openmw.org

Not sure if this idea has been brought up before, but I think it would great if mods such as Tamriel Rebuilt, Skyrim: Home of the Nords, and MorroUI was merged into OpenMW and made available as options that can be selected/deselected out of the box. I feel these are essential mods that blend in nicely with vanilla Morrowind and are 100% lore-friendly, and in the case of MorroUI, looks to be a superior user interface.

We're in the process of dehardcoding UI so MorroUI can be a regular mod instead of a fork. Its creator is part of the OpenMW team, so is planning on doing that as soon as it's possible.

As for shipping mods with OpenMW, we won't be doing that. Not everyone likes every mod, even the ones you've mentioned, and half the point of OpenMW is to make modding more flexible. There's nothing stopping the TR team bundling OpenMW with TR, though, for example, and if they ever change their stance towards supporting the original engine, which might happen if we add some killer features worth abandoning it for, they might well find that that's the easiest way of distributing their mod.

That is unfortunate to hear. I mean if someone doesn't like to explore the rest of Morrowind, they could just decide not to explore those extra areas?. I'd agree with you if it was some random, immersion breaking mod but Tamriel Rebuilt seems to fit in very nicely with the rest of the game. You'd think Bethesda developed it themselves!.

I suppose the TR team could fork OpenMW, but then that has issues of it's own. Mainly the problem of trying to be at-parity with the main OpenMW project, I would imagine. If a Tamriel Rebuilt version of OpenMW is made using 0.50, for example, it would be unfortunate then if OpenMW was at 0.53 or even 1.0 with a lot more features and improvements. It just wouldn't feel right to me, at least. Bundling it would be alright, as long as the bundled version is updated at a good pace.

Definitely excited to give MorroUI a try once it becomes it's own mod, as it looks to be a sizeable improvement on the base UI. Doubly so if it offers better controller support.

Packaging mods with OpenMW (particularly massive in-development mods like TR), implementing and maintaining options in the launcher/elsewhere to ensure the mod(s) and base OpenMW work flawlessly together, and inevitably ballooning the size of the OpenMW distros as a result would all lead to a huge amount of additional work for the OpenMW devs and hassle for users who wouldn't be interested in the mods in the first place and/or who would prefer to simply download them separately.

Something that hasn't been mentioned yet but is probably the most important part:

Shipping TR could be illegal. Tamriel Rebuilt is a mod based on Morrowind and on Bethesdas Elder Scrolls IP. Thus it (at least partially) belongs to Bethesda. If we ship Tamriel Rebuilt with OpenMW, we would be shipping Bethesda lore, names of Bethesda-owned geographical areas etc. It would be way too risky to ship Morrowind mods with OpenMW. Mods are legal because they are simply plugins for a product you already bought. Game publishers and developers are simply accepting the distribution of their IP if it is only used within their own games. OpenMW is kind of another thing since it's a game engine that can run more than just Morrowind. To keep OpenMW 100% free from Bethesda, we need to avoid shipping bethesda-related things with OpenMW.

It's not even 'just' that they're plugins for something you've already bought. Bethesda's ToS for the game grant specific permissions that let you create and distribute mods provided they partially own them and you abide by some restrictions on what you can do. With other games that don't have such an agreement, nearly every mod is technically already illegal and one lawyer's letter from being forced to disappear.