may have been organic, to non-organic. This is necessary as opening an owned organic container does not raise a trespass crime. I expect that OpenMW will allow this, but I am not sure. If not, the ExplodeSpell trick will not work.

Finally, where should I put my mod for testers to use? If there is no place here, I could put it on NexusMods with a proviso that it is intended for testers at this stage. What do you suggest?
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Atahualpa
Posts: 1176
Joined: 09 Feb 2016, 20:03

Re: Testers for a New Graphic Herbalism mod

Post by Atahualpa »

I'm curious: What keeps you from downloading the recent 0.43 release, installing OpenMW and testing the mod yourself? Anyway, if you provide the mod files, you'll most certainly find some testers for your mod.
Gruntella wrote: 06 Dec 2017, 13:06 Finally, where should I put my mod for testers to use? If there is no place here, I could put it on NexusMods with a proviso that it is intended for testers at this stage. What do you suggest?
The Nexus is the right place, if you ask me. Simply add a "beta status" statement to your description and set the version number to 0.1 or something like that.
Gruntella
Posts: 3
Joined: 11 Jul 2014, 15:05

Re: Testers for a New Graphic Herbalism mod

Post by Gruntella »

Thanks for the reply, Atahualpa.

I am new to publishing a mod and needed some pointers to get started. I suppose I expected that installing OpenMW would be painful, though I have no actual reason to believe that. As you suggested, I will publish the mod on Nexus and put a link here. But, not tonight.
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