Map Options

Feedback on past, current, and future development.
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DestinedToDie
Posts: 1181
Joined: 29 Jun 2015, 09:08

Re: Map Options

Post by DestinedToDie »

Oh. :D

I didn't realise they can only be enabled. I suppose a mod could be made so that they are never enabled on new characters.
Ignis
Posts: 8
Joined: 01 Nov 2016, 20:05

Re: Map Options

Post by Ignis »

Yes, as I remember, map menu is enabled by the script on the barrel with Fargoth's ring, but it would be nice to disable map for custom locations, for example. Or disable inventory menu in combat. So I repeat my request :)
Xenuria
Posts: 45
Joined: 26 Feb 2017, 22:35

Re: Map Options

Post by Xenuria »

I am starting to get concerned by the overall progress and likely hood of these map features ever coming out. OpenMW is a massive step up from the vanilla engine and plays way smoother but it's still not perfect. It still dosn't take full 64-bit advantage of my 1080 graphics card or my SSD.

I had this vision in my head of OpenMW in it's final form being able to render the entire game world with ease or at least solid 60 fps outdoors with all the latest visual mods.

It's starting to feel like the current engine isn't good enough.
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Pherim
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Joined: 27 Aug 2014, 15:37

Re: Map Options

Post by Pherim »

Xenuria wrote: 15 Jul 2017, 00:15I had this vision in my head of OpenMW in it's final form being able to render the entire game world with ease or at least solid 60 fps outdoors with all the latest visual mods.
This is highly unlikely to happen at any time with any engine. I don't know that much about the exact technical aspects involved, but there are limits to what is possible even with the most modern hardware. To be honest, I am highly impressed by how well MGE XE distant land performs and looks in vanilla Morrowind, especially given that it renders the full meshes and not just billboards or simple LOD meshes (because they don't exist, even though they could), and it still performs WAY better than most mods for Oblivion that add distant objects in my experience. OpenMW is likely to improve on that once it has the same functionality, but this could still take some time. I admit it looks like development has slowed down in the last few months, but the release of 0.42 has been held back by the lack of release videos. Now they are coming, and so is the new version, which already includes a first version of distant land. I'm sure things are going to progress faster again from now on.

Also, performance is not just a matter of the engine. The truth is, many mods, but also the vanilla assets, are badly optimized and unnecessarily Performance-heavy. For example, many vanilla objects use a relatively large number of small textures, and this can have a much larger impact on performance than objects with a single large texture for the entire mesh would have, which is how modern games usually do it to save draw calls. A draw call, as I understand it, is a command from the CPU to the GPU to draw a certain object on the screen, and the more textures or materials a mesh has, the more draw calls it causes, no matter how simple the actual mesh is or how small the single textures are. For the same reason, all LOD objects in Skyrim share one single texture, for example. So there would already be room for improvement in the way the meshes and textures of the vanilla game are done. Have you ever noticed how when you play a highly modded Morrowind, the FPS can be pretty low even though the GPU has very little to do? This is partly because the game can only use one CPU, and once that is at full load, performance will only get worse with additional objects and other things, and more draw calls are one aspect which contributes to that. Of course, we all wish for OpenMW to make full use of multiple CPU cores at some point, but from what I've heard it's not that simple. But we will see.

And they haven't even begun to add new graphical features besides normal mapping and a few other basic things, so calm down, there is no way to say what the engine will be capable of eventually. I admit I am also looking forward to the day when the ominous version 1.0 is released, but I realize that these things take time, especially on a project like this which is done by a bunch of people in their free time. And I have nothing but respect and admiration for what they have done and continue doing with OpenMW.

However, if you further wish to express your disappointment with the progress of the engine, this thread might suit your needs: OpenMW is dead
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AnyOldName3
Posts: 2668
Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Map Options

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Draw calls are also not created equal - a draw call that changes the GPU state (e.g. switching a shader, texture or uniform) can be more expensive than just drawing a new array of vertices using the existing state (provided those vertices are already uploaded to the GPU). Using a single massive texture for everything can even be beneficial sometimes - the id Tech 6 engine holds all active textures in a giant 'megatexture' and edits parts of that texture instead of switching textures during a frame.
Xenuria
Posts: 45
Joined: 26 Feb 2017, 22:35

Re: Map Options

Post by Xenuria »

Pherim wrote: 15 Jul 2017, 10:34
Xenuria wrote: 15 Jul 2017, 00:15I had this vision in my head of OpenMW in it's final form being able to render the entire game world with ease or at least solid 60 fps outdoors with all the latest visual mods.
This is highly unlikely to happen at any time with any engine. I don't know that much about the exact technical aspects involved, but there are limits to what is possible even with the most modern hardware. To be honest, I am highly impressed by how well MGE XE distant land performs and looks in vanilla Morrowind, especially given that it renders the full meshes and not just billboards or simple LOD meshes (because they don't exist, even though they could), and it still performs WAY better than most mods for Oblivion that add distant objects in my experience. OpenMW is likely to improve on that once it has the same functionality, but this could still take some time. I admit it looks like development has slowed down in the last few months, but the release of 0.42 has been held back by the lack of release videos. Now they are coming, and so is the new version, which already includes a first version of distant land. I'm sure things are going to progress faster again from now on.

Also, performance is not just a matter of the engine. The truth is, many mods, but also the vanilla assets, are badly optimized and unnecessarily Performance-heavy. For example, many vanilla objects use a relatively large number of small textures, and this can have a much larger impact on performance than objects with a single large texture for the entire mesh would have, which is how modern games usually do it to save draw calls. A draw call, as I understand it, is a command from the CPU to the GPU to draw a certain object on the screen, and the more textures or materials a mesh has, the more draw calls it causes, no matter how simple the actual mesh is or how small the single textures are. For the same reason, all LOD objects in Skyrim share one single texture, for example. So there would already be room for improvement in the way the meshes and textures of the vanilla game are done. Have you ever noticed how when you play a highly modded Morrowind, the FPS can be pretty low even though the GPU has very little to do? This is partly because the game can only use one CPU, and once that is at full load, performance will only get worse with additional objects and other things, and more draw calls are one aspect which contributes to that. Of course, we all wish for OpenMW to make full use of multiple CPU cores at some point, but from what I've heard it's not that simple. But we will see.

And they haven't even begun to add new graphical features besides normal mapping and a few other basic things, so calm down, there is no way to say what the engine will be capable of eventually. I admit I am also looking forward to the day when the ominous version 1.0 is released, but I realize that these things take time, especially on a project like this which is done by a bunch of people in their free time. And I have nothing but respect and admiration for what they have done and continue doing with OpenMW.

However, if you further wish to express your disappointment with the progress of the engine, this thread might suit your needs: OpenMW is dead
Deeply Fascinating...
As you say OpenMW isn't multi-core yet. Forgive my ignorance but wouldn't choosing an engine that is natively multi-core and 64-bit be a starting point? Not something you work towards after already having most of the game working on an engine?
Chris
Posts: 1625
Joined: 04 Sep 2011, 08:33

Re: Map Options

Post by Chris »

Xenuria wrote: 15 Jul 2017, 18:56 As you say OpenMW isn't multi-core yet. Forgive my ignorance but wouldn't choosing an engine that is natively multi-core and 64-bit be a starting point? Not something you work towards after already having most of the game working on an engine?
No two engines are the same. Trying to fit game data from one engine into another premade one is a big task in itself, and even if you succeed, you'll end up with something that doesn't quite look or play like the original (take someone who's extremely familiar with Morrowind, tweak the movement physics just a little bit, and they'll be able to tell something's wrong). Since OpenMW was conceptualized as replicating the original engine as faithfully as it could (minus the bugs), a premade engine wouldn't be able to accomplish that. Additionally, because of the aforementioned inefficiencies in the assets, along with modern engines requiring higher hardware specs, there's no guarantee it would show much improvement anyway.
Xenuria
Posts: 45
Joined: 26 Feb 2017, 22:35

Re: Map Options

Post by Xenuria »

Chris wrote: 15 Jul 2017, 23:03
Xenuria wrote: 15 Jul 2017, 18:56 As you say OpenMW isn't multi-core yet. Forgive my ignorance but wouldn't choosing an engine that is natively multi-core and 64-bit be a starting point? Not something you work towards after already having most of the game working on an engine?
No two engines are the same. Trying to fit game data from one engine into another premade one is a big task in itself, and even if you succeed, you'll end up with something that doesn't quite look or play like the original (take someone who's extremely familiar with Morrowind, tweak the movement physics just a little bit, and they'll be able to tell something's wrong). Since OpenMW was conceptualized as replicating the original engine as faithfully as it could (minus the bugs), a premade engine wouldn't be able to accomplish that. Additionally, because of the aforementioned inefficiencies in the assets, along with modern engines requiring higher hardware specs, there's no guarantee it would show much improvement anyway.
hmmm Depressing...
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scrawl
Posts: 2152
Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 11:51

Re: Map Options

Post by scrawl »

The truth is, many mods, but also the vanilla assets, are badly optimized and unnecessarily Performance-heavy. For example, many vanilla objects use a relatively large number of small textures, and this can have a much larger impact on performance than objects with a single large texture for the entire mesh would have, which is how modern games usually do it to save draw calls.
Yep, and it's not just the number of textures. The vanilla assets make very liberal use of transparency, for example. Almost every single tree/plant in the game uses alpha blending rather than alpha testing, which means the branches have to be sorted then rendered one by one. A tree model from the bittercoast uses around 50 batches, which is just insane.

Mods, at least many that I've seen, are even worse; I've seen some that had unnecessary keyframes assigned to every single node in the file even though none of them actually moved.

Another issue is that the game doesn't specify which objects are static, anything could be moved or disabled by a script at any time. This makes it hard to do any batch rendering.

I don't doubt there are tricks and hacks that could be added to the engine to try and workaround such things, but it would be much easier (and future proof) to just fix the assets instead.
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psi29a
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Re: Map Options

Post by psi29a »

Do we have a guide that talks about best practices when creating mods? Something that works for both Morrowind and OpenMW and then another one specific to OpenMW to get the most out of the engine? This would be a boon for those wanting to make their own game content for the OpenMW engine.
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