OpenMW Game Template

Anything related to PR, release planning and any other non-technical idea how to move the project forward should be discussed here.
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dirnae
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Joined: 09 Aug 2015, 08:25

Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by dirnae »

Hi DestinedToDie,

My old ones do, though I wont be using those, they're from 3-5 years ago.

Hrnchamd, who created MCP and tweaked some of my animations, created a patch option for new bones to be used in the original MW engine as long as you name the bones correctly. So we can actually create a new skeleton that is cross-compatible between MW and OpenMW, with no Bethesda assets, that can be used for this project, if there'll be no issues with that. So we get immediate results with future benefits.

I never got around to playing with this MCP feature as real life commitments took me away from modding for the past few years, but I'm looking at modding again recently, and I'm looking at using a new skeleton with the following additions compared to vanilla:

- Upper and Lower arm twist bones
- 5 fingers and toe in 3rd person
- a proper neck bone
- more tail bones
- Hopefully an extra spine bone used for transitions, as currently Bip01 Spine is used for transitions and this can look ugly.

I'm using Robert's original body releases for Oblivion, so I have a pre-built body to play with (it's completely free to use so ideal for this project too). I'm not fussed about who uses my mods or about credit either.

I rebuilt the new skeleton I was using yesterday so I'm having to rebuild the x.nif (which means a lot of playing around with nodes in nifskope) and port the animations onto the new skeleton. I have some 1h, 2h, and Idle anims done right now on my older skeleton.

And yeah, it's going to take ages.
If you're ever looking to animate again let me know, we could collaborate or share ideas. OpenMW devs will no doubt know more than me on a lot of things... but I know a bit about engine kinks from old discussions with Axel and niftools devs that might prove handy.
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DestinedToDie
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Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by DestinedToDie »

Awesome.

But I wonder why you want to add toe bone. Wouldn't that mean that even iron boots would bend on the toe parts while walking/running?

More tail bones? :shock: I guess we might see some mutant argonians with 2 tails. Siamese twins, maybe.

As far as doing animations again, I will probably start once OpenMW supports file formats other than nif, so I can do it without having to work in Blender 2.49B. Of course that's so far away in the future that the template project and example suite will be finished by then.
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dirnae
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Joined: 09 Aug 2015, 08:25

Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by dirnae »

Thanks for the feedback. Oblivion and Skyrim both have toe bones and boots should allow foot bending in those games, these bones are useful for sneaking/walking/running animations. You just use a single bone for foot curves, such as standing on your tip-toes.

I did a quick Google of 'Skyrim Sneaking' and it looks like they add a slight bend to the right foot here: http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/435/ ... 565618.png
https://suzitastarshadow.files.wordpres ... &h=&crop=1

Any metal boots in real life or games I can think of are made of interlocking plates, so allow some bending. I'll have to think about what makes sense and look at equivalents. Got any examples where toe bends would look weird?

And more tail bones means more tail links, not multiple tails. If you look at the difference between Oblivion/Skyrim tails and the default MW tail you'll get what I mean. MW has 3 tail bones I think compared to Oblivion's 8. But yeah I wasn't very clear here.

And yeah, it's not even just .nif, the MW engine itself is very limiting, it can be frustrating at times. :)
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DestinedToDie
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Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by DestinedToDie »

Now that I've looked closer, it seems that my assumption in that some boots do not have toe details was wrong. :oops:
ahehalftalftow
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Joined: 27 Jul 2015, 19:48

Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by ahehalftalftow »

I actually thought of a scripted mod idea, I am hoping to extend OpenMW to support it (because it does not line up with OPENMWs goals)... basically, it's quest markers, except instead of markers, you get very vague details in the night sky pointing you towards your goal.

I was thinking a very subtle line of stars, which points you towards the cell you need to be in [say, (12,22)]
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psi29a
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Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by psi29a »

@ahehalftalftow: You can do that as a mod, as in upon a trigger you can load a new night sky. The question is, how do you handle the day-time? ;)

As sandstranger pointed out earlier in this thread, s3tc is rearing its ugly head in the RPi2 and elsewhere. So I believe the next release of the template suite will be without s3tc (DXT1 and DXT3) compression. Going to do some research to see if there are any alternatives that are as universally accepted, however I doubt this.

We'll likely have to deal with uncompressed DDS textures. The good news is that it will still be highly compressible with 7zip for releases. The bad news is, the size of the textures decompressed will slow down the time necessary to load them into GPU and of course they will take up more GPU memory as a result.
Penultima
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Joined: 20 Oct 2014, 01:08

Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by Penultima »

Textures are stored in BSA files, right? Perhaps OpenMW could check on each launch to see if there are any new or modified .bsa files (using a non-cryptographic hash), compress the textures in them to a format that works best on that platform, and cache them for quick loading in the future.
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jirka642
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Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by jirka642 »

Penultima wrote:... compress the textures in them to a format that works best on that platform, and cache them for quick loading in the future.
Or create some desktop tool that can convert all textures in your datafiles to specified format, so you won't need to do it on slow phone/tablet.
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psi29a
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Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by psi29a »

Or use one that is supported on almost all platforms... ;)
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DestinedToDie
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Re: OpenMW Game Template

Post by DestinedToDie »

Since the template is CC BY, do you think you can squeeze in a .txt or something that attributes the included assets to makers? It would be convenient for game-makers, since then you have a list of who made what icon and you don't have to start making one without knowing where they came from.
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