0.15 feedback

[Lazaroth]

Hello,

I've followed this project for a little over a year now without bothering to register and posting anything. But there are some issues/inconsistencies to original MW in 0.15 (that you may or may not know about), which I wanted to bring to your attention.

1. Map issues.
- There are hard black edges in the map between new cells.
- There is also an alignment error, so that the new/old cell is 10 or so pixels off.
You can see both issues here:
http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/6405 ... ot000n.png
- The arrow in the map window to the bottom right is cut when near a cellchange.
http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/107/ ... t002wq.png

2. Sound issues.
- Don't know how much you've fine-tuned the ambient sounds, but they are playing too often. E.g. when near a boat, the creak you hear are played a lot more than in the original.
- This may or may not be related to the previous point, but in Ghostgate, the forcefield is too loud and is dissed.

3. Underwater issue.
Not a big thing, just that the tint is completely different than the original and IMO looks like a tropical paradise.

4. Texture weirdness.
I noticed while confirming the sound issue that the forcefield in Ghostgate had some strange glowing artefacts.
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/872/ ... 001cvr.png

5. Moving between areas.
The rotation which the player looks at when entering a new area is wrong.



Another thing I'm curious about is if changing cell will be smoother in the future. I.e. seamless moving between cells as in e.g. Skyrim.

BTW, I really like the font you've chosen.

Keep up the good work!

[raevol]

Thank you so much for the feedback... I don't know how many of these are known issues, but I really appreciate that you took the time to thoughtfully write these up and provide screenshots/descriptions. I'd hire you to do QA any day.

[Zini]

Not going to comment on the graphics part, because scrawl pretty much has taken over this area of OpenMW.

- Don't know how much you've fine-tuned the ambient sounds, but they are playing too often. E.g. when near a boat, the creak you hear are played a lot more than in the original.

We haven't done much fine tuning at all yet. I guess that is better done around 1.0 or maybe even in a post 1.0 maintenance release, because then we (hopefully) will have a larger group of testers.

- This may or may not be related to the previous point, but in Ghostgate, the forcefield is too loud and is dissed.

There is an issue for that on the tracker.

The rotation which the player looks at when entering a new area is wrong.

Unimplemented feature. I think there is even a comment in the code about it. But we don't have an issue in the tracker, it seems. Will add it. Thanks for bringing this up.

Another thing I'm curious about is if changing cell will be smoother in the future. I.e. seamless moving between cells as in e.g. Skyrim.

Most likely a post 1.0 feature. There are a couple of things we could do to make cell transitions smoother.

[scrawl]

Then it's my turn to comment on the rest.

1. Map issues.

2 of the 3 issues you mentioned are fixed in git and will be part of 0.16. The remaining one (objects cut off at cell borders) is a bit harder to fix. It has an issue on the tracker already.

3. Underwater issue.
Not a big thing, just that the tint is completely different than the original and IMO looks like a tropical paradise.

This is the current color in RGB: 0, 0.65, 0.65
I agree it doesn't fit so well. Feel free to suggest a better one.

4. Texture weirdness.

This is related to the fact that morrowind uses per-vertex lighting while OpenMW uses the (technically superior) per-pixel lighting. In this case the results look weird because morrowind dev's have used individual lights to lighten up the whole ghostfence (instead of simply increasing the diffuse/ambient values of the material). This looks only correct with per-vertex lighting, because the ghostfence has a low tesselation. This would be a good case for correction via a plugin. Does OpenMW intend to ship with useful plugins by default?

[Zini]

Does OpenMW intend to ship with useful plugins by default?

Sure. Why not? This is definitely better fixed in a plugin than have some kind of workaround in OpenMW.

[Lazaroth]

Good that most issues were known. Feels great to have gotten them off my chest...

This is the current color in RGB: 0, 0.65, 0.65
I agree it doesn't fit so well. Feel free to suggest a better one.

Is there some way I can test this myself?
Anyway, I did an approximation and it is: 0.15, 0.22, 0.26

[Tarius]

Good that most issues were known. Feels great to have gotten them off my chest...

This is the current color in RGB: 0, 0.65, 0.65
I agree it doesn't fit so well. Feel free to suggest a better one.

Is there some way I can test this myself?
Anyway, I did an approximation and it is: 0.15, 0.22, 0.26

Best way to test is to go into the game and take a screenshot. You then put screenshot into something like photoshop and do a color picker on the tint to get a close value.

[Necrod]

Good that most issues were known. Feels great to have gotten them off my chest...

This is the current color in RGB: 0, 0.65, 0.65
I agree it doesn't fit so well. Feel free to suggest a better one.

Is there some way I can test this myself?
Anyway, I did an approximation and it is: 0.15, 0.22, 0.26

Best way to test is to go into the game and take a screenshot. You then put screenshot into something like photoshop and do a color picker on the tint to get a close value.

Nope, that's not a good idea, because the tint is like 50% transparent, and the color you would pick up in Photoshop, would be of the tint combined with 50% of underwater dirt or whatever you see through the tint

[natirips]

As for underwater color:

UnderwaterColor=012,030,037
UnderwaterColorWeight=0.85

[Chris]

Sure. Why not? This is definitely better fixed in a plugin than have some kind of workaround in OpenMW.

That can probably be used to fix the Ghostgate sound volume, too. The problem is simply that the sound is given a really really large radius, and the audio engine seems to have built-in limits on the number of (identical?) sounds it'll play at once. Nothing else seems to trip over this problem though, and it's probably best to avoid such artificial limits when possible.