openmw.org

A mod just arrived, and not a day too late: https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/45399

Basically, the project is working on combining all the textures of the different sets into one big texture for each theme (like hlaalu for example) and modify the UV maps to work with these textures. This is something I've wanted to do for years but never had the time to do.

So anyway, this brings up the question of normal maps and more specifically, parallax maps. If I don't want to have parallax effect in a texture that still has a _nh.dds file with an alpha channel in it, should the alpha channel for that part be pitch black or pure white or somewhere in between? Because if I want some of the textures of the Velothi set to have parallax mapping, I need to have a height map for the entire set.

Just trying to understand the scope/significance of this mod. I understand atlasing is putting the component textures onto a single texture file and this is supposed to make things faster. However, isn't this usually an atlas per model? Why is this actually beneficial, less redundant use of VRAM due to only needing to load a relevant thing once? Doesn't the larger file size offset the benefit? Does this mean it only helps significantly if VRAM usage is your bottleneck?

In regards to the mod itself, is this simply to change the starting point for texture replacers? Does this mod merely atlas the vanilla textures together, rather than actually add visually new textures? Seems like a worthy cause, especially if this fixes some of the poor UV mapping throughout!

Also, as you find the answers to your paralax questions, do you mind adding the info to your texture section of the documentation? I'd rather have someone who actually knows what they're talking about add it

Atlas project can help on a GPU-limited setups (since it allows to reduce amount of GL calls and used VRAM a bit), but unfortunately OpenMW is usually a CPU-limited (players often complain about physics performance).
Also I have a suspection that most of performance gain comes from shapes merging rather than texture atlasing itself.

This would be a great mod if it is completed.

Would require one to get rid of most mesh and texture replacers (if i'm not wrong - or maybe just installing them after would be enough, if it's a texture-mesh pair or just a mesh), but it would be very worth it.


I'm interested in particular in this for the exteriors and small objects. Nature and cities, but also clutter objects.

edit: that mod helps already. Recommended for a bad GPU.