OpenMW Spotlight: Lua & Light, the second chapter

[lysol]

As if the last post wasn't long enough! We need to share some updates regarding Lua and the upcoming lighting improvements. Welcome!

Lua:

Petr Mikheev just reached a major milestone with the upcoming Lua scripting system: The first playable Lua test mod is *live*! Note the word "test" here of course; this is nothing of interest for you guys that just want to have fun and play a great RPG from the early 2000s enhanced with cool mods. But while the mod in itself might not be too exciting, it still proves that things are actually moving forward and that we are getting closer and closer to a world where OpenMW has *greatly* enhanced modding capabilites compared to today.

Here are two screenshots, from GitLab and from our forums. Links to the GitLab MR and the forum thread are below the images if you want to read more or even test the mod out.

https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/merge_requests/430

http://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7149

Lighting:

In the last post, we talked about how Cody Glassman is working on support for more than 8 lights per object. Well, his merge request has evolved into something even more. As it is right now, the fixed-function math used for Morrowind's light attenuation, which is faithfully identical in OpenMW, do not actually allow for good attenuation at all. This manifests in light seams, visible popping, and mismatched object lighting, which you may have noticed in previous builds or the original Morrowind engine. With the arrival of Active Grid Object Paging in the upcoming 0.47.0 release, it became clear that a change was needed to squash these issues once and for all. Thanks to under-the-hood changes to lighting and a brand new attenuation formula, all of these problems are cleaned up wonderfully. The lighting should look pretty much the same as you remembered it, but with a level of polish that hasn't been seen before. As a preview, here are some before and after shots placed side by side for you to compare. We think you'll agree the OpenMW experience is about to feel even smoother!

https://imgsli.com/NDQyODU

https://imgsli.com/NDQyODY

https://imgsli.com/NDQyODg

https://imgsli.com/NDM5NTg

https://imgsli.com/NDQ0OTA

That's it for today. Stay safe everyone, and stay tuned for the next release!

[sg1efc]

A lot of hours and hard work you all do... Thank you.

[testman]

wow, the screenshots demonstrate really well how lighting completely changes the feeling of the game

can't wait to immerse myself in the comfy atmosphere that new lighting will bring

how would rave party in Morrowind look like?

[psi29a]

Lua rave light mod inbound in 3... 2...

[docent27]

You've done good lighting. Thanks for your work.

[mikeprichard]

Wow... those many, many years of incredibly dedicated effort have finally brought us to this point - these are some fantastic updates, and it seems the fabled 1.0 and great de-hardcoding spoken of in ancient legend may at last be in sight. Thanks to all for your amazing work!

[saveliyb]

Amazing work guys, thank you for your years of effort.

[klorax]

This is awesome, thanks!

❤

[robcbwilson]

Loving the difference the new lighting makes. It makes it so much more immersive and helps makes the lighting less harsh and subtle. Awesome work!

[Aldrog]

The progress in both directions seems great! And the screenshots show how much realistic lighting actually means.

Do you think it would be possible to integrate RTX into the engine? I've seen it's claimed to be supported in VulkanSceneGraph, which is supposed to be a successor to OSG, but I have no idea how straightforward porting from OSG would be and what would it take to enable RTX afterwards.