Xenuria wrote: ↑15 Jul 2017, 00:15I had this vision in my head of OpenMW in it's final form being able to render the entire game world with ease or at least solid 60 fps outdoors with all the latest visual mods.
This is highly unlikely to happen at any time with any engine. I don't know that much about the exact technical aspects involved, but there are limits to what is possible even with the most modern hardware. To be honest, I am highly impressed by how well MGE XE distant land performs and looks in vanilla Morrowind, especially given that it renders the full meshes and not just billboards or simple LOD meshes (because they don't exist, even though they could), and it still performs WAY better than most mods for Oblivion that add distant objects in my experience. OpenMW is likely to improve on that once it has the same functionality, but this could still take some time. I admit it looks like development has slowed down in the last few months, but the release of 0.42 has been held back by the lack of release videos. Now they are coming, and so is the new version, which already includes a first version of distant land. I'm sure things are going to progress faster again from now on.
Also, performance is not just a matter of the engine. The truth is, many mods, but also the vanilla assets, are badly optimized and unnecessarily Performance-heavy. For example, many vanilla objects use a relatively large number of small textures, and this can have a much larger impact on performance than objects with a single large texture for the entire mesh would have, which is how modern games usually do it to save draw calls. A draw call, as I understand it, is a command from the CPU to the GPU to draw a certain object on the screen, and the more textures or materials a mesh has, the more draw calls it causes, no matter how simple the actual mesh is or how small the single textures are. For the same reason, all LOD objects in Skyrim share one single texture, for example. So there would already be room for improvement in the way the meshes and textures of the vanilla game are done. Have you ever noticed how when you play a highly modded Morrowind, the FPS can be pretty low even though the GPU has very little to do? This is partly because the game can only use one CPU, and once that is at full load, performance will only get worse with additional objects and other things, and more draw calls are one aspect which contributes to that. Of course, we all wish for OpenMW to make full use of multiple CPU cores at some point, but from what I've heard it's not that simple. But we will see.
And they haven't even begun to add new graphical features besides normal mapping and a few other basic things, so calm down, there is no way to say what the engine will be capable of eventually. I admit I am also looking forward to the day when the ominous version 1.0 is released, but I realize that these things take time, especially on a project like this which is done by a bunch of people in their free time. And I have nothing but respect and admiration for what they have done and continue doing with OpenMW.
However, if you further wish to express your disappointment with the progress of the engine, this thread might suit your needs:
OpenMW is dead