feedback to 0.47 / bug report / feature requests

[Tobias44]

@oldChimer
You have a pretty bad temper towards an Open Source project made by volunteers. Instead of demanding stuffs that are not important for all other users, why don't you help the team by implementing the features you are craving for? Please keep in mind that for a lot of other OpenMW users, graphics and support for later Bethesda's Elder Scrolls titles and Fallout games is extreme important, including me. If you love MWSE, mlox, MSGO, MXG, MXGE, MCP than why don't you stick to vanilla Morrowind for the time being? I played the whole game with my girlfriend on tes3mp 0.7.0 (based OpenMW 0.44) and it was a blast. Some minor error here and there, but I just installed mods that are on the compatibility list and good is. By the way, I always keep an eye on the android development, not that I like Android. But rather due to the danger of possible power outage in Europe, with a solar powerbank and OpenMW.apk you could still play the games in hard times, that is an incredible important feature I think. Or alternatively maybe I wait for a good Linux phone in the future.

[AbuMorrow]

As for later Bethesda games, you're implying that OpenMW is not meant as „openMorrowind” but a general Bethesda-on-modern-OSes engine, and copying flaws of Oblivion and Skyrim and doing new visual tricks rather than bringing out a „perfected Morrowind” with full compatibility is a priority?

What brought you up to that conclusion? Can you be specific which "flaws" OpenMW is copying from Skyrim and Oblivion? Can you be specific how they're "flaws" (if any)?

Which Skyrim or Oblivion visual tricks are you talking about that are in OpenMW?

Your reply is honestly not clear at all, and isn't encouraging us to reply back to you.

[AbuMorrow]

For the record OpenMW has better cell loading and preloading than in Skyrim and Oblivion (and obviously Morrowind), and the preloading is completely optional and has alot of settings which you can use to make it very seamless and have few to no loading screens during a very long play session:
https://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/latest ... cells.html

As for the "building nav mesh" message, then you need the development build (available at the Downloads page), it should be gone once you use the nav mesh disk cache feature.

Make sure to generate the nav mesh cache from the Launcher.

Otherwise you can still disable the waiting:
https://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/latest ... -to-player

[psi29a]

I posted this over in this reddit thread, thought I should repost it here as part of setting expectations: https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comm ... &context=3

From my point of view, Morrowind.exe will remain for those wishing an authentic Morrowind experience. Albeit modified by MGE:XE, MCP and MWSE, which arguably invalidates the Morrowind.exe as being authentic. This crowd is not OpenMW's target audience.

That being said, we will provide all the mechanisms that would allow for a subjective "authentic Morrowind experience" via Lua, well except for the crashing part which is also part of the authentic Morrowind experience.

There is nothing stopping a modder from creating a Patch for Purists: OpenMW Edition that can re-introduce what we view to be questionable mechanics. That is just one of OpenMW's goals.

OpenMW does not have just one goal, it has several. However one of those goals is NOT to recreate an authentic vanilla experience, by that I mean we will not be reproducing mechanics that do not make sense: bugs, oversights and exploits. One of OpenMW's goals is to be drop-in replacement for Morrowind.exe that comes close to vanilla, improving the experience, on all platforms.

That is not to say that some of the critiques aren't valid, some are legitimate issues that we haven't gotten around to implementing or fixing. Some things we are not aware as it doesn't show up on our radar. It's hard to be everywhere at once. The only thing we can do is guide people to our IRC, Discord, Forums, Tracker to help contribute to make OpenMW better.

This will likely however turn people off from OpenMW, that's fine. We have to draw the line in the sand somewhere as we are an all volunteer effort who work on something we love, just as much as you love Morrowind.

[oldChimer]

Oh, wow, those are a lot of replies, so I'll do my best to sort them out:

elsid and AbuMorrow, concerning the short freezes and stuttering: already resolved, I had accidentally turned on AA and anisotropy in OpenMW while my general graphics card config already sets everything to „maxed out” by default. So the double request tried to run the engine in 32xAA and 32xanisotropy instead of my boards max of 16x each, which caused the stuttering. Thanks, nonetheless. Will try the navmesh disk cacher, too.

AbuMorrow, concerning the „flaws”: Ha, got you there in a very sensitive spot . No need to get aggravated, I just wanted to tease a bit since we all know that Oblivion and Skyrim mainly consist of visually compensating what the game misses.

AbuMorrow, concerning the malfunctioning mods: Thank you, I'll browse through the lists, and additionally I'll prepare detailed notes of what doesn't work here (eg., my machine/openmw) correctly. When I find something not in the docs you linked, I'll add it. I already have found several mods with skinning problems, wrongly placed meshes, or non- or malfunctioning scripts.
MogMod and a handful of others: I'll play a bit with changing the load order in OpenMW to try and get them working, obviously OpenMW handles mods a bit differently. A different (and upsetting) dialect of MW, so to say. Still, why does Morrowind cope with UTF-8-charset names in scripts and NIFs and OpenMW doesn't? I again had to rename some files and NIF texture references for OpenMW although Morrowind uses them without complaints.

AbuMorrow, concerning camera behaviour: I just confirmed my post by trying a pristine installation of Morrowind GotY on a MS-Windows system which has never seen any games before. The user you mentioned is in error. Nothing of what I wrote is a patch, it is the original game.

AbuMorrow, concerning MW glow maps: I believe what you refer to are glow effects, like the magic effect overlays, those are overlaid glow maps on a regular mesh. Glow maps are not bump (or „normal”) maps, glow maps are glow maps — they use regular full-colour textures and special color assignments in the Mesh to cause an indirect self-lighting effect as if caused by a lighting source. Bump maps use bumps and reliefs and shades of bright blue to simulate three-dimensionality and reflections from external (engine) light sources. In MW, glow maps are intentional to let things glow, like vampire eyes or certain items. Instead of turning them off globally, one should take the according two parameters (one setting, one color value) from the NIFs concerned to stop things from glowing. All Morrowind modder's tutorials state this.
You're wrong concerning „not OpenGL”. The old DX format from 1998/2001 used by Morrowind is virtually identical to OpenGL format, hence Morrowind.exe can handle both. The 1.2 and 1.6 updates merely added the new DX formats and left the old ones in place as to not break the game.

AbuMorrow: MWSE was initially a runtime scripting patch to MW, MGE did not exist at that time when it came out, and LUA is barely ten or fifteen years old, much younger than MWSE or MGE. MWSE worked by inducing hooks into the Morrowind memory process in the RAM, which is why MWSE had to be started before MW so that it could hook directly into the scripting engine. It does work the same way today, only that part of its hooks go via MGE-XE now. The dependancy on MGE XE is only since the existance of MGE XE and mainly concerns MGE-XEs LUA engine which is shared to MWSE, old MWSE and old MGE were completely separate and from different authors.
Please don't mix up the tight integration MGSE-XE and MWSE now have with „not possible to simulate MWSE functions in OpenMW scripting”, because that would be a blatant lie. I know that because I am a programmer. And since you just said your LUA engine is already working, the LUA side would be even easier.

Tobias44: When I hear that something claims to be „like foo, only better” and „fully compatible to foo”, isn't it justified to expect exactly that? I know that it is a volunteer project; every open-source project is. Mine are, too, although they're not open-source. If you consider honesty and openly speaking (or writing, in this case) a nuisance, you should think about the effects of false politeness and boot-licking. They're massively counterproductive, because nobody says anything which might annoy some overly sensitive persons who think they are personally attacked when they absolutely aren't.

Enough explaining, ranting and irritating everyone for today — Sorry for sounding a bit harsh, but things had to be said. Don't get me wrong: I do not want to annoy or stomp on somebodies' feet; I just prefer clarity and honesty to false politeness. And I might have to add that I am not a newbie anymore for more than twenty years now .

psi29a: nice post, to the point. I guess I'm in the more hardcore MW corner, then

[psi29a]

psi29a: nice post, to the point. I guess I'm in the more hardcore MW corner, then

Thank you, and it's alright. Having someone in the hardcore MW corner that also helps OpenMW to improve is always welcome.

Please don't mix up the tight integration MGSE-XE and MWSE now have with „not possible to simulate MWSE functions in OpenMW scripting”, because that would be a blatant lie. I know that because I am a programmer. And since you just said your LUA engine is already working, the LUA side would be even easier.

Sadly not that simple. Some of MWSE 's Lua is very tightly coupled to Morrowind's directX8's scenegraph. So while we can have some level of compatibility, things that reflect the nature of Morrowind's data structures is not something OpenMW should even bother with. We can expose the same, but it would be equally useless for MWSE. Providing some higher-level API though is something we very much can collaborate on. The other option is to allow the modder ability fall-through by testing which dialect is available and to use that.

As an aside, there is a bit of work internally to make things more deterministic that help make/improve our testing more accurate. This is for several reasons: makes things easier to measure, so we have objectionable ways to measure performance; creating more tests to help track regressions; prevent save scumming. The more tests we make the easier it is for us to prevent regressions from happening and to also model our way closer to Morrowind's mechanics.

Anyway, if there are things you think can be improved upon... as the saying goes, MRs and PRs welcome.

[AbuMorrow]

AbuMorrow, concerning MW glow maps: I believe what you refer to are glow effects, like the magic effect overlays, those are overlaid glow maps on a regular mesh. Glow maps are not bump (or „normal”) maps, glow maps are glow maps — they use regular full-colour textures and special color assignments in the Mesh to cause an indirect self-lighting effect as if caused by a lighting source.

Glow maps are supported btw, and anyway unless you have been reading something else; I have never mentioned them in my post.

Also again can you mention what "bump map" or (what you have been talking about) "glow maps" or "normal maps" mods that use "the OpenGL format" (if any)? You haven't answered that part of my post, let's keep focused on the subject and not backtrack.

[AbuMorrow]

I think you missed this part of my post:

Keep in mind all of the OpenMW camera features that aren't vanilla are optional:
https://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/latest ... amera.html

Also make sure your game isn't patched with MCP and you not forgetting that, I think based on what you have been saying should be capable enough to notice if there's two exe files of Morrowind one that MCP renames (which is the original exe) and the patched one, if not, look at the date to confirm again that its not patched.

Here this is from the MCP history file, which proves it's a feature from MCP and you're using a patched Morrowind.exe:

- Vanity camera lock. Allows the moveable vanity camera to stay active after the key is released. It also loosens the restrictions on camera position.

[AbuMorrow]

No need to get aggravated

I actually wasn't aggravated, my questioning was meant to expose your intentions, And I think it did its job well

[AbuMorrow]

if what you're thinking was possible

Yeah I guess my habit of using "possible" instead of "simple" could get confusing, I admit it's a bad habit.

Also "corrected" the post.