Welcome again.

There is little news this week, but there is a good reason for it; we are getting close to the  release of 0.18.0. There are already RCs available on our forums. The team worked really hard and effective to close tasks on the road map. But there were severe problems with bugs on OSX.

There’s been bad luck recently with the OSX build, but only corristo on our development team uses Mac, so it’s a classical example of under-testing. This issue did get sorted out thanks to corristo and scrawl.

In other news: Scrawl implemented two more features: gamma correction and the rest/sleep window. Gamma correction adjusts the screen brightness (it’s the age old dilemma of video games: do you want to see your enemy slightly washed out or not?). Scrawl took over the Rest/Sleep window, because Aurix was quite busy lately. Thanks to the help of Hrnchamd we are quite sure that the speed of mana and health regeneration is correct. scrawl is now working on the global map, it’s only half finished but works very well!

jhooks1 made excellent progress on his task. Pmove has been reintroduced and controls are already working with all important features.

Welcome once again fellow readers!

scrawl went into overdrive this week. He forked several branches to implement new features in each. Now we have: “paperdoll” next to the inventory menu which shows all the armor and clothing on your character, a preview of the face in the race menu, hiding of markers (like the north marker), loading screens with progress bars and splash pictures, disabled collision for objects with NCO flag (like spider webs) and now level up. scrawl always working on something, even if I don’t mention him here in the weekly post. However, the impact of this particular programmer is huge.

jhooks1 continues to work on physics. He is facing a quite large task and I hope he isn’t getting bored and that the physics implementation is both challenging and rewarding. He got actors physics working, with scale functionality, but rotate isn’t finished just yet. There is still much to be done.

Aurix, a new developer that joined us some time ago, implemented a spell buying window and is now looking into the wait and rest window.

Zini implemented eating, with the appropriate sound playing.

We still don’t have the training window code on github, but Dgdiniz guarantees us he is still working on it. Another issue for the training window is that we are missing the fade to black effect that happens during training. This is not a trivial issue and may take some time to implement.

OpenMW 0.18.0 will introduce a nice set of new features, with plenty of gameplay and gui functionality.

Finally, WeirdSexy made a video for those who don’t want to read a FAQ. The majority of the internet discovers OpenMW by youtube. Also a link to a video is better then a link to the even most impressive website that requires actually READING the text (it’s so XIX century, I know…). Anyway: OpenMW FAQ #1 enjoy!

Hello,
I’ve just enabled some small server-side anti-spambot script today, so if you encounter any problems with OpenMW forum access (HTTP 403 error), then please let me know (via IRC, GitHub, e-mail). Sorry for inconvenience.

Welcome again, here’s the news report.

Jhooks1 was so nice to describe what He is up to do. Great, since I’m actually ignorant in all technical related topics and in addition to this quite lazy so let’s just quote it:

I am still working on the NPC/creature correct collision shapes task.

I had the task done, but I decided instead of scrapping the PhysicActor class that I would redesign it (too much valuable code). The new class is going to incorporate the Rigid Bodies (based on box shapes) and use pmove to allow the creature/NPC to collide with the world around it. Right now only the player gets to collide with the world through pmove, so this work is essential to having NPCs and creatures running about.

This is a lot to take in and change around though (and it seems like 3x the work of the original task I set out to do). I hope I can get a solution up and running soon.

In addition to this the fix, jhooks1’s work to smooth out the animations shortly before the 0.17.0 was finally merged to the master branch.

Zini worked on actiontarget branch to implement target handling in action class — solving issue number 370 on our bugtracker.

Eli2 made quite a lot commits for the editor. These mostly regard filters, since that’s was the subject of discussions on the forum recently. No surprise since it’s a crucial element of the whole concept.

Hrnchamd’s doing excellent work on finding and documenting internal Morrowind gameplay mechanics. For example, he nailed down the formula for training costs so Dgdiniz was able to progress with his task. The following picture shows OpenMW on the left and Vanilla Morrowind on the right.

Pretty picture.

Scrawl pointed out that the scroll bar is not needed in OpenMW, because there is no need to scroll such short list.

Finally, I just learned about a feature OpenMW has over vanilla Morrowind. In Morrowind you cannot teleport the player to a cell while using variables as coordinates. This limitation is just painful! Although modders were able to bypass it partially thanks to script extenders and some really fancy tricks like those used in the tent mods but those ugly hacks tend to deliver a lot of problems. OpenMW does not have this limitation, so teleport away!

Have you tried the new version of OpenMW? Did you liked it?

There wasn’t much in terms of shiny new features, but as usual a lot of work on engine basics took place and that paves the way for version 0.18.0. There are a lot of really cool tasks open on the roadmap, something for everyone. We can implement long awaited features (or prerequisites that are necessary for those features).

If progress remained stable, then we could bring large chunks of gameplay with each new version. The project’s at an amazing point. Want to implement a new skill? Go for it. The code is ready. We may need the formulas first, but Hrnchamd (famous for making the Morrowind Code Patch) is helping discover them. You can look on wiki page to see what formulas he and those other reverse engineers have figured out.

Maybe you’d prefer to implement level-up? Sure get on it, skills (the ones we’ve implemented) can now improve.

Would you rather implement sleeping and resting? OK, they are ready to be worked on.

GUI tasks are often neglected, so maybe take the trainer window or spell buying window tasks?

We can finally we can support the walking animation. It “just” needs to be finished first.

Developers solved a number of smaller issues this week.

For example Scrawl fixed many bugs, added the ability to hide GUI elements by pressing F12, and added a new GUI window for quick keys.

Greye is our AI specialist, but since we weren’t ready to implement it he worked on other features. This week, Greye started to loading AI packages into the engine. We can’t do anything with them yet, but that’s another first step that’s been taken.

Dgdiniz is a new developer who recently finished his first task (moved Sounds into Action). It was a typical beginner refactoring task and he behaved like a gentleman on the forums. ;-) Dgdiniz praised our clean and readable code. He is not the first person to notice it. This is due in part to zini’s endless struggle to refactor and control things like a general in battle. It makes quite a lot of difference!

Now Dgidiniz has moved on to working on getting the training window to work. MyGUI does not have the best documentation, but we have some experts in our team that have worked with it before, including scrawl, gus.

Zini currently is merging branches and making sure that everything works as it should. While also solving bugs.

jhooks1 wants to merge collision shapes into the master branch. Before that can happen the old kinematic controller and actor physics code needs to be removed so he is focusing on making all stairs climbable with the current system.