Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

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Nerevar
Posts: 4
Joined: 29 Oct 2018, 23:38

Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

Post by Nerevar »

Ok first, let's be honest :|

Morrowind is one of the best games of all time

OpenMW brings it up to date comparable to newer games

it already works on every platform with little effort

What's left in my opinion, are improving on the things
that will lend themselves to scalability

I installed morrowind again the other day to try out
the new 0.47 openMW, and was floored by all of it's
changes, but found a lot of general issues that seem
like no brainers to work towards resolving



Having a standard library of pluginless mods
textures, bodies, faces, hairs, sky, in a single package
is a good baseline to start building the game off of,
and something I couldn't find anywhere.

Nexusmods does a poor job of hosting mods, since
you have to wait for the "free" download and have to jump
through hoops to pick out all the mods you want each time
you reinstall, and they wont host everything to begin with

Then there are perhaps tons of little websites with mods
for morrowind you have to spend hours searching for,
and many have broken/gone offline/have bad links, and
these deserve to be searched out and archived somewhere

Then there is portability, it should be simpler to install openMW
and move it to a new operating system/hardrive without having
to spend hours searching out all the obscure links for your specific
operating system, and figuring out how to get it working,
there should be a single directory where everything gets
installed to, so it can easily be moved around with no hassle

Game mechanics, and balancing issues, are a complete and total
after thought after the fundamental foundation is built for, a morrowind
of the future.

After all this time I'm really surprised we don't have a website listing
servers to join where we could start playing with other
people with some basic common customization that is simple point
and click to install.

It would be nice to work out configurations/specs/balancing and mechanics
in ONLINE morrowind that has a good customized baseline to work off of
as opposed to straight vanilla, and as opposed to single player.

I love OpenMW, it is truly amazing, and easily the most impressive mod
I have ever seen for any game, and I think it could take morrowind
to a place that is better than most other games out there frankly. :|
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AnyOldName3
Posts: 2667
Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future
For trademark reasons, it's OpenMW.
Having a standard library of pluginless mods
textures, bodies, faces, hairs, sky, in a single package
is a good baseline to start building the game off of,
and something I couldn't find anywhere.
This is a much bigger deal to create than you've suggested. We used to have the Morrowind Original Asset Replacement project as a side thing, but it made very little progress, and unlike replacing the engine, there are copyright issues here - if you change a duplicate asset enough to not count as a derivative work, it's likely to look bad when placed into the game, or cause other problems like blocking corridors due to a different collision box.
Nexusmods does a poor job of hosting mods, since
you have to wait for the "free" download and have to jump
through hoops to pick out all the mods you want each time
you reinstall, and they wont host everything to begin with
It's expensive to run a fast file hosting service, and we're not in a position to do better than the Nexus at that.
Then there is portability, it should be simpler to install openMW
and move it to a new operating system/hardrive without having
to spend hours searching out all the obscure links for your specific
operating system, and figuring out how to get it working,
there should be a single directory where everything gets
installed to, so it can easily be moved around with no hassle
This is improved on the master branch, so if you get a dev build from our downloads page instead of the 0.47 release from last year, you can make a portable installation.
Game mechanics, and balancing issues, are a complete and total
after thought after the fundamental foundation is built for, a morrowind
of the future.
We're an engine replacement, not a remaster, and any change like this is subjective, so would upset some people if it were the default. It's much better to leave these things up to mods, and we're developing an extended modding API compared to the original engine so mods will finally be able to make changes here they've never been able to before.
After all this time I'm really surprised we don't have a website listing
servers to join where we could start playing with other
people with some basic common customization that is simple point
and click to install.
This is a TES3MP thing, not an OpenMW thing, and TES3MP does have a masterlist of servers including everyone who wants to show up on the masterlist (but also doesn't want to see the entire Jewish population exterminated - they've had problems with neonazis in the past).
davidcernat
Posts: 256
Joined: 19 Jul 2016, 01:02

Re: Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

Post by davidcernat »

Nerevar wrote: 18 Jun 2022, 15:01 After all this time I'm really surprised we don't have a website listing
servers to join where we could start playing with other
people with some basic common customization that is simple point
and click to install.
Have you tried using the TES3MP server browser?
sonicboom12345
Posts: 18
Joined: 13 Sep 2016, 23:47

Re: Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

Post by sonicboom12345 »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 18 Jun 2022, 17:21 words
I just want to point out that this is maybe not the best community management. Someone cared enough about your project to brainstorm a list of ideas they thought could help make the game better. Even if some of the ideas were unrealistic, the intentions were good, and the original post was full of positive energy.

Conversely, post #2 is a very matter-of-fact, point-by-point dissection and refutation of every idea this person came up with. Basically a wall of "no." That's a very humbling thing to be confronted with. It doesn't create positive energy, and it doesn't invite participation or collaboration. It broadcasts that people's unique perspectives and opinions aren't really welcome. Perhaps as a result, this individual hasn't bothered to make a follow-up post or invest in the community at all since June. Not on the forums, anyway.

I'd like to suggest that maybe hitting people with "no" is perhaps not the best strategy for cultivating an active community and getting more people involved with the project. Instead of a point-by-point refutation, maybe the OpenMW team could be vocal about praising and thanking people for their ideas and feedback. Remark that some of the ideas are outside the project's current scope, but if you have an interest in seeing some of this implemented, come talk to us on Discord and think about becoming a part of the team. We can talk shop, hook you up with the software and the tutorials, etc. From a community management stsndpoint, that seems a lot closer to the ideal to me.
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AnyOldName3
Posts: 2667
Joined: 26 Nov 2015, 03:25

Re: Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

Post by AnyOldName3 »

The original post was a laundry list of massive amounts of extra work the original poster was requesting we do, and I explained why the core team was unable to work on it. It's worth bearing in mind that we're all volunteers working on this in our free time, so sucking up to people whose bad takes insist we increase our workload isn't something that's exciting, and is likely to be overly reminiscent of problems at our day jobs. Stressing out our devs is a much bigger risk than being unfriendly to people who've made a counterproductive contribution in case they'd have made a productive one later, especially as people grown-up enough to be helpful are likely able to cope with a point-by-point refutation.
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psi29a
Posts: 5355
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Location: Belgium
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Re: Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

Post by psi29a »

sonicboom12345 wrote: 04 Aug 2022, 18:53
I'd like to suggest that maybe hitting people with "no" is perhaps not the best strategy for cultivating an active community and getting more people involved with the project. Instead of a point-by-point refutation, maybe the OpenMW team could be vocal about praising and thanking people for their ideas and feedback.
Thanks so much for volunteering to be a part of our community management! We really appreciate your willingness to help improve, foster and care for OpenMW's community and public relations.
polynomial
Posts: 14
Joined: 31 Jul 2021, 21:57

Re: Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

Post by polynomial »

sonicboom12345 wrote: 04 Aug 2022, 18:53
AnyOldName3 wrote: 18 Jun 2022, 17:21 words
I just want to point out that this is maybe not the best community management. Someone cared enough about your project to brainstorm a list of ideas they thought could help make the game better. Even if some of the ideas were unrealistic, the intentions were good, and the original post was full of positive energy.

Conversely, post #2 is a very matter-of-fact, point-by-point dissection and refutation of every idea this person came up with. Basically a wall of "no." That's a very humbling thing to be confronted with. It doesn't create positive energy, and it doesn't invite participation or collaboration. It broadcasts that people's unique perspectives and opinions aren't really welcome. Perhaps as a result, this individual hasn't bothered to make a follow-up post or invest in the community at all since June. Not on the forums, anyway.

I'd like to suggest that maybe hitting people with "no" is perhaps not the best strategy for cultivating an active community and getting more people involved with the project. Instead of a point-by-point refutation, maybe the OpenMW team could be vocal about praising and thanking people for their ideas and feedback. Remark that some of the ideas are outside the project's current scope, but if you have an interest in seeing some of this implemented, come talk to us on Discord and think about becoming a part of the team. We can talk shop, hook you up with the software and the tutorials, etc. From a community management stsndpoint, that seems a lot closer to the ideal to me.
As a currently-non-technical, long-time follower of the project. I think you read too much into this. Anyoldname3's spot on and not actually negative. To actually receive a serious matter-of-fact response to all suggestions is laudable. I'd have loved that level of access as a kid when sending mail to the Age of Empires developers with suggestions.

The thing is, ideas are the easy part. The OpenMW community and devs quite welcoming there, and responsive. But being an engine placement, with long-tail legacy compatibility, it's highly complex and involved and you can see the great lengths the devs take to balance a fine line with this.

Further, consider it's people working on this in their spare time out of passion and interest. I follow many open source game engine recreations, and OpenMW's dev community is pretty outstanding and effective. So I'd say read it with positive intent in mind.

The energy of OP is welcome and fostered, and appreciated, though technical realities must be appreciated.
sonicboom12345
Posts: 18
Joined: 13 Sep 2016, 23:47

Re: Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

Post by sonicboom12345 »

psi29a wrote: 05 Aug 2022, 19:43
sonicboom12345 wrote: 04 Aug 2022, 18:53
I'd like to suggest that maybe hitting people with "no" is perhaps not the best strategy for cultivating an active community and getting more people involved with the project. Instead of a point-by-point refutation, maybe the OpenMW team could be vocal about praising and thanking people for their ideas and feedback.
Thanks so much for volunteering to be a part of our community management! We really appreciate your willingness to help improve, foster and care for OpenMW's community and public relations.
To be honest, I think the snark is both uncalled for and revealing. You pretty much made my point for me. I love this project and I wish it every success, but I've always found the way OpenMW handles community feedback to be quite alienating and self-sabotaging.
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psi29a
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Location: Belgium
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Re: Bringing OpenMorrowind into the future

Post by psi29a »

It wasn't snark, I honestly thought sonicboom12345 wanted to help.

It's hard to find volunteers able to have the time and motivation to work on their passion project, which OpenMW definitely is.

Considering that English is the lingua franca, it is by no means everyone's primary language and cultural differences makes things difficult enough, compounded by it being purely text... anyone can read into what they will.

We live for comments like this
viewtopic.php?p=72956#p72956
This is why we work on OpenMW and there are more things to come in the future. :)
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