OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

OpenMW's very own demo, template and game to show off everything that OpenMW is capable of.

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johndh
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by johndh »

Upon digging around my digital spare parts drawer, it seems a lot of the work has already been done for us. 8-)
psi29a wrote: 1) Journal (dog-eared and weathered)
http://opengameart.org/content/old-pagesflip-with-sound
http://opengameart.org/content/old-book
http://opengameart.org/content/mini-library
2) Pages from journal, water stained and slightly torn.
http://opengameart.org/content/scrolls-0
http://opengameart.org/content/old-parchment-paper
I'm trying to figure out what kind of locale... tropical (palm trees and coconuts ala Lost) or sub-tropical (American North-West coastline) or something more Fjord like in Norway? Anyone have any preference? :)
Plenty of CC0 assets for warm or temperate climates:
http://opengameart.org/content/3td-afri ... a-pack-v10
http://opengameart.org/content/3td-trop ... t-pack-v20
http://opengameart.org/content/3td-starter-pack-1
http://opengameart.org/content/3td-coni ... t-pack-v11
http://opengameart.org/content/3td-cave-pack-pro-v10
http://opengameart.org/content/konserian-swamptree
3) camp-fire, smoldering (thin wispy smoke particles)
4) camp-fire, alite/burning with soft/flickering light source and smoke particles
Hmm... fire sounds like particles, and embers sound like animated textures. I cannibalized a model from FLARE (CC-by-SA) and got it into OMW, but I'll have to leave the actual burning to a more leet artist who understands such things.
FLARE campfire in OMW.jpg
Sorry, the lighting in Arrille's Tradehouse isn't that great. ;)

I've got a ton of generic assets in my collection, many of which are unfinished, so it's largely a matter of knowing which to finish, polish, and convert to the proper format.
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psi29a
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by psi29a »

Wow, that is incredible. :)

We can accept assets into OpenMW-ES if they are CC-BY compatible. I want to make sure that people can also take it and run with it if they want to. I'm not sure about the inclusion of a CC-BY-SA (or stricter) asset. Does this mean that the whole suite is then also CC-BY-SA or only just that asset? Do we have any 'free-er' alternatives?

We currently only support NIF and OSG-native statics, can these assets be ported? I would prefer OSG-native of course.

Animations, sadly, are only supported in NIF so there will need to be some rather nasty porting there.

How I envisioned asset inclusion would need the following:
1) license (which?)
2) attribution (who created it and URL to where to find it online)
3) original asset
4) modified asset (to work with OpenMW-ES)

This way we cover our legal obligations and make the creator happy. We keep the original just in case we want to port it to another format later. The assets will be kept in redmine, so there will likely be a ticket per asset or group of assets that has these 4 things above.

When OpenMW-ES is released, the information above will be compiled so we can give thanks and attribution to everyone who worked on OpenMW-ES.

Does this sound reasonable?

Update: I've started creating issue here:
https://bugs.openmw.org/projects/examplesuite/issues
testman
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by testman »

Yep, it does.
I am very glad to see this project moving forward again.
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psi29a
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by psi29a »

At some point, we need to discuss how to distribute OpenMW in a way that it doesn't constantly asked about installing Morrowind. :) Currently the launcher keeps complaining that Morrowind.esm can't be found and offers to install it for us, every time we start the launcher.

I think another way to handle this, if it detects an omwgame in the usual directories, then it shouldn't complain about not finding Morrowind. It should only do that if it detects nothing that could be considered a game.

Speaking of 'usual' directories, can we also use '/usr/share/openmw/content', './content', or something similar as a place to automatically look for omwgame content? This would be perfect when installing OpenMW-ES from Debian/Ubuntu/Whatever package manager.

@Zini: Are you comfortable with this or would you rather handle it another way?
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johndh
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by johndh »

psi29a wrote: Does this mean that the whole suite is then also CC-BY-SA or only just that asset?
TL:DR; The freer assets can keep their original licenses.

I feel like a convincing case could be made for either, but it's basically irrelevant because CC licenses are non-exclusive. You could license the entire *.omwgame file as CC-by-SA while also allowing the freer (CC0, OGA-by, CC-by) assets to keep their original licenses on top of being made available under CC-by-SA (which they already were anyway, due to compatibility), so the ways in which these assets can be used need not change. Since the licenses and URI/URLs need to be included in the attribution file anyway, the overall effect is that assets that are currently only available as CC-by-SA will continue to be CC-by-SA, and the freer assets will continue to be available under their own freer license as well as CC-by-SA, which is the same result as licensing them individually.

So the credits file might be something like this (but probably phrased much better):
The OpenMW Example Suite is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0, copyright 2016 of the OpenMW Suite Bureau. It contains original work as well as derivatives of the following freely-licensed and public domain assets:
Item 1, by Artist A, CC-by, example.com/item1
Item 2, by Artist B, CC-by-SA, example.com/item2
CC-by-SA would only be a problem for assets that weren't allowed to be combined with it, such as "all rights reserved", NC, or ND -- none of which are free/libre anyway -- so this doesn't affect us.

The crux of the issue is whether compiling disparate assets into a game file creates a new work of creativity. I'm no lawyer, but copyright law suggests that it is:
Compilations of data or compilations of preexisting works (also known as “collective works”) may also be copyrightable if the materials are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes a new work. When the collecting of the preexisting material that makes up the compilation is a purely mechanical task with no element of original selection, coordination, or arrangement, such as a white-pages telephone directory, copyright protection for the compilation is not available. Some examples of compilations that may be copyrightable are:
• A directory of the best services in a geographic region
• A list of the best short stories of 2011
• A collection of sound recordings of the top hits of 2004
• A book of greatest news photos
• A website containing text, photos, and graphics
• An academic journal containing articles on a particular topic
• A newspaper comprised of articles by different journalists
• A catalog comprised of text and photographs
In the above examples, original authorship may be involved in deciding which were the best stories, the biggest hits, greatest photos, the appropriate article for the serial, and in what order to present the respective works within the compilation.
http://copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
Essentially, is it just a dump of random assets in no particular arrangement, or were the components put together in a way that required some expression of creativity? I'd say the example suite (and any other mods) are firmly in the latter camp.
Do we have any 'free-er' alternatives?
Most of the FOSS games I'm familiar with use CC-by-SA (FLARE, 0 A.D., MegaGlest), so that would really hamstring us if we decide against allowing that license. Hopefully my copyright explanation renders this a nonissue. :)
Animations, sadly, are only supported in NIF so there will need to be some rather nasty porting there.
This is a problem that I don't really have a good solution for. AFAIK, the Blender NIF exporter only works for archaic versions of Blender, and animations made in modern versions may not be compatible with earlier versions, so modern animations might not be usable. So we can either 1.) animate everything in Blender 2.49b or earlier, 2.) convince somebody to update the NIF exporter to work with modern versions of Blender, or 3.) convince somebody to get another format working in OMW. For me, #1 is the immediately actionable choice, while #2 and #3 can be filed under "it sure would be nice if somebody did that eventually".
We currently only support NIF and OSG-native statics, can these assets be ported? I would prefer OSG-native of course.
I haven't run into any issues that would keep anything in my collection from being exported as *.osgt files.
Does this sound reasonable?
No complaints here.
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DestinedToDie
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by DestinedToDie »

johndh wrote: I haven't run into any issues that would keep anything in my collection from being exported as *.osgt files.
Were you able to export the textures in -dds form?
dudezzz
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by dudezzz »

psi29a wrote:I already have experience with terrain and have looking at various DEMs. I know almost all the formats and how to work with them as well. ;)

For example, Oahu in OpenMW.
Could you please explain how you did this? I'd love to try importing DEMs into OpenMW but I'm not at all familiar with the formats or how to work with them.
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johndh
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by johndh »

DestinedToDie wrote: Were you able to export the textures in -dds form?
I haven't tried.
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psi29a
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by psi29a »

To play with terrain, you'll need two things:
gdal http://www.gdal.org/
tesannwyn https://github.com/psi29a/TESAnnwyn

Download the DEM you want and let gdal translate it into a 32 signed int raw (ENVI format).

Code: Select all

gdal_translate midway_1_3s_v2.asc -of ENVI -ot Int32 midway.raw
You then take the resulting raw and use tesannwyn to create an esp. It is expecting int32 input where 0 is sealevel.

Code: Select all

./tesannwyn -T 3 -t 1 ./midway.raw -p 1 -b 32
It might complain about a missing file, you can just create the file (empty) and it will shut-up. :)

You can play without options with gdal to scale the size (dimensions) of the DEM. You can use tesannwyn to also scale the height.

Enjoy!
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Zini
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Re: OpenMW Example Suite - Active Development Notice

Post by Zini »

At some point, we need to discuss how to distribute OpenMW in a way that it doesn't constantly asked about installing Morrowind. :) Currently the launcher keeps complaining that Morrowind.esm can't be found and offers to install it for us, every time we start the launcher.

I think another way to handle this, if it detects an omwgame in the usual directories, then it shouldn't complain about not finding Morrowind. It should only do that if it detects nothing that could be considered a game.
I am not quite up to date on how the launcher currently works, but from what I see in the source only the installation wizard is complaining about not finding Morrowind.esm. Which is the right thing to do if you try to install Morrowind.

I think the real issue here might be the Morrowind.ini file, which is the reason why Morrowind needs to be installed in the first place. Of course sometimes post-1.0 the Morrowind.ini file will become redundant for newly created games (part of the great de-hardcoding). I am not sure yet how to handle this situation with the least amount of user annoyance.

For now maybe we could check if a Morrowind.ini file is available and if that is the case and it is not the first run bypass the wizard.
Speaking of 'usual' directories, can we also use '/usr/share/openmw/content', './content', or something similar as a place to automatically look for omwgame content? This would be perfect when installing OpenMW-ES from Debian/Ubuntu/Whatever package manager.
Is there any specific significance to the content directory? I am not opposed to add additional locations, but we already have default locations, both for global data and for per user data.
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