The first year of OpenMW development under new management is over and for the most part we have done good. Last year around this time OpenMW still looked dead. Now there is no doubt anymore that OpenMW 1.0 will see the light of day.

We had three releases which isn’t so bad, although slightly less than I had hoped for. We had a lot of problems: forced website migration, partial loss of the old wiki, some important developers gone inactive, people involved in the release process quitting at the most inappropriate time and the mwrender refactoring task which went through the hands of three developers and which will still have an aftermath in form of an to be investigated slowdown and a potential regression. But overall we did good.

We didn’t produce a huge load of user visible improvements in 2011. Most of our work was either of peripheral nature or focused on the backend or code maintenance. I suspect that this factor contributed greatly to the decreased public attention we received, especially in the second half of 2011.
But the upside of this is that we are in a very good position now. We have a lot of groundwork covered. The only major issue we need to get out of the way is the configuration improvement and the rest of the packaging automation.
Now we can implement several interesting features that wouldn’t have been possible a year ago. Namely I expect for the upcoming releases (after 0.12):

• plugin and multiple master loading
• implementation of most of the missing graphical features
• completing our plan to make the tutorial part at the beginning of Morrowind fully playable.

Also it looks like we will see the beginning of the Editor.

Once we have 0.12 out of the door a much brighter future is ahead of us.

We did good in 2011. Let’s do better in 2012.

Christmas! And under Christmas tree…

Cook book “Telvanni secrets” for zini. It’s been told that It contains Telvanni bug mask recipe! Zini’s fridge is full of hunted down bugs so it’s time to do something with them.

VIP card of House of Earthly Delights for jhooks. Jhooks was working hard to make animations working. Besides of that openmw still can’t load plugins so lack of better bodies should be a remainder…

Collection “Lessons of Vivec” and “Corpse Preparation” for GUS. GUS is working on journal but some code should be reusable for books as well.

Fortify English Grammar potion for me. Since I freaking hate it.

Basically the same work as last week, but it’s just another step toward our well planed target. Nothing really interesting.

Well, I wanted to say “thank you”.

It’s over a year since I’m writing news for openmw and around a year since nico is considered as exdeveloper. You may feel disappointed with the status of openmw but consider that we (somehow I feel like a member of the project even if my work is really marginal) never thought about giving up.

In 2012 morrowind will turn 10 years old, if only we could bring new engine for this…

So, stay with us! We will never surrender!

PS
Zini agrees with the “We will never surrender!” too ;-)

PPS
Yacoby have any exam on monday. Let’s wish him luck.

jhooks seems to be able to work a little on animations again. Integrating it into main branch is not that small task but still tiny when compared with doing all the code. This makes me thing that It’s just needs time.

And GUS was able to merge journal into main, the problem is that it gives instacrash. So something is wrong and the code maintaining seems to be a frustrating job.

But there is a plenty of time to do that since animations will take a larger amount of time.

That’s it. Wait for next news on openmw and listen Nick Cave albums meanwhile.

PS
Let’s hope that I didn’t screwed something or Zini will eat my heart out. ;-)

Nothing new and exciting I’m afraid. This week was weak (oh, I’m so funny!).

At least there is now journal branch. GUS didn’t wanted to publish messy code so all the work he was doing was hidden unitll now. However It does not merge without conflict with main at the moment.