Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

General discussion regarding the OpenMW project.
For technical support, please use the Support subforum.
DocClox
Posts: 101
Joined: 10 May 2015, 13:26

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by DocClox »

I've been learning a little about NIF lately.

As I understand it, the idea of the NIF format is to store the information about the object in exactly the format it will load into the game. The idea being, of course, to eliminate delays while parsing and converting data.

With that in mind, how useful would a loader for assets from FO3 or Oblivion mods actually be? Given that there would be a lot of data that would need to be ignore or converted on the fly. From the point of view of the OpenMW project, you might be better off with a converter. Of course to do that you first need to be able to load the nifs, so loader code would still be needed, but it's possibly not a useful endpoint for OpenMW.

That is not intended to pour cold water on the idea of a Fallout or Oblivion port incidentally. I'd love to see an OpenF3 or Openblivion whether it takes OpenMW as a starting point or not. Just wondering how useful a fallout asset loader is going to be to this project as it stands.

As a follow up point: how well suited is the NIF format when it comes to loading direct into the OpenMW engine. Some of the internals of the engine have got to be different from Beth's engine. Is there a case for developing an OMWIF format. Probably as a late-in-project optimisation, and you wouldn't want to lose the ability to load MW nifs, but still....

Of course, it may well be that you already did that and I just wasn't paying attention.
SquireNed
Posts: 403
Joined: 21 Dec 2013, 22:18

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by SquireNed »

DocClox wrote:I've been learning a little about NIF lately.

As I understand it, the idea of the NIF format is to store the information about the object in exactly the format it will load into the game. The idea being, of course, to eliminate delays while parsing and converting data.

With that in mind, how useful would a loader for assets from FO3 or Oblivion mods actually be? Given that there would be a lot of data that would need to be ignore or converted on the fly. From the point of view of the OpenMW project, you might be better off with a converter. Of course to do that you first need to be able to load the nifs, so loader code would still be needed, but it's possibly not a useful endpoint for OpenMW.

That is not intended to pour cold water on the idea of a Fallout or Oblivion port incidentally. I'd love to see an OpenF3 or Openblivion whether it takes OpenMW as a starting point or not. Just wondering how useful a fallout asset loader is going to be to this project as it stands.

As a follow up point: how well suited is the NIF format when it comes to loading direct into the OpenMW engine. Some of the internals of the engine have got to be different from Beth's engine. Is there a case for developing an OMWIF format. Probably as a late-in-project optimisation, and you wouldn't want to lose the ability to load MW nifs, but still....

Of course, it may well be that you already did that and I just wasn't paying attention.
I think one of the ideas is that some of the data and information stored in later .nif types would be made compatible with OpenMW through the addition of features; for instance, using the different animation schema.

AFAIK, there is no current effort to create an OMW proprietary model file type.
User avatar
psi29a
Posts: 5355
Joined: 29 Sep 2011, 10:13
Location: Belgium
Gitlab profile: https://gitlab.com/psi29a/
Contact:

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by psi29a »

SquireNed wrote:AFAIK, there is no current effort to create an OMW proprietary model file type.
If OpenMW had it's own model file, it wouldn't be proprietary because that would defeat the purpose of an open and cross-platform system. Even then, it would arguably be a bad idea considering that there are other better open formats out there... like collada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA
SquireNed
Posts: 403
Joined: 21 Dec 2013, 22:18

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by SquireNed »

psi29a wrote:
SquireNed wrote:AFAIK, there is no current effort to create an OMW proprietary model file type.
If OpenMW had it's own model file, it wouldn't be proprietary because that would defeat the purpose of an open and cross-platform system. Even then, it would arguably be a bad idea considering that there are other better open formats out there... like collada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLLADA
Proprietary in the sense that it would be custom-designed, not necessarily closed.

But yes, there is no need for us to create a new format, because there are already good formats out there.
HiPhish
Posts: 323
Joined: 02 Jul 2012, 08:36

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by HiPhish »

The way I understand it is that importing assets from other games is just a part of what would be required. The game mechanics like physics, AI, pathfinding and all game rules would need to be reverse-engineered and implemented as well. Otherwise all we would get is Fallout characters in Morrowind. That might be an interesting idea for a mod, but not what we really want.
User avatar
psi29a
Posts: 5355
Joined: 29 Sep 2011, 10:13
Location: Belgium
Gitlab profile: https://gitlab.com/psi29a/
Contact:

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by psi29a »

HiPhish wrote:Otherwise all we would get is Fallout characters in Morrowind. That might be an interesting idea for a mod, but not what we really want.
This is what you are going to get with OpenMW unless you fork it to support Oblivion or FO3.
User avatar
sjek
Posts: 442
Joined: 22 Nov 2014, 10:51

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by sjek »

This is what you are going to get with OpenMW unless you fork it to support Oblivion or FO3.
i thinks this will depend on how deep the dehardcoding will go? will it go to level of ruling when the weapon will hit and achhemy success rate and so on essentially everything from wiki research

the script possibility for region and subset flavours could make in that case also oblivion and other game mechanics possibility.
for complete overhaul would of course need to give physic engine and collision functions and whatnot so it would be long time but possible?

PS. would love to see morrowind/oblivion combined magic system in skyrim .p
DocClox
Posts: 101
Joined: 10 May 2015, 13:26

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by DocClox »

psi29a wrote:
SquireNed wrote:AFAIK, there is no current effort to create an OMW proprietary model file type.
If OpenMW had it's own model file, it wouldn't be proprietary because that would defeat the purpose of an open and cross-platform system. Even then, it would arguably be a bad idea considering that there are other better open formats out there... like collada.
Well, yeah. If you decided to do such a thing, and I'm by no means pushing for it, it would only make sense if, like the NIF format itself it was designed to replicate the internal structure of the OpenMW engine so that it could basically be slurped straight into the game without spending time converting this and reallocating that. It's an optimisation thing.

If that's not something the project wants or needs then the best thing is to stick with nifs, since you already read them and all the mods use them as well. Although then, I'd still argue that a converter makes more sense for FO3/TES4+ formats since you don't really need to spend time reading and discarding dismember partitions and the like

But you know, just $0.02 worth from someone who isn't doing any of the work :)
User avatar
psi29a
Posts: 5355
Joined: 29 Sep 2011, 10:13
Location: Belgium
Gitlab profile: https://gitlab.com/psi29a/
Contact:

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by psi29a »

OpenMW is also a game engine... for you know, making your own game. No one _wants_ to work with NIFs. ;)

We are going to support other formats besides NIFs.
DocClox
Posts: 101
Joined: 10 May 2015, 13:26

Re: Revisiting the idea of FO3/Oblivion support

Post by DocClox »

psi29a wrote:OpenMW is also a game engine... for you know, making your own game.
A point which had not, in fact, escaped me :)
psi29a wrote: No one _wants_ to work with NIFs. ;)
Well no, of course not. NIFs are largely undocumented, and full of game and vendor specific extensions, and with numerous chunks of binary data that may be padding for structure boundaries, or may turn out to map an enum in someone's source code so that the wrong value breaks the game. Of course no one wants to work with them.

On the other hand, they are the primary format for Morrowind, OpenMW already supports them and there are a lot of mods that have a lot of content using NIFs. So it's not like you're going to abandon the format either.
psi29a wrote: We are going to support other formats besides NIFs.
Well good. All I'm saying is think about the design decisions behind NIF. The format is basically an optimisation that allows NIF based games to load larger scenes faster than would otherwise be possible. The question is do you want that level of optimisation?

Collada is cool and very politically correct, but it's still an exchange format, and in terms of efficiency probably doesn't offer anything over nifs. If you're going to have a preferred format, it's worth thinking about defining one that's optimised for loading into OpenMW.
Post Reply