openmw.org

I was browsing through UESP when I found this interesting little tidbit: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Linux ... re_methods

There exists a branch of OpenMW that is able to load assets from Oblivion's data files.

Can someone explain this. Thanks.

Open-source development means everyone has access to the source code for the application. Most of the time, this means that people make changes to that source code and submit them to the main team and they get included in future releases. Sometimes people work on their own branch or fork, though, which means they make changes and they don't get included into the main project. Someone's started doing this to get Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas stuff to load, but it's not been included as it's based on a pretty old version of OpenMW (so it would be a pain to include), isn't always done the same way as the main OpenMW team would have done things (as it was mostly someone doing it to keep themselves entertained rather than as a serious attempt to become OpenMW's future loader for newer games' assets), and is pretty experimental (so things might need big changes, which is easier to do before it gets included).

Some parts of this work have made their way into regular OpenMW, though. It's what our support for loading BSA files with the later games' formats was based on, for example, even though we can't load the meshes inside those BSAs yet.

You can see some videos of the fork here: https://www.youtube.com/user/cc9cii

That's pretty cool.

Does that mean that one day we can have Oblivion-style combat animation and other such animation in OpenMW in the future and maybe a compass similar to Oblivion also?

Coming up in 0.47 is more Skyrim style animation for walking/running/combat where your upper torso faces where you are looking while your lower bit in the direction you are moving.

The compass though is GUI related though, so probably is best handled by mods once we have Lua in.