Hello.

So water rendering is going fine. Cell switching works with exteriors and It seems that, well We have a water rendering almost finished. Jhooks wanted to give some credit to Azathoth for helping him. Thank you very much Azathoth!

And since jhooks is free It’s time to fight with animation issues again. Performance is still not satisfying when animating bunch of npcs.

GUS is on Dialogue GUI/System task. Although GUI was already quite advance there is still much to be done to make it functional.

Yacoby is still developing terrain. Still a lot to do, for example tga/bmp textures (bmp textures are lame but are supported by MW and used in old mods like Wizards Island).

And Configuration/Path handling is progressing too, thanks to lgro. Zini wants to throw new version soon as already It took plenty of time to finish.

But that’s not real problem, It didn’t stopped work on OpenMW even for a moment.

And that’s just perfect.

Journal task is finished for now (It’s very basic but We don’t need anything more than that at the moment), GUS is free to focus on the other frontiers, like dialog GUI task, or meshes orientation bug. Good. Very good! Many have fallen in the battle with GUI tasks, so developer who survived and is somewhat experienced with mygui is even more important as He can do not only tasks on his own but also support other developers.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

lgro continues his work on configuration handling. Task is not that small as It seems but It’s only one left for release and It doesn’t interact with other tasks like water or terrain rendering.

Terrain task is going well and smoothly, and that’s not surprising since Yacoby knows very well what to do. Once again experience proves to be useful.

jHooks is doing fine with water rendering as well. In interior cells it works mostly well, while work on rendering water in exterior cells had only began.

One last thing: lgro (our beloved admin) upgraded wiki and forum recently. Forum members recevied PM but I will quote It for those who are not forum members yet:

Hi,
forum and wiki upgrade is done. If you encounter any strange bugs or something, please let me know (send me e-mail or pm, or just write a post in “Discuss the site” subforum), and I will try to fix it.

It seems that the only task left for new release openmw is configuration/directory handling. lgro is currently on it so It looks like we will see new version on the loose soon with basic journal, properer character rendering and animations finally working (to mention the most spectacular features).

Actually work for 0.13.0 already started. Yaccoby is taken over terrain rendering task and jhooks1 is working on water rendering.

Short reminder here: yaccoby is the guy behind old terrain rendering in old openmw. It was totally custom implementation, since the current ogre3d lib did not exist at the time and available solutions sucked a bit. Currently there is no reason to write custom terrain rendering since:

And yaccoby seems to excited to work on feature that can make pretty pictures

While Yaccoby is doing element of earth jhooks1 started element of water (sadly We dropped codenames so We can’t name 0.12.0 “It moves” and 0.13.0 “ElementalWind”). No hydratex here: It requires decent hardware to run smoothly and that’s not really acceptable for openmw.

Although openmw will require better hardware than morrowind It shouldn’t need newest graphic cards to run at all. For example yaccoby wants to use shader model 2 for terrain, and although Morrowind did not require that kind of hardware today it’s unusual to find less capable PC. Even my crappy, old Geforce 7300 GT is a shader model 3.

Oh, my geforce is doing what I want and I’m not complaining at all. It’s just old. I don’t think that anyone uses older graphic card than this.

Hello,
Thursday and Friday openmw.org unavailability, as I mentioned in previous post, was caused by power loss in Ecatel datacenter in Holland which is used by Rootnode.net (our hosting), but that unfortunately was not all (Friday 13th?). There was also APC power switch and some KVMs failure which caused some problems with data on shell and web servers, so RN admins restored it from backup. I don’t have access to shell (yet) so I can’t verify if all data was restored, but main page, forum, wiki and bug tracker works, so I hope everything is OK.

Among this, RN admins planned some bigger maintenance works at Monday and Wednesday (16/17.01.2012). Maintenance status will be posted on twitter. They will add and start testing new (faster, better) web cluster which will be used for web hosting for RN users in near future. Also there will be HDD upgrades (but only on shell servers so openmw.org pages will not be affected), and some network reconfiguration. So, please be prepared for some “unexpected” things, like few minutes of web page unavailability. And there is yet another thing, there will be a dedicated machine for Java in RN (it’s currently tested) – whats this mean for us? We could setup in future Jenkins Continuous Integration server which could do for us some automatic binaries building and packaging :D

Hi,
as you probably noticed openmw.org was off-line yesterday and today that was caused by some strange power failure in datacenter used by Rootnode.net.
More detailed info is in http://rootnodestatus.net but unfortunately it is still in Polish language only. All data was restored from backups, so there should be no loss except uptime.

I will monitor situation and write another status post on weekend.