Development update news

General discussion regarding the OpenMW project.
For technical support, please use the Support subforum.
User avatar
scrawl
Posts: 2152
Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 11:51

Development update news

Post by scrawl »

Hi guys,

the first two weeks under my new development model are almost over, so I figured it'd be nice to give you a recap of what happened in that time. Okulo's posts are great, but they tend to be less technical and slightly delayed. This post aims to bring you a more direct under-the-hood look of everything that went down.

My goal at the moment is to bring OpenMW to 1.0 state. Performance optimizations have been put on hold for now. We already have ok-ish performance and many people are now legitimately playing OpenMW, so giving them a more complete experience should be the higher priority.

The first couple of days were spent catching up with the backlog of easy to fix bugs that had accumulated. Over the course of the two weeks, many more of these were discovered and fixed, some of which can be attributed to Tinker's efforts regarding a mod testing wiki page. I applaud this idea and must say I am very happy with the amount of polish we are getting these days.

A few NIF features were added: XYZ rotation keys, used among others by the "Containers Animated" mod are now supported.
The ClampMode in NiTexturingProperty is now accounted for, which was causing visual glitches both in vanilla content and in mods. It controls whether textures will repeat or wrap when the UV coordinates exceed the 0-1 range.
NiFogProperty can be read now, so meshes using that will work (though we can't actually use the NiFogProperty yet due to an issue in Ogre).
NiStencilProperty has been partially implemented (the drawMode flag which allows for rendering a polygon from both sides). This also fixes excessive loading times for meshes using NiStencilProperty, because the "Unhandled property type: NiStencilProperty" warning was getting spammed over and over for each mesh instance.

The sound system was updated to account for various range limiting quirks in MW's sound system. This fixes excessively loud ambient sound volumes that were often noted by testers, and also bug #244 "Clipping/static in relation to the ghostgate sound" which is one of the most long-standing issues we have fixed in recent times.

Lastly, a dialogue script testing switch was added. We often get bugs regarding script compilation errors, since OpenMW's script compiler is more strict than the original game's. There has been a --script-all switch to compile all scripts in the game and check for errors for a while now, but this didn't cover dialogue scripts. Now we can test dialogue scripts too, and several bugs were already found as result of this.

All in all, 0.35 is shaping up to an awesome release already. Not in terms of numbers, but the amount of polish we are getting and also the fixed ambient sound volume issue should be very appreciated by players.

I'll try to get another post out by the end of the month, hopefully by then with less news of bugfixes and more news regarding the last couple missing 1.0 features.
Last edited by scrawl on 02 Jan 2015, 03:54, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Gramblosh
Posts: 69
Joined: 30 Sep 2014, 20:15
Location: Germany
Contact:

Re: Development update 1

Post by Gramblosh »

scrawl wrote:NiFogProperty can be read now, so meshes using that will work (though we can't actually use the NiFogProperty yet due to an issue in Ogre).
Not sure how much it is used, so far I know only Apel's fires that use it. And with that one I am not sure how much it is needed, in a quick test I couldn't see a mayor difference when comparing the same mesh with and without NiFogProperty in the vanilla engine but maybe that is just my ignorance. To be honest, I do not even see a minor difference...
NiStencilProperty has been partially implemented (the drawMode flag which allows for rendering a polygon from both sides). This also fixes excessive loading times for meshes using NiStencilProperty, because the "Unhandled property type: NiStencilProperty" warning was getting spammed over and over for each mesh instance.
Yeah! Wondering if this will also reduce crashes on cell change.
User avatar
dEnigma
Posts: 248
Joined: 24 Nov 2013, 21:24
Location: Hla Oad

Re: Development update 1

Post by dEnigma »

Nice, thank you for the update, I'm sure a lot of people will appreciate it (though I keep myself up-to-date by reading the bug tracker and looking at the commits on github)
robcbwilson
Posts: 39
Joined: 04 Dec 2014, 14:15

Re: Development update 1

Post by robcbwilson »

Thanks for the update Scrawl, much appreciated.

I am so happy that we are nearing 1.0, it will be brilliant to have it feature complete. I have been helping out with Tinkers mod testing wiki page, I wish I could code and assist directly to OpenMW's progress but this way I can help in some small way to its completion.

Look forward to your next update :D
User avatar
psi29a
Posts: 5356
Joined: 29 Sep 2011, 10:13
Location: Belgium
Gitlab profile: https://gitlab.com/psi29a/
Contact:

Re: Development update 1

Post by psi29a »

Would be nice to see this post on the front page of openmw.org... could we move this topic to the appropriate area so that it will show up on the blog?
User avatar
scrawl
Posts: 2152
Joined: 18 Feb 2012, 11:51

Re: Development update 1

Post by scrawl »

Would be nice to see this post on the front page of openmw.org... could we move this topic to the appropriate area so that it will show up on the blog?
Sure, I wouldn't mind. Whoever can do that feel free to do it.
User avatar
Greendogo
Posts: 1467
Joined: 26 Aug 2011, 02:04

Re: Development update 1

Post by Greendogo »

Great job Scrawl!
User avatar
ElderTroll
Posts: 499
Joined: 25 Jan 2012, 07:01

Re: Development update 1

Post by ElderTroll »

Thanks for keeping us posted Scrawl and great work. I hope we can finish funding you for at least January's work as well. Starting from Friday I'll be out of communication until early January, but if need be I'll try to help you out with more pizzas.
User avatar
Okulo
Posts: 672
Joined: 05 Feb 2012, 16:11

Re: Development update 1

Post by Okulo »

psi29a wrote:Would be nice to see this post on the front page of openmw.org... could we move this topic to the appropriate area so that it will show up on the blog?
I'm reading all new posts on this forum. I'll include it in the next newspost.

Thanks for this, Scrawl. I appreciate not having to scrounge for newsbits that might be interesting to the general public. ;)
User avatar
raevol
Posts: 3093
Joined: 07 Aug 2011, 01:12
Location: Caldera

Re: Development update 1

Post by raevol »

https://bugs.openmw.org/issues/1985#change-9920

Christmas came early... thanks for this scrawl!! Super excited for this coming few months!
Post Reply