Hello, and welcome to the third and final part of our Forgotten Release Commentaries. This video will cover version 0.38 of our open source reimplementation of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. For those of you who don't know the score: This video covers the changes made to the OpenMW engine. To see the progress made on our editor, OpenMW-CS, check out the corresponding release video. OpenMW version 0.38 is the second release following the switch to a new rendering engine, the OpenSceneGraph renderer, and it is mostly a maintenance release. However, there have been several improvements over the previous versions, so let's have a look at what's new. -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- The change of rendering engines has really revived OpenMW's development, and caused many code revisions under the hood which you even might not notice. For example, the sound source for NPC voices has been moved from the NPC's feet to the head in order to mimic the real-world behaviour. I hope this corresponds to what everyone experiences. The same is true for the player's character as well. Additionally, other sounds, such as readying your weapon or casting a spell, have been moved from the feet to appropriate locations. This should make surround sound in OpenMW a lot more enjoyable. And did you know that NPCs triggered the wrong sound file on landing? Well, in vanilla Morrowind the formerly confused sound files include the same sound, but modders may change that in the future, so: all hail to OpenMW! Moreover, the combat AI now takes account of collision boxes when checking the distance to the target. For example, this should prevent guards from endlessly and eagerly running into Mudcrabs in order to protect the player. Save a Mudcrab, eat a guard! Previous versions of OpenMW made Dwemer ruins look like techno raves - at least the sounds fit as well. With the current release, the pulse rate of light sources has been modified to suit the vanilla game. This makes exploring those ruins much less disruptive and seizure inducing. If that wasn't enough, OpenMW now supports OpenSceneGraph's native model format. For the time being, this format only enables basic modelling, but in the future more features, like applying bump maps, texture and skeletal animations, or separate collision shapes, will be added. Please pay attention to the advantages an open source model format has over the proprietary NIF format: It is extendible, maintainable, free-licensed and, hopefully, easy to export from modelling software like Blender. I'm really looking forward to someone finally replacing Morrowind's, eh, let's say 'limited', animations. -------------------------------------------------- When exploring dangerous dungeons, a player may want to quick save their game often, as Morrowind can have quite unforgiving combat difficulty. With improved performance, and thus shorter saving times, there is a chance that the save bar isn't noticeable anymore. However, to indicate a successful save a quicksave indicator has been implemented. A significant change has been made to the ranged combat mechanics. In earlier versions, if the player was underwater or trying to shoot something through the water surface, the projectiles would smoothly travel through the water instead of loosing their power after a short distance like in vanilla Morrowind. This has been fixed as OpenMW now mimics the original game's behaviour. Moreover, items dropped underwater formerly hovered on the spot. With version 0.38 they sink to the ground just as the vanilla version demands. - Please, don't ask me which behaviour is more realistic. Previously, the dressing and undressing of your character could become slightly annoying, with the mouse cursor picking up clothes worn underneath those you wanted to select. This issue has been addressed in the current release. -------------------------------------------------- A typical morning on Vvardenfell: You've just finished your nightly bar-hopping routine, admired the barmaid, taunted a proud Nord warrior, and beaten up some annoying Dunmers - and already there's a guard standing in front of you, shaking you down for the last coins you possess. Well, smart characters would formerly solve the situation by simply dropping all inventory gold before confronting the guard. This would allow the player to pay a fee without having the appropriate amount of gold at hand. Unfortunately, this glitch has been fixed, now nothing protects you from the full rigour of the law. Did you know that NPCs in OpenMW had their eyes on the back of their heads - at least when the player was in sneak mode? The NPCs' view direction was inverted during the sneak awareness check, which, of course, has been fixed now. Another bug occurred when casting two or more unique soul trap spells on a creature. If the player carried the appropriate amount of sufficiently-sized soul gems with him, the soul would be trapped once for every spell effective. This exploit is no longer a problem in version 0.38, which should noticeably decrease Galbedir's workload. -------------------------------------------------- When changing the field of view to very high values, rendering glitches may appear in first-person view. In the vanilla game this problem only occurs in werewolf mode and is solved by applying the changes to the game world only, not to the first-person meshes. A more flexible solution has been implemented in OpenMW, with two field of view settings, one for the first-person meshes and one for the game world. Moreover, the settings for the werewolf field of view are now properly imported from the Morrowind.ini file. Please note, that it may be necessary to re-run the settings importer in the OpenMW launcher in order to make this feature work. Another werewolf-related bug has been solved: Previously, certain controls like Next Weapon, Previous Weapon, or Ready Magic were available to players in werewolf mode. This could leave the player defenceless when accidentally switching weapons. The controls have been fixed, so nothing prevents you from using these - menacing claws! -------------------------------------------------- Version 0.38 includes a milestone in OpenMW's development: Finally, movement of objects between cells has been implemented! Previous versions worked around this feature by simply deleting and recreating an object on cell transition. Obviously, this lead to several bugs and, occasionally, to severe misbehaviour. For example, in one of Bloodmoon's main quests some of your companions are scripted to die of werewolf attacks. Because of intermediate cell changes the script could fail, leaving the quest irresolvable. The same went for other scripts affected by movement between cells, such as scripts containing direct positioning commands, or scripts trying to disable NPCs in another cell. This also affected mods like the famous Julan Ashlander Companion mod. All these issues have been fixed in the current release. -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- That's all for now. If you want to help us finishing the last steps before OpenMW version 1.0 will be released, just grab the recent version from our download pages, start playing, and update our bugtracker whenever you encounter one of those nasty little things. If you are skilled in C++ and want to help us on the programming side of OpenMW, you're welcome to join our efforts. Please note that there aren't many beginner tasks available at the moment. In case of doubt, simply sign in our forums and ask what you can do. If you want to help us but don't have the time to do so, consider a donation to scrawl's Patreon account in order to increase the time he can spend on OpenMW. Scrawl is one of our main developers and has dealt with the switch to the OpenSceneGraph renderer almost single-handedly. Moreover, he's always good for a surprise - look forward to the release of version 0.39. The corresponding Patreon link is available below this video and on our homepage, openmw.org. -------------------------------------------------- Don't forget to check out the extraordinarily short release video about our editor, OpenMW-CS, in which I'm rebuilding all of Tamriel in 2 minutes and 37.5 seconds. Also consider reading through the official release notes for more in-depth information and visit our forums on openmw.org. With the next update we will hopefully be release-synchronised again. Until then, thanks for watching!