The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Everything about development and the OpenMW source code.
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Okulo
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by Okulo »

Zini wrote: 19 Jun 2018, 16:15 Well, I am not happy with this turn of events. I elaborated extensively why I think it is a bad idea. But trying to force my own opinion though is unlikely to result in anything good in this situation, so newscript and most likely Lua it is.
Still, don't give up now, though. You're in a position where you can be fiercely skeptical of any step being taken. If this team was led by someone who was rushing headlong into what seemed to them like scripting paradise, that would pretty much surely result in a bad product. You're critical, though, and that makes me feel safe for this part of the project.

(I admit to not being selfless here - I find the discussions on this subject fascinating. ;))
onionland
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by onionland »

Okulo wrote: 19 Jun 2018, 19:26 Still, don't give up now, though. You're in a position where you can be fiercely skeptical of any step being taken. If this team was led by someone who was rushing headlong into what seemed to them like scripting paradise, that would pretty much surely result in a bad product. You're critical, though, and that makes me feel safe for this part of the project.
Seconded, the reason that any considerations can be made towards any improvements to oldscript is because of the excellent leadership of Zini, without which openmw would most certainly not be in as excellent shape as it is today. The critical look on the project has been essential in steering the project in the right direction without which many would have been working on superficial features rather than essential cornerstones of the engine, and without which we may not had even the skeleton of an editor.
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wareya
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by wareya »

I mean, making a scripting language from scratch isn't actually hard, it just requires the technical know-how. The reason Lua is popular is because it's premade and very fast, and straightforward to integrate into existing C/C++ projects. It's not actually a "good language" or anything. It would probably be somewhat annoying to dehardcore OpenMW in Lua; it would be better as an OpenCS plugin language or something.
NullCascade
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by NullCascade »

Glad to see the project move in this direction. My offer still stands. I want to see OpenMW be less of a headache for modders, and I think if we worked together to make a compatible API it would go a long way. I guess I'll see if that's something you guys are interested in once it comes out of private committee.
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Zini
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by Zini »

You are welcome to join in on the design team, once we are ready to move forward. Just want to point out one thing: Even an attempt at compatibility would make MWSE at most a subset OpenMW. There are improvements on the post 1.0 roadmap that just won't be possible without full source access to the actual engine.
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psi29a
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by psi29a »

We can always shoot for feature-parity... so that what OpenMW supports could also be supported by MWSE, I wouldn't put it past NullCascade to try support things even it's just a stub API so that mods could work on both OpenMW and Morrowind+MWSE. By work, I mean at least doesn't crash or refuse to run. I would suspect that MWSE would warn users at run-time that some extensions are OpenMW specific and wouldn't apply to Morrowind.

Am I over reaching here? Or am I thinking about this the wrong way?
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Zini
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by Zini »

I am 99% sure this won't be possible (see the section about Cells, Workspaces & Areas for example).
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psi29a
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by psi29a »

Zini wrote: 20 Jun 2018, 09:07 I am 99% sure this won't be possible (see the section about Cells, Workspaces & Areas for example).
I see, meaning that there will be things that really aren't of interest to Morrowind modders anyway?

We would then have to make it clear in the API what is Morrowind and MWSE compatible and what is OpenMW specific?
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Zini
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by Zini »

I see, meaning that there will be things that really aren't of interest to Morrowind modders anyway?
No. There will be things that just can't be done without full access to the source code. They will be of high interest to Morrowind modders.
We would then have to make it clear in the API what is Morrowind and MWSE compatible and what is OpenMW specific?
If there is interest in that and there are people willing to do it, I have no objections.
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psi29a
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Re: The Future of OpenMW Scripting

Post by psi29a »

OK, how does older MWSE extensions and newer MWSE extension fit into this now?

Will OpenMW support older MWSE extensions via newscript(Lua) as well? Or could we dig up the old PR here:
https://github.com/OpenMW/openmw/pull/75

It's also what NullCascade keeps pointing out that there are still mods being written and that they are increasingly using MWSE. It isn't a 1.0 goal, but perhaps a post 1.0 goal can be MWSE scripting support.

Then we can begin closing the gap between the two.

For example a compatible API for MWSE-Lua and OpenMW-Lua?
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