openmw.org

While understandably the focus is on getting the default support for morrowind up and running but I was wondering if Morrowind Script and Graphics extenders will be supported (if not intergrated) at some point? Something I would love to see, meanwhile keep up the good work!

No they won't be supported. But don't worry, you will be able to get same effects (in a different way) with openmw at some point.

The MWSE instructions will likely get implemented directly in the engine, so integrated is not a bad word to use. I don't think it makes sense to talk about integrating MGE. I'm sure that OpenMW will eventually have all the modern rendering features that are supported by MGE, but it's not like it will have anything to do with code that was written for MGE.

MGE, while an excellent tool in its own time, is in the past now. OpenMW is the future.

There is no plan to support MWSE instructions in the engine. But there will be other ways to achieve the same.

Currently the priority is to bring OpenMW to be fully compatible with vanilla MW, but when the time comes we may consider adding these instructions.
http://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=MWSE

More likely not. I only had a quick look at these instructions, but it is likely that at least some of them might be syntactically incompatible with the way our script compiler works. Please keep in mind that our compiler does not compile the MW script language, but a superset of it. Any separate attempt to extend the original MW script language can potentially be incompatible with that.

On top of that we should be able to do most of these instructions in a much cleaner way and I think some of them have already been made redundant by OpenMW in its current state.

Zini wrote:More likely not. I only had a quick look at these instructions, but it is likely that at least some of them might be syntactically incompatible with the way our script compiler works. Please keep in mind that our compiler does not compile the MW script language, but a superset of it. Any separate attempt to extend the original MW script language can potentially be incompatible with that.

On top of that we should be able to do most of these instructions in a much cleaner way and I think some of them have already been made redundant by OpenMW in its current state.

But then we start alienating potential players who want to use mods that require MWSE (and there are quite a number of them), and especially considering that it's built into MGE, it has quite a large "user base". Adding alternate ways to do similar things doesn't help preexisting mods that won't or can't be updated for OpenMW compatibility, which would just drive people away if there's no one interested in making OpenMW versions (that there even needs to be an "OpenMW version" of a number of Morrowind mods should raise a flag). People will be less interested in using OpenMW if their favorite or "must have" mods require MWSE, and we don't support its extensions.

This is a pretty serious concern if you're expecting OpenMW to be a full replacement for Morrowind, to the point where it's considered a failure if people still want to stick with the original. MWSE compatibility is going to be a strong sticking point, if not an outright deal-breaker, for some people and their mods.

We always said that we will not support external tools. That was the premise right from the start. If some people don't like that, so be it. Besides, I don't see that there is an existing large user base for MWSE. A bit of googling gets me a number of mods, but compared to the whole body of MW modding work this number seems to be tiny.

What we could do is set up MWSE script instructions as aliases for regular script instructions, where it does not get in the way of other things (that is trivial and having a few extra instructions really not hurt), but I do not expect that to be a full reimplementation. As I wrote before, I only looked at MWSE superficially, but I am almost sure that there will be stuff that won't go along nicely with OpenMW (both the scripting language and the way the engine works).

What, exactly, is meant by "Superset"? I doubt you're talking about something totally different (like Papyrus) here, but are there any examples/documentation demonstrating OpenMW's being a superset of the vanilla Morrowind scripting language? Are we talking closer to, say, Oblivion's language (with mod/set/force/getav and the like)?