The 0.12.0 is near. Actually only package testing has left, well unless something goes wrong again. Lgro had a lot of struggle with libboost ─ it worked in different ways depending on version. Finally solution has been found and to this point It seems that morrowind path finding finally works as it should.

Scrawl started to work on skybox and weather implementations and soon after got very good results. So good that actually Zini started to think about moving skybox to openmw 0.13.0, even if weather still will be unfinished just because sky looks awesome on its own and most certainly It will be ready on time. I must say that I’m very happy since We finally can get rid of cealum that didn’t do what morrowind sky needs to have and is a fps-killer.

Sadly no chance for terrain rendering in 0.13.0. Water+Terrain+Sky would be so awesome, but It won’t happen before 0.14.0.

Jhooks1 is digging in few places and sometimes findings are ugly. Remember Project Aedra physics? Ultimately it seems that the problem cannot be solved by simply tuning few values. It looks like we are about to see a lot of recoding in our physics implementation.

OTOH jhooks1 was also messing with animations, and maybe finally the performance stopper was found. Needs testing. Meanwhile you can see this video…

Also it’s worth to mention that another crashing bug was solved. Heart in the Akulakhan’s Chamber is different then all other creatures and that proved to be a little nasty. But it’s fixed now. Bravo Jhooks1!

Dudes on IRC channel (our IRC channel is on freenode) say that it’s not advertised enough. Well, ok. So here is just a short compilation of memorable quotes from the channel:

|werdanith| interesting, sitting on the couch, watching on TV journalists arguing about exactly how !@$!$# we are

|pvdk| gus: never got into that, I did install gentoo though
|pvdk| back in the days, 14 years old, me and a friend, printed the whole install guide

|Sir_Herrbatka| anyway
|Sir_Herrbatka| Did anybody thought about using their skybox code?
|Sir_Herrbatka| It seems to work the same way as morrowind one
|pvdk| Sir_Herrbatka: well i thought about it right now
|pvdk| i thought: lets steal it!
|pvdk| steal their skies!
|Sir_Herrbatka| and? ;-)
|Sir_Herrbatka| they have a pretty water too
|pvdk| nice! let’s steal that too

|raevol| some of my favorite things come from finland though: linux, korpiklaani, vodka…
|werdanith| vodka is finnish?
|raevol| probably not originally
|raevol| but they make good vodka

|Yacoby| it is trivial for the loss of productivy it brings
|pvdk| yeah need another vid card for it though
|pvdk| haha how so?
|Yacoby| I can “work” and watch a film :P

|swick_| i got skyrim run in wine :)
|pvdk| nice!
|swick_| running on lowest settings and in a 800*500 resolution
|pvdk| 800×500
|swick_| did not event know the resolution exists :/

|werdanith| scrawl: gus might know
|gus_| scrawl: 42

|Yacoby| I know a guy who ran arch testing on his server
|pvdk| Yacoby: wow…
|pvdk| why?
|Yacoby| for the lols.
|Yacoby| it was sometimes up for entire days

|Pjstaab| why freenode?
|Pjstaab| all the cool people are on chatspike
|pvdk| wow hi Pjstaab
|pvdk| chatspike didn’t want us
|pvdk| they said we werent cool enough

|Sir_Herrbatka| NPC Activation only works on each npc’s lower body.
|Sir_Herrbatka| openmw is perverted by design?
|pvdk| Sir_Herrbatka: hehehe good pickup line to use on a pretty girl
|pvdk| Sir_Herrbatka: “Let me activate your lower body girl”
|pvdk| or something like that
|Sir_Herrbatka| try and share report about resoult
|Sir_Herrbatka| ;-)
|pvdk| maybe i will :)
|pvdk| “openmw got me laid!”
|Sir_Herrbatka| I would put this on blog
|Sir_Herrbatka| would be very good PR

Let’s start with important news: We decided that openmw should focus on smaller, but more frequent releases. It seems that every single release of openmw up to now was delayed badly. And that’s bad since It means that features must wait very long for testing. Bugs can be tricky to fix when a lot happens in the code meanwhile.

In openmw 0.13.0 We won’t see terrain rendering as It needs to wait for new version of OGRE to be added without unneeded pain. Waiting does not go well with new concept of frequent releasing. But we have another killer feature: dialogue GUI! GUS did very well on this one, and did already a lot ─ the rest needs fixing another partially broken stuff and Zini is on it just after finishing equipping item task (jhooks1 wouldn’t forgive delaying it).

And water rendering. Water is mega-important and easily seen feature. Jhooks1 did awesome job again. This will be include in new version of openmw as well.

This two features would be enough for openmw 0.13.0 on they own. Any other big features needs to be moved for 0.14.0 or even 0.15.0.

And Let’s not forget about the openmw 0.12.0. We are almost done here. Just a little more tuning and We are ready. It’s all in lgro hands. This are good hands (frequently washed). ;-)

Recently new developer joined us. Welcome Scrawl, one of the vdrift-ogre developers where He plays the role of graphics guy! Although advance graphics features needs to wait for openmw post 1.0.0 there are still tasks to be done, even in rendering. We still miss particles, need a proper skybox, weather…

PS
ElderTroll wrote article for the freegamer about open source morrowind engines.

About openmw 0.12.0 (almost) straight from zini (The Coder Supreme):

Regression #1 (back and okay button in race window): The bug went away after the window manager refactoring. Slightly suboptimal, since we still don’t know what has caused it, but since the code that caused the bug is probably not in the codebase anymore, this is acceptable as a fix.
Can’t get it into 0.12.0 though (merging it into 0.13.0 was nightmarish enough). It looks like we will have an unfixed regression for this release.

Regression #2: (Crash when activating collisions after cell change) Very suspicious workaround. Shouldn’t work, but it does. Not entirely happy, but it seems we have no other choice than going along with it for now.

Regression #3: ( Running with –new-game will teleport to a strange location when leaving the initial location (imperial prison ship) Fixed. A slight oversight on my part during my work on cell handling; with disastrous results though.

Regression #4: (After exiting an interior and re-entering it light coming from light type objects is not rendered.) Fixed recently.

We also have 3 new (non critical) regressions:

Most of the configuration system is finished now too thanks to lgro. Since all major problems are now fixed I can say: The last commits before openmw 0.12.0! (?)

Besides:
Jhooks1 says that He might found the solution for the problem with falling trough floor. That would be awesome but needs a little more insight.

GUS is still on dialogue GUI task. addTopic script instruction now works as well as greetings. Still much to do, like executing scripts in dialogs.

BrotherBrick created wikipage with instructions about testing for novice, I hope that It can be filled with more info soon. Here is the link: http://openmw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Testing

PS
Did you visited http://crystalscrolls.sourceforge.net webpage? There is a new version released!

Hello everyone!

OpenMW have now brand new http://www.youtube.com/user/MrOpenMW Good idea since until now videos was scattered around few youtube channels. That’s thanks to new guy called ElderTroll who joined our team to participate in PR efforts. Although We was a little confused at first (mostly because nick suggested some kind of treachery) He seems to be so enthusiastic.

http://openmw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Project_History contains now old changelogs. Also ElderTroll job.

Also another new user: Mircceam94 joined us recently and started to mess up with the code, becoming new developer.

Since chatspike had some problems #openmw was moved to freenode. And it seems that channel is now more active by far. Yesterday I spent too much time on this channel for sure. :-)

lgro reports that rootnode was attacked by hacker nicknamed Brudny_Koń (translates into Dirty Horse). Everything was already spoken on forum.

I guess that there is no reason to fear since we have backups anyway.

When it comes to development:

GUS is doing dialogue task. It’s not that simple, mostly because lack of documentation. Actually GUS could use some support of experienced modder to answer his questions.

Yacoby have some problems with terrain. Ogre3d terrain lib seems to be not so perfect as initially looked like and some bugs are difficult to fix. Ogre3d forum support helps a lot. :-)

Jhooks is looking into our and project aedra physics code. As all of us know current physic implementation is pretty bad…

… and project aedra has a better one for sure. Although our project is very different from aedra we both use libbullet so examining aedra could give us a lot.

The bad news is that numerous bugs showed up recently and a lot of bugfixing is needed to solve it. Zini is a little angry because of this situation but no one can blame him, really.