Modding-OpenMW.com -- What's up? 2020-01 Edition

Not about OpenMW? Just about Morrowind in general? Have some random babble? Kindly direct it here.
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johnnyhostile
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Modding-OpenMW.com -- What's up? 2020-01 Edition

Post by johnnyhostile »

Greetings folks!

Your friendly neighborhood site admin here, bringing you some updates about the website. What have I been up to, you may be asking yourself; well in no real order:

Name Generator: Thanks to awesome contributions from dmbaturin of the IRC folk, I'm glad to present to you the Lore-Friendly Name Generator. He's got a thread going on the Tamriel Rebuilt forums, so be sure to give it a read and try out the generator!

At some point I'd like to provide a standalone, offline version of this (I've started work on the basics of the code but it's not ready).

TES3MP servers and scripts: earlier this year, I began work on two TES3MP servers that I've not really mentioned much about (though they are listed from the main page of the website). It was sort of a test bed for setting up a server with scripts as well as a place for me to hack on scripts of my own.

I do plan to list these in the server browser eventually, after I've had a chance to dust them off and take care of some other things. Be on the lookout for that if you like TES3MP!

Cleaning house: If you ever bothered to look through the website source after I opened it up, you might have seen some hideous stuff. I sure did; after open-sourcing the code it became apparent to me that a lot of things needed to be tightened up before anybody could be expected to want to contribute to the code directly.

I'm now pleased to say that this situation is much better than it was (of course it's always possible there is room for improvement). Whereas before I had an utterly massive single python file that contained all data, this is now broken up and laid out in a way that doesn't really require any understanding of the rest of the code. Mod lists are literal lists, and the mod data itself is represented as a python dict with only string keys and values (mostly like json). Mod data itself is grouped by category.

My hope is this may make the codebase less intimidating to even look at. Let me know in any case!

Oh, on the subject of mod lists: While doing the refactoring mentioned above, I cleaned up the bits of code that defined a rough mod list in a bad, hard-coded way. Now, as I mentioned above, list data is separated from mod data and the lists themselves are represented by YAML files containing an array of mod names (strings).

This way, a new list can be created as easily as a new file with a list of names. Anybody could, in theory, submit a list and have it on the website as an option for folks to browse. Check out the lists page for more info on contributing if you are curious!

Keyboard navigation: Now, all mod lists can be browsed by using Ctrl + Left / Right arrow keys to go up or down a step. This unfortunately requires javascript, but I promise it's a tiny bit of code.

CFG Generator: A nice side effect of all the work I went on about above is that the CFG Generator now works a bit better for folks not using just the presets.

For instance, and I deeply regret missing this feature before (how did I miss this?!): Now when you use the CFG Generator, no matter if you've selected a preset or you've hand-picked some list of mods, when you submit your selection and the page loads the results - your selections will still be selected in the menu.

If a multiple-select menu wasn't cumbersome enough, having mine not remember your selections made it nearly useless. Now, its a bit more useful and should allow for folks to more easily make variations of existing lists.

For instance, want to use the Total Overhaul list but with some different textures? Use the preset, then select/unselect mods in the menu as needed. After you click "Submit", the URL will be copy-pasteable and/or bookmark-able.

The resulting URLs are huge since they contain the slug for each selected mod, please keep that in mind when you copy and paste and see a huge amount of text!

Other updates: It's so awesome how often we see new, quality mods nowadays - and even more awesome that they update with improvements. Sometimes, I don't find out about these updates for a while and so the site goes a bit out of date. I apologize about that, but in any case at present most major, new mods should have current and accurate descriptions and usage notes.

If something's ever out of date and you notice, and you don't mind dropping me an email about it, then please do. For that matter, if you have any thoughts about the site whatsoever, please reach out! I love hearing about new ideas for features or additions.

IPv6: Soon, the modding-openmw.com domain as well as my TES3MP servers will support IPv6 and HTTP/2. Sort of a minor feature but one that's necessary.

Exit plan: After some conversations on IRC (you know I have an IRC channel for the website, right?!) it became apparent to me that some folks might wonder: "What happens to the website if/when johnnyhostile is out of the picture [for any reason]?"

No, I don't plan on going anywhere, and yes I plan to continue working on the site for the foreseeable future.

But I do want to be clear that, should I ever choose to stop doing the website, it is my wish to donate the domain name to the OpenMW project should they want it. I don't want anybody to lose access to it, just because of something unrelated.

Of course, the code being GPLv3 means it already belongs to everybody. So feel free to take advantage of that! :D

Alright that's it. Thank you for reading this wall of text.

And last but not least: A huge thank you to everyone who has emailed or otherwise reached out about the site, you are all awesome!
tvenissat
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Re: Modding-OpenMW.com -- What's up? 2020-01 Edition

Post by tvenissat »

Thank you for the update. The website has been an huge help and I wanted to say that I appreciate all of the work you have done!
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johnnyhostile
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Re: Modding-OpenMW.com -- What's up? 2020-01 Edition

Post by johnnyhostile »

tvenissat wrote: 18 Jan 2020, 23:29 Thank you for the update. The website has been an huge help and I wanted to say that I appreciate all of the work you have done!
Thanks for the comment, I'm glad the site's been useful to you. Please keep an eye out for things to come! :D
Shinino
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Joined: 03 Dec 2017, 17:27

Re: Modding-OpenMW.com -- What's up? 2020-01 Edition

Post by Shinino »

Used this yesterday, and found it fairly helpful, but there were a few things that came up.

1) The Powershell command to create all the folders is nice -- but in the premade cfg for the Overhaul, it has sub-folders that the command doesn't create, and it doesn't seem to be consistent on the mod info whether the folders have subfolders or not (Talking about stuff like 'NPCs' 'Fixes' and the like).

2) There are a ton of mods that are listed as being OpenMW compatible in the wiki that aren't on the site. Is there a way to recommend these for adding? I ended up guessing on load order on some additional ones I added because I wasn't sure (a big one, of course, is Necessities of Morrowind)
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johnnyhostile
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Re: Modding-OpenMW.com -- What's up? 2020-01 Edition

Post by johnnyhostile »

Shinino wrote: 03 Feb 2020, 21:01 Used this yesterday, and found it fairly helpful, but there were a few things that came up.

1) The Powershell command to create all the folders is nice -- but in the premade cfg for the Overhaul, it has sub-folders that the command doesn't create, and it doesn't seem to be consistent on the mod info whether the folders have subfolders or not (Talking about stuff like 'NPCs' 'Fixes' and the like).

2) There are a ton of mods that are listed as being OpenMW compatible in the wiki that aren't on the site. Is there a way to recommend these for adding? I ended up guessing on load order on some additional ones I added because I wasn't sure (a big one, of course, is Necessities of Morrowind)
Hey Shinino- apologies about the delay. Regarding the things you mentioned:

1) Admittedly, Powershell is not something I have a lot of experience with. So when I added the category-based subfolders I was unable to update that bit because I .... well I can't :) I welcome any help that I can get on that stuff.

2) Thank you for bringing this up, it's something I've been aware of for a while. "Parity with the official wiki" is a goal I have for the project, it's just been on hold for a while as I do other things.

I gladly accept new mod recommendations via email, here on the forums (though I don't always check here regularly), or on IRC or Discord. You can see what mods I've got actual plans to add via this link, which is a search of my issue tracker database.

Thanks for the feedback!
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