openmw.org

Assorted things relevant to this thread:

1.) Ponyrider’s FarNIF generator. And his Morroblivion LOD assets (including billboards for rocks!).

2.) Arthmoor’s LOD water plane.

3. Morroblivion FAQ:

Wasn't Morroblivion shut down by Bethesda?
Several years ago, at the beginning of the Morroblivion project, the project thread was shut down on the official Bethesda forums, and hosting of it on TES Nexus was taken down at Bethesda's request, due to some apparent licensing issues with using textures from Morrowind in Oblivion.
...
These legal issues have now been circumvented with mesh and texture replacers, and community development of the project is still going on here at Morroblivion.com.

PS someone upthread suggested that _far meshes are made in CS. But they aren’t; you can just use Nifskope to remove collision, swap textures out with low res alternatives, and maybe merge some faces. So I can’t think of any legal problem with using Morroblivion LOD as a mod for OpenMW. Of course, if ponyrider’s efforts work, we could just make new ones.

So for people interested and following along at home... we just started a new dev cycle (0.47) and looking contributions made last year by a developer named bzzt. He (we assume) was difficult to work with (language barrier/attitude), but did the lion's share of work having to do with distant statics. We couldn't really review/merge his work until after shadows got merged in so now that 0.46 is in the oven, time to look at that work again for 0.47

There is still a bit of work to be done; first stabilise it (not a crashy mess) then fine tune it (does it look alright at default settings), then merge and let you lot test it as well for feedback to improve it.

3440x1440 screenshot, soft fps cap at 60, no dips, all visual effects turn on and full, including shadows, ECLD=1, view distance of 66666 So yes, it's being worked on.

Can you share the original pic? This is beautiful!

Drool ....

This would be amazing and a big step for OpenMW! It seems like a lot of work has been done on it already. I'll be very happy to assist with testing/feedback.

Does this help?

https://imgur.com/a/1vCnEoM

Thank you! Wallpaper now!
Also, does the bzzt branch will increase the FPS? I have enabled 2 cells and my fps runs around 25/30.

This is with exterior cell load distance = 1

Distant statics might be merged in the 0.47 cycle? This would be incredible!! I had thought from this and other forum topics (e.g. viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4621) this might take years assuming a dedicated developer had the time, skills, and interest to develop this - viewing distant statics is really the only remaining major feature that OpenMW is currently "lacking" compared to vanilla MW with MGE XE. I'll be following this closely - great news!

psi29a wrote: ↑22 Apr 2020, 19:53 This is with exterior cell load distance = 1

Jeez, I really can't wait to play Morrowind at 60fps with 2,5 cells distance view like I do now.

Are we talking past each other? Do you mean ECLD or do you just mean literally, 2,5 cells worth of distance?

Distant lands have been in for awhile. Seeing the statics in distant lands is what is being worked on now. (Among other things.)

ECLD has to do with making the cells around you 'active', as in... scripts loaded, actors doing their things. It is a real killer in terms of performance. So people mistakenly think that bumping their ECLD > 1 will give them distant statics... which it does, but it loads EVERYTHING... including physics which will bog down even the most hardcore gaming computer.


@mikeprichard indeed... it is why we keep telling people NO; stay away from ECLD for distant statics... as it just kills performance as it enables EVERYTHING in those cells even if your view distance is 666.