Floating NPC few centimeters form theground

[Tobias44]

Hi everybody,

I really enjoy OpenMW 0.47. I played Morrowind completely with with tes3mp 0.7.0 (OpenMW 0.44). I cannot remember but know I realize that all NPCs are slightly floating above ground, see attached jpg. What could be the cause. I am on Debian Testing, using lots of mods, including Beautiful Cities of Morrowind. Any ideas of what I did wrong? Thanks a lot.

[AnyOldName3]

The gist of the problem is that NPCs in Morrowind are supposed to use axis-aligned bounding boxes, and, being boxes, the corners are the same height as the middle, so when they're on a slope, one corner collides with the ground and the other three corners end up above the ground. We used to use capsules instead, which are round at the bottom and don't really have this problem, but it broke some things. The problem is less pronounced in the original engine as there were collision bugs which caused things to overlap a lot of the time, but it was still a thing.

[Tobias44]

Thanks for the clarification. You are right, on the bridge in Seyda Neen, which is a flat surface, the NPC and the PC are aligned with the ground. So no modding or settings issue from my side. Will this bug be fixed in 0.48 or is it a OpenMW feature?

[AnyOldName3]

There's some more discussion here: https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/issues/5409

[Tobias44]

I see, pretty technical topic. I just checked Oblivion for curiosity, and indeed it looks better there. So all NPCs and creatures are affected in OpenMW then. Thank you.

[psi29a]

Morrowind.exe suffers from this issue too. The real solution is to provide inverse kinematics, like Oblivion and Skyrim provides to actually have a way for the model, even with crappy animations, to interact with the surfaces of terrain. It won't be perfect, because Morrowind assets weren't made with this in mind, but they can be modded to make it look even better.

It's on the roadmap.

[Tobias44]

Thanks psi29a, very good that this is on the roadmap. By the way I went into the Mages Guild and found out, that the default brightness is lowered to previous OpenMW versions. Default minimum interior brightness settings in OpenMW is now 0,08 which I keep, because I do not like ambient light, that does not emit from a light source. But that makes it a little bit too dark to navigate, hence I changed the value in the openmw.cfg for LightAttenuation_LinearValue from default 3.0 to 1.0 and LightAttenuation_LinearRadiusMult from 1.0 to 6.0. Now it is better to navigate, but is there anywhere in OpenMW I can change the brightness and or radius of light sources even further?

[psi29a]

Yes, in-game menu there is a slider for interior lighting because of thew lighting system. We talked about this in our release video for 0.47 .

[Seven]

Sometimes it get's a bit too much than few centimeter, I hope there was some solution (like, add offset to all people animations), currently even on flat ground all NPC's are flying somewhat above.


I also have a strange issue when shooting with arrow from crouched/sneaking stance in 3rd view camera, as arrow goes somewhere at 45 degrees to the side and ground then bounces from air and moves towards target. In first view shooting works as normal.
Using OpenMW 0.47.0 release.