OpenMW 0.46.0

[psi29a]

Agreed, if we know that MOP made a new release that OpenMW can't handle.... we need to be up-front about it. Stating that we're aware it and have it tracked on our issue tracker is enough. We are also not going to delay the release because of it either. If we don't pull the trigger and keep delaying because of some new feature being worked on, or bug fixed or new mod was released that uses things we don't yet support then we'd never release and just tell people to use our nightlies (which also wouldn't support the newer MOS ).

[Capostrophic]

Status update:
1) There seems to be an alpha channel reading issue in OSG 3.6.5 TGA readerwriter that is used for our modified 3.4.2. Waiting for AnyOldName3's input on that.
2) Shadow transparency fix is up, but untested (that's on me).
3) There's an optimizer issue that breaks NiCollisionSwitch's special behavior, the fix is also up.
4) There was a small fix to OpenMW-CS brush outlines cherry-picked to 0.46.0 branch, so there'll be a call for RC2s either way.

[raevol]

How's the changelog looking? And what's our plan for release videos?

[Capostrophic]

Here's the last release announcement revision I've prepared.

Engine release video is practically done and is expected to be finished by the time RC phase ends. Editor release video production hasn't started yet.

[raevol]

Nice! Sounds good.

[Time4Tea]

Yippee! I'm looking forward to seeing the release vid!

[EmperorArthur]

- Actors avoid walking on the children geometry of an AvoidNode (#1774) - elsid

Looks like a mistype snuck through.
Issue 1774 is not associated with AvoidNode. I think that's issue 1724.

I'm going through the changelog now and spot checking anything that seems interesting.

Quick question from someone who hasn't touched the NIF code in years. How well does it load models from TES4 or other games? If it even does basic loading, that might be worth including in the video at least. This opens up more opportunities for moders since more assets are available.

[Capostrophic]

There's no Oblivion file format support at the moment. Zini suggested to keep it separate for now.

(That said there's no "properly" usable Oblivion file format support for upstream OpenMW anywhere at the moment.)

[EmperorArthur]

Zini suggested to keep it separate for now.

I remember that. It was when I re-wrote the niftest tool, and found that one of the mods I was using at the time had accidentally included a newer NIF format than OpenMW supports.

Given that compressed BSA support was approved, has something changed?

[Capostrophic]

We have received a "probably good to go" response from a Bethesda CM about running plugins from newer games and NIF files, as implied, but basically Zini believes there are still legal concerns over letting the general public run and show (and redistribute) assets from other games running in a Morrowind environment, for example - since Morrowind is obviously the default OpenMW game - instead of "where they belong" that haven't been ruled out.

Improving BSA support meanwhile doesn't really allow the user to do something weird like that. It doesn't make the user able to port assets without any additional effort like improving NIF support would.

Zini himself may explain it better. Also he wasn't around when compressed BSA support was merged. Maybe it'd be vetoed.

That said I believe it's perfectly fine to improve the NIF support for older versions than what Is present in Morrowind because Morrowind itself supports NIF versions like 3.3. So I did that and there's undocumented NIF 4.0.0.0 support added in 0.46.0.