Are Dynamic Shadows Coming Back In a Month or So?

[mikjames]

Just curious what the rough time frame for reimplementation of dynamic shadows and distant land is. Are we talking a month here, or many months, or even years?

Maybe I'm mistaking this mod for mgexe, I'm not even sure that Openmw ever did dynamic object shadows, beyond character models? I know mgexe looks stunning but it's a real chugfest on any hardware (hence the need for openmw).

I'm not looking for an exact date or anything, just trying to determine if I should jump in now with an older version of Openmw or wait a month/s. I sort of got my hopes up when 0.39 was released and it was said that shadows and distant land will be reimplemented in the future. Then 0.40 said the same thing

[DestinedToDie]

Hi mikjames. It's hard to say when shadows/distant land will be implemented, mainly because no one is working on them. I believe Scrawl started working on Distant Lands and at that stage I would've told you that maybe we'd have something in a month or two.

Unfortunately Scrawl needed to take a break due to health issues. Some new developers have popped up and are tackling smaller features/bugs and getting more familiar with the codebase. So that's where we're at right now.

[Capostrophic]

Pre-0.37.0 releases indeed presented both dynamic shadows and distant terrain (note: not statics), however the shadows were... flickery. And even without these features the performance left much to be desired. Since the release 0.37.0 which was in November last year OpenMW's using OpenSceneGraph graphic libraries instead of Ogre's, so everything (well, actually not that much) was basically rewritten, blah-blah-blah...

There was a project recently which was focusing on adding eye-candy, but seems it's quietly died.

[CMAugust]

OpenMW's lack of shadows and distant land in particular does appear to be what keeps many in the Morrowind community from jumping aboard, so it's a shame about the setbacks. Thankfully that hasn't stopped the development team from making a ton of progress in other areas. I'm looking forward to the graphical bells and whistles too, but it's been a treat to see the incremental improvements to OpenMW across the board.

[mikjames]

Fair enough folks, I hope development goes smoothly.
Yes it is certainly a trade off, from what I understand the new engine implementation brings a nice performance boost hopefully beyond that gained by the lack of shadows and distant land.

I believe the last openmw version I tried was either 0.36 or 0.37, and I think I had an AMD 6950 card at the time (notoriously bad opengl performance). Even so it ran smoother than Morrowind with mgexe at a lower framerate. I was getting 45 fps with dips to 20 in mgexe, but there was a lot of micro stutter that took away from the experience in comparison to openmw.

Now that I have my 980 I will give 0.38 another try and see where performance is at .

[Capostrophic]

I will give 0.38 another try

Erm. Although scrawl made quite a bit of optimizations in that version, it's almost a year old. The current up-to-date release is 0.40.0 which was released on the 22nd of September.

[mikjames]

I will give 0.38 another try

Erm. Although scrawl made quite a bit of optimizations in that version, it's almost a year old. The current up-to-date release is 0.40.0 which was released on the 22nd of September.

Yeah, but no shadows or distant land...

[lysol]

I will give 0.38 another try

Erm. Although scrawl made quite a bit of optimizations in that version, it's almost a year old. The current up-to-date release is 0.40.0 which was released on the 22nd of September.

Yeah, but no shadows or distant land...

... and 0.38 has no distant land either.

[Capostrophic]

... and 0.38 has no distant land either.

Nor shadows.

[jvoisin]

OpenMW is open-source, feel free to implement the support of what you want yourself :)