Splash screens

[PeterBitt]

I think artworks in the UI of a 3d game dont work that well. I for one dont like seing stuff in loading screens that dont even apear in the game, somewhat breaks consistency too.
I am looking forward to help some coders to make a completely fresh and new UI for this game. Personally I love the Skyrim approach for menus - realtime 3d objects that are movable in the loading screen and main menu is awesome I think.
Would some design sketches help anyone at the moment? Propably I should be a bit more patient and stop annoying you guys before 1.0

[sirherrbatka]

Depends. For instance RAGE game looks just like concept art

http://www.xboxachievements.com/images/ ... shot_3.jpg

I really liked the the half-sketch look of morrowind splashes, though.

[Okulo]

Also, that would be content. We don't do content. Of course any modder is free to create and provide this kind of mod outside of the project and if it is something cool (and legally unproblematic) we may link to it.

Y'know, people have been talking about making content for OpenMW more and more and that is great, but I still wonder how that would be delivered. Are you going to have your own repository or are you going to wait for fansites to offer downloads?

Suppose I want to create a texture pack specifically for OpenMW? And what of mods that change the source code? Like a mod that changes the leveling system? Or a mod that allows for a quick casting button a la the MCP? Or even a full-blown combat overhaul? Of course I could branch off from main, but I'd want my mod to be distributed independently from OpenMW so that it's fully optional and compatible with other mods. I had a very quick chat with a team member already who said that there's probably going to be some kind of API but I have no idea how to picture that.

I've seen something about .omwaddons left and right, but the path to that point is quite unclear to me. How would mod creators go about getting there? And what about mod users, how would they get it?

[K0kt409P]

Are you going to have your own repository [...]

How great would it be if omwlauncher had integrated dowload management (including updates) and dependecy resolution for mods? Think Wrye Mash + $(YOUR_FAVOURITE_PACKAGE_MANAGER).

[Zini]

There a plenty of sites that host MW modes. I would hope that they will also accept OpenMW modes. Hosting content ourself sounds like a problematic idea. Not to mention that it might get expensive rather quickly, there are also possible legal issues (if someone uploads content that he does not have the right to).

Any kind of source modification would be a fork. I hope that it does not come to that anytime soon, but if it does hosting is really none of our business. Unless people have very unusual requirements and are very impatient forking shouldn't be necessary.

Assuming source modifications outside of the project does not happen, modding for OpenMW should be no different from modding for MW (except for being better).

[Okulo]

That answers the hosting question, but the specifics on mod creation are still a bit vague, I think.

You say that any kind of source modification would be a fork. Okay, so from the depths of time Galsiah rises and decides to redo their development mod and Skycaptain would be redoing Morrowind's combat system in a mixed style of Deadly Reflex and Mount & Blade combat. Now they would both be forking OpenMW. Yet here I am as a player, wanting both total revamps.

Now what?

[Zini]

As I wrote before, we should try to avoid forks as much as possible. With a bit of luck maybe we can avoid them completely.

Modifying game mechanics via source modifications is a bad idea anyway. The right thing to do is to modify the source to make the game mechanics more moddable and then do the modding in content files.

[Okulo]

I see, so the team will make OpenMW's inner guts more and more accessible as time goes on. I guess OpenCS goes a long way towards that already then. That, too, can be continuously expanded as time goes on.

[endorph]

I was thinking alot about extending engine capabilities and, yep, forks with following engine recompilation looks like the worst possible way.

Just some of my thoughts in that context:
In general it should be some kind of dispatcher, which will have smth like vtable for moddable engine methods/events and give modders an ability to override standard behaviour with their own code, shipped with addon (in native form or compiled from script through jitter at runtime).

For example (just pseudocode):

Code: Select all

mwgui::loadscreen::draw() {
 // perform() is to examine chain of registered overrides and execute them
 if ( mwdispatch::SKIP_ORIGINAL == dispatcher->perform(/* some info regarding current method */) )
    return;

 // ...
}

Maybe we need to formalize that system now to have less refactoring later?

[psi29a]

If the content being created for OpenMW is liberally licensed, it can be hosted on Debian. It just has to follow the rules.

I was actually thinking of all the additional openmw-mod-* packages that could be installed.

It would be trivial to build in a sort of strip-downed dpkg inside the launcher for windows and osx.

This solves two things:
1) license, because the mods have to follow Debian rules which absolves us of pretty much everything
2) distribution and content delivery

as for non-free licenses, I think you'll still need to depend on pre-existing mod websites.