Welcome to the first regular OpenMW release commentary in 2016. The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.39 of our open source reimplementation of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. 0.39 brings OpenMW a few steps closer to the longing awaited release of version 1.0. There are improvements to the behaviour of our engine as well as several essential new features in our editor, OpenMW-CS. Those of you who watched the recently published Forgotten Release Commentaries know the procedure; for those of you who've just returned: The release commentaries are divided into two videos, one for OpenMW and one for OpenMW-CS. This video deals with the engine, while the corresponding one concentrates on our editor. So let's have a look at the progress our engine has made since the last release. -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- When going through the change log, you will realise that this release is all about corpses and magic effects. - I will deal with these issues first, and save the non-lethal parts for later. First off, dead bodies formerly wouldn't disappear after the appropriate amount of time had passed. In the vanilla game, this is controlled by a global game setting which defaults to 72 hours. To illustrate this issue I cleared an ancestral tomb near Balmora, left it, rested for 3 days and entered it again. As you can see, the corpses are still there in version 0.38. The necessary game setting has now been implemented, so dungeons will be self-cleaning from now on. Please note that vanilla Morrowind's infamous 72-hours bug, which is related to the above-mentioned setting and clears some temporary data after the given time, will not be adopted one-to-one in OpenMW, but rather affect dispensable data only. Funnily enough, the respawning of creatures and NPCs was broken too. The respawn timer was bound to the wrong setting and not timed individually for every instance. This is best seen when killing a levelled-list creature in a dungeon, getting rid of the corpse, leaving and re-entering the dungeon. There should now be a reincarnation of the creature you've killed. As you can see, both issues have been fixed in the current release. Good hunting! When an actor dies in vanilla Morrowind, all magic effects cast by that particular actor are removed from their targets. Unfortunately, this mechanic wasn't yet implemented in OpenMW. Even after killing that nasty Lesser Bonewalker, my character is still suffering from drained attributes until the effect naturally wears off. Version 0.39 finally adapts the vanilla behaviour so your combat efforts are instantly rewarded. - Alas, this is no remedy for Greater Bonewalkers whose attribute damaging has terminated the career of so many promising adventurers. As the main character of the game, you're allowed to do whatever you want. That includes such morbid hobbies as dressing up corpses for the fun of it. In previous versions, items containing constant magic effects would even trigger those effects on dead bodies. In the end, this couldn't save the dead from their doom, so the OpenMW team decided to adapt to the vanilla behaviour. Sorry, Tarhiel! Vvardenfell is a thoroughly strange place, and therefore it's no wonder that even water-logged corpses are treated differently depending on their time of death. While they generally float to the surface, bodies that are dead upon the start of the game are meant to sink to the ground instead. OpenMW now provides this non-egalitarian approach as well. The vanilla engine allows statics and activators to cast effects on the player, for example a large fireball when the player enters a certain area. This is used by some mods and was formerly impossible in OpenMW. Version 0.39 implements this feature - with supposedly devastating results! Morrowind offers several types of magic effect arrows to add some spice to your ranged combat experience. Formerly, a successful hit with such a projectile would additionally launch the magic projectile corresponding to the arrow's effect towards the target. This incorrect behaviour has now been fixed. -------------------------------------------------- Morrowind often makes use of the placeAt function to spawn creatures or NPCs at certain places. For example, Tribunal's Dark Brotherhood assassins are spawned at your character's location. The same goes for the Ancestor Ghosts in Ibar-Dad which spawn when the player takes some cursed daggers. In order to avoid them being spawned in a rock or beyond the walls of an interior cell, Bethesda implemented several safety checks. OpenMW formerly placed instances without checking for a safe spawn location which could lead to hilarious as well as game-breaking results. Version 0.39 should fix this issue in most situations. Staying on that theme: In the past, OpenMW also misbehaved regarding the placement of items. Dropping an item from your inventory wouldn't necessarily place that item at your mouse cursor's position for the bounding box was set to hold all possible animation states of the item's mesh. For example, a bow would have a large bounding box and thus be placed further to the right than expected. The current version solves this issue by taking into account the initial pose when placing an object. OpenMW formerly allowed sounds to be played more than once on the same object at the same time. Just listen to what this Riekling Raider wants to tell us: ... Well, this issue has been fixed now, and yet I still can't make out the message. Can you? ... Before you start an explorative tour on Vvardenfell, you may want to get yourself some potions to cure the various negative effects such an undertaking can involve. But what if your character had a low alchemy skill and was short of money? How would they find out about the correct ingredients for, let's say, a Restore Fatigue potion? In previous versions, this was no problem, as combining suitable ingredients in the alchemy window displayed the generated magic effects disregarding your character's alchemy skill. This bug has been fixed in the current release, so better ask around for ingredient effects, or read some alchemy books. And like I predicted in the 0.37 video, OpenMW now correctly updates the ingredient count in the alchemy window when you try to create a potion without any effect. I mean, you wouldn't do that anyway, but who knows what glitches may have appeared if we kept that incorrect behaviour? Morrowind players have proven to be very creative... OpenMW offers overcautious players the possibility to delete some of their numberless saved games in order to free up some disk storage. Unfortunately, the scroll bar would jump at the top when deleting a saved game in earlier versions, complicating your task tremendously. The scroll bar will stay at its current position with version 0.39. We will also add the possibility to multi-select saved games once our external interface software supports this feature. -------------------------------------------------- Let's move on to the highlights of this release. In the past, players often complained about extensive micro-stuttering while playing OpenMW. This was mainly caused by our physics engine which was updated with a fixed frame rate of 60 fps. When the actual frame rate deviated from that value, the stuttering occurred. OpenMW now uses interpolation between the physics engine's time steps to hopefully prevent this issue in the future. The new version also supports normal maps, specular maps and parallax maps on textures. To demonstrate this, I installed some work-in-progress textures made by our member lysol. He currently works on a complete retexture of Vvardenfell's capital city Vivec and was so kind as to allow me to showcase his early results. A first look at Morrowind's glorious future! As if that weren't enough, scrawl has implemented a really cool feature in OpenMW: a first iteration of background cell loading and caching of loaded cells! This feature drastically decreases loading times on cell transition by predicting possible cells the player could enter in the future. On my medium class PC with recording software running and OpenMW's graphics set to highest values, loading times when entering or leaving interior cells aren't noticeable anymore, whereas cell transitions on exterior cells only rarely lead to loading times so far. To illustrate the difference this feature makes, we will soon organise the first Morrowind Olympiad. Stay tuned! -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- We hope that with increased performance of our engine more and more of you will start playing Morrowind natively using OpenMW. While you're at it, please report every bug you encounter while wandering around Vvardenfell's vast lands at our bugtracker. OpenMW is not only an engine to play good-ol' Morrowind in a more stable and moddable way, but it's also suitable for the creation of completely new games. The OpenMW Game Template project has set its goal to providing the very basic assets a game developer would need to create a whole new game using the OpenMW engine. It will only contain content licensed under the Creative Commons by 3.0 license, which is free to use for your own projects. At a more content-based view, the OpenMW Example Suite is in active development too. Its purpose is to showcase the improved and additional features, such as bump maps or better combat, of the OpenMW engine over the vanilla one. Settled in a world distinct from Bethesda's Nirn, it will contain a small storyline, new items and new characters to - really along the way - let the player discover the capabilities of our new engine. We will provide a more detailed video about these two projects soon. If you're interested, check out our forums for more information. So that's it: Another two reasons to get you involved with OpenMW; don't let that chance slip by. If you have some C++ knowledge and enough spare time to contribute to our open source project, feel free to sign in our forums and ask what you can do. OpenMW amongst other things isn't as attractive as Skywind in terms of graphical quality, and thus lacks an appropriate awareness level. All the more we need every help we can get, so spread the word! And if you want to support scrawl in implementing more great features like the above-mentioned background cell loading, just become one of his Patrons on Patreon and allow him to assign more of his time to OpenMW. The corresponding link is available below this video and on our homepage, openmw.org. -------------------------------------------------- Now it's high time for you to hurry over to the OpenMW-CS video of this release. Look forward to a small self-created mod that reimplements all of Skyrim's game mechanics in OpenMW while upgrading all visual assets and animations to vanilla Morrowind's quality. Awesome! Also, don't forget to read through the official release notes for more in-depth information and visit our forums on openmw.org. Until next time; thanks for watching!