image ©Maxim Nikolaev
the week in review 2012-10-29 - sir_herrbatka

Ruminations of alchemy, animations, and death

The Alchemy implementation is complete. Bug testing has revealed some issues that will surely get resolved soon.

Zini is also working on the “Death” branch. There was a bug where everything/everyone was insta-killed. That is no longer a problem, but there are more to be fixed.

The newly finished quick travel services in the “Travel Dialogue” branch is being refactored by Gus.

Pvdk continues working on our launcher with the support for profiles now back!

Greye is working in the “Storedevel” branch on lower level structures of the engine, rather than on user visible features ─ but that doesn’t make it unimportant. In fact quite opposite: without it we would be screwed in many ways.

Chris is digging around in the animations. The number of commits increases, the number of issues decreases but the goal of fully implemented animations is still far away…

The OpenMW engine is so big and interrelated that every feature requires quite a lot of work…

Eli2 as usual continues to work on the editor. Stopgap json serializer has been replaced with the qt variant. There was also Qt5 experiment ─ not very important from practical point of view but some of you may be interested that “It works”.

The week in review 2012-10-21 - sir_herrbatka

Welcome! All of you!

The OpenMW editor, which some of you might not even be aware of,  has been progressing stably for quite some time now. Eli2 is currently focusing on loading and saving projects. Once this groundwork is finished, other features can be edited more quickly.

Scrawl is not working on shaders at the moment (mark this historic date on your calenders). Instead he’s working with zini on the alchemy implementation. The new code needs to be integrated into the game engine, and also requires its own GUI. He made the original alchemy window, so clearly he’s fit for the current job. Scrawl is becoming a true MyGUI adept. When the GUI first appeared bugs appeared with it, but these are getting squashed now.

BTW, compile time of OpenMW on Scrawl’s computer is about 2 minutes.

Zini assigned the “Death” task to himself. I wouldn’t be surprised if WeirdSexy’s videos get a little more of thriller/horror feel or maybe something ala Overgrowth. Hopefully WeirdSexy will also be able to show some more animations as Chris is working on this feature. Although getting animations to behave correctly is not trivial, the concept has already taken shape.

lgro, the fearless spambot slayer, holy guardian of… eh never mind. Lgro is working on books. The task proved to be harder then it first appeared to be. The only current benefit from Lgros effort is realizing there are problems that need to be solved in the parser. Lgro promises to do the trick, but it will take quite some time.

Another careful operation in the works is on the performance of cell loading. For some users loading is very slow. To fix this, Zini introduced changes, and the testing brought some surprising results. Unfortunately surprising in the negative sense. Honestly, nobody knows what to do! But the team will figure this out, eventually.

 

the week in review 2012-10-21 - sir_herrbatka

Welcome,

I had unexpected computer problems last week and I’m trying to make this post cover two weeks…

Scrawl finished work on the spell creation feature.  Thanks to his good program planning at least part of the spell creation code can be reused for the enchanting feature.

gus worked on the traveling feature. He made a GUI which displays prices and you can now travel between places.

pvdk altered the launcher’s data files tab. It uses a new model, but we unfortunately don’t yet have support for multiple esx files in the engine!

Cory Cohen is working on the ESMTool. It displays human readable labels and it also provides record dumping with more details.

Greye made minor changes to the ESMStore. It nows allows storing additional records not loaded from esm/p files, but created in game, with the ability to modify these records. One situation where this is needed is during character creation, where the player decides his/her character’s race.

Zini fought/is fighting with non-standard GCC extensions. He also enabled C++11 mode for compiler flags, but at the moment it’s nothing more than an interesting detail. Standard coding for OpenMW is still the de facto of C++03. When C++11 is supported by the main compilers, then we’ll add support for it. This means the earliest we’ll see C++11 in OpenMW is the second half of 2013.

Did you notice the tag cloud on the right? Scrawl, zini and the rest of the development team are now not only programmers, but also tags! Funny!

the week in review 2012-10-13 - sir_herrbatka

Welcome!

If you did not visit our forum recently you could miss new theme. It’s done by jedd and necrod, looks very nice and integrates with wordpress theme. This is not everything, lgro — our admin installed a brand new anti-spam plugin that should reduce the daily cleaning for admins and moderators — it seems to work good.

We have also quite a lot of programming progress. Scrawl added skill gain for training books and also started to work on video playback feature so maybe finally you will be able to see the intro movie as well as create spells since scrawl also works on it. In addition, as usual some bug fixing, most visible for global map not updating when it’s pinned.

gus started to work on fast travel service: silt striders, boats and guild guides will be finally able to take you to the other towns. It seems that guild guides works just as silt striders and the only difference is that mages are located in interiors and will take you to the other interior so game is not able to calculate distance and in this case it just assumes that travel will cost 10 gold and be instant.

drpaneas (a new developer) started to work on his first task that is implementing a failed action. It’s quite important!

Mark76 showed up on the forums recently. Nothing has changed for the multiple esm and esp support but zini thinks about splitting it so it won’t be so overwhelming.

Zini on his own works on proper alchemy implementation. Needless to say current solution was nothing else then a prototype and was never intended to go into the 1.0 so it was just too strongly tied to the GUI and was just not planned properly. This is about to change.

greye is working on the old task of record saving. It’s very important task for both game and the editor.

OpenMW 0.18.0 Released! 2012-10-01 - sir_herrbatka

The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.18.0! Release packages for Ubuntu are now available via our Launchpad PPA. Release packages for other platforms are available on our Download page. This version introduces a myriad of new features, including Level-Up, Key re-binding, Spell buying, eating ingredients, using Keys to open things, and much more. Read on for the full changelog.

WeirdSexy stars again, in our 0.18.0 release video:

Known Issues:

Changelog: