sonicboom12345 wrote: ↑06 Dec 2018, 04:04
This is a good distillation of the anxiety I have regarding the project. Speaking for myself, I'm not seeking to blast holes in team morale and sink the ship. My real goal is course correction. I would rather speak up now and risk a negative backlash, than see the project make mistakes and risk falling into obscurity. Believe me, if I didn't care about all of you and the hundreds of thousands of man hours you've already put in, I wouldn't be saying anything at all.
I'm not aware of any risk of the project falling into obscurity. Even just my own plans for loading up assets from the other Bethesda games
in multiplayer will ensure that can't happen. Combine that with the plans of other contributors and it becomes clear that your anxiety in that regard is unwarranted.
sonicboom12345 wrote: ↑06 Dec 2018, 04:04
First of all, because you don't have to look beyond the cold reception Fallout 76 has gotten to see how Bethesda's chickens have come home to roost insofar as "industry standards" are concerned. But more apropos than that, because OpenMW's real competition isn't Bethesda or the modern industry. It's
other unpaid hobbyists.
I can download the Morrowind Overhaul, and in fifteen minutes, have a kitted-out Morrowind with 100+ mods, model and texture upgrades, and graphics and gameplay extension via MGE and MWSE. Unless I'm a hardcore Morrowind fan with an extensive knowledge of the user-driven landscape, I'm not going to recognize all of the ways OpenMW is superior, because most of OpenMW's improvements are under the hood. I'm probably just going to download the Morrowind Overhaul and stop at that because 1. it looks prettier and 2. it's the path of least resistance.
That's what you need to overcome, and
that's the reason I don't necessarily agree that "a one-to-one recreation of the original Morrowind" is necessarily the best goal post to strive for.
Like most people expressing their neverending "worries and concerns" here, you seem to willfully ignore 90% of the context. (At least you're slightly more polite than the others, though.)
First off, the vast majority of the 100+ mods, model and texture upgrades work just fine in OpenMW. I don't see how
OpenMW is competing with them.
Secondly, MGE and MWSE do not in any way adhere to the "industry standards" addressed in the quote, did not need to recreate an entire massively complicated engine before they could add extra functionality to it, and have severe limitations that OpenMW doesn't.
Thirdly, what does it matter that the average user would rather use the "prettier-looking path of least resistance" for now?
This is an unfinished hobby project, and I'm getting pretty tired of random unhelpful bystanders coming in and going on like broken records about their profound disappointment that OpenMW hasn't yet wiped the floor with the existing engine hacks, as though this was some kind of bloodsport.
I primarily work on my branch of OpenMW for my own pleasure and enjoyment, not to indulge the competitive shower thoughts of people uninvolved with the project.
Finally, there have been other projects trying to recreate Morrowind's engine and they have failed hard because they have overshot their mark. You should very seriously consider the possibility that what you regard as OpenMW's
fatal flaw, its
focus on doing things in the right order, is actually the only reason why it's still around as a project to this day.
You're comparing apples and oranges. OpenMW is primarily a programming project, not an art project, recreating a game that's more than twice as old as Skyrim and has sold 7.5 times fewer copies. It's also focused on
sane nonsuperficial plans and long term thinking, instead of
flashy gimmicks and publicity stunts, which is precisely why it's not vaporware.
sonicboom12345 wrote: ↑06 Dec 2018, 04:04
Has anyone on the OpenMW team even talked to Zaric?
What do you think? (Unless I'm Schrödinger's OpenMW team member, whose existence can be denied whenever convenient to any given critic of OpenMW.)
sonicboom12345 wrote: ↑06 Dec 2018, 04:22
This is exactly what I'm talking about. No, PR isn't an impediment to getting OpenMW to 1.0, it's an
essential tool for getting OpenMW to 1.0. If you had spent the last year advertising, you would have more monetary support on Patreon. If you had spent the last year advertising, you would have a larger team. If you had spent the last year advertising, you would have a bigger audience for your project, which would make each release more rewarding, which would improve morale, which would improve retention. Posts like this are so depressingly short-sighted. It makes me feel so defeated to read them. They're big red flags that warn against the future success of the project.
That's a gross oversimplification of how advertising and project management work in the real world. The briefest look at some other projects with large team sizes and budgets that have never had
any releases whatsoever will clarify as much.
Endless pointless hype can make you crash straight into a wall when you end up with overly impatient people nagging you forever and trying to derail the project in a hundred different directions.
Perhaps more advertising would be attempted if you armchair experts could just shut up for a little bit instead of being such a constant reminder of advertising's drawbacks.