Understanding Morrowind's Asset Issues

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sgtwisky
Posts: 18
Joined: 02 Aug 2017, 03:14

Re: Understanding Morrowind's Asset Issues

Post by sgtwisky »

I would be really surprised/impressed if it was skill and not time that is lacking in the people developing OpenMW. I mean, to get this far without knowing how modern games and/or software is designed, as well as being familiar with older methods (like those used in Morrowind) of software development would be pretty improbable.

From my very basic knowledge of C++ and lurking on the forums and the github for OpenMW, I am confident in my assumption that many of the developers ether work or have worked in software development. Wouldn't surprise me any if some of them are game dev's who have helped produce other games I've played.

Obviously its the internet and every contributor could, in theory be learning as they go but that seems far fetched to me lol. Now... if only I had bought bitcoin early or won the lottery and could just pay everyone to make OpenMW their day job XD.
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lysol
Posts: 1513
Joined: 26 Mar 2013, 01:48
Location: Sweden

Re: Understanding Morrowind's Asset Issues

Post by lysol »

Despite people not having enough free time to work as much on OpenMW than they wish they could, we need to remember that the development of OpenMW is very healthy. We have plenty of really cool stuff coming in the future, Lua GUI and post-processing shaders to mention a few.
concurrent
Posts: 4
Joined: 29 Jun 2020, 22:06

Re: Understanding Morrowind's Asset Issues

Post by concurrent »

wazabear wrote: 21 Jul 2021, 07:08 ... Besides just static objects the way body slots work in Morrowind add to the draw-call nightmare, it's one of the reasons later titles like Skyrim have such a simplified body part system.
If I am understanding you correctly I may have accidentally found a bit of a workaround for this issue regarding body parts - or maybe just an optimization.

A long sleeve shirt has likely 7 parts. Chest, L/R Upper Arm, L/R Forearm, L/R Wrist. I've been digging into reworking A lot of the Better Clothes assets. The textures for those were combined into 1 texture. So even though your .nif only has 1 texture - it 7 objects.

I just got sick renaming parts all the time, so What I do is just make the shirt "Tri Chest" And also include the proper named empty's (no material defined) so the "Tri Left Upper Arm", "Tri Right Upper Arm", etc. parts are just empty nodes in the .nif. This info is apparently good enough to tell the game to replace those parts. I reuse those emptys over and over again and I don't have to rename 7 objects for every thing I export.

I started doing this just to same time, but sounds like it might be a small help performance wise as well.

*edit I realize this method here can cause some issues with certain assets - you are generally going to want the wrist part of a long sleeved shirt to be replaced by gauntlets for example. if the shirt is tight fitting, maybe this works. Or it probably just clips through. hmm...

never mind anything I said :P ...
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