You can now begin and complete the first quests of the main quest line. Once you reach Vivec you’ll hit an impasse as those missions require AI functions that are still unimplemented. The increased playability is the result of zini’s work on dialog filters and scrawl’s resolving a bug that prevented the dialog filters from working correctly. It’s great news! I suspect things will really start moving forward once we get AI implemented.

Speaking of AI, rpopovici is just hacking together the script instructions for the dummy AI classes.

Scrawl is in the process of implementing many scripting functions.

Gus has got the major, and hardest parts, of weapon rendering completed. There’s still a fair share of work left to be done and the problem may prove more difficult than gus currently anticipates. Let’s hope things go smoothly.

A surprisingly difficult bug to resolve involves proper text rendering in books and scrolls in all local versions (ie different languages). This is a perfect example of something that appears trivial at first glance, but proves otherwise. But we believe Igro can eventually squash this problem.

Finally, pvdk returned to work on the launcher. We got the first run dialog!

Welcome!

We had quite a nice week. A new developer Gohan (real name Marcin Hulist) joined us and started implementing AI dummy packages. This is his first attempt at AI. Hopefully we will see more AI oriented tasks after we implement the walking animations and maybe some elements of combat.

Zini finished implementing all the filter dialogs. Finally, everything in the dialogs should work,, unless there are other, currently unknown, features missing.

Thanks to greye we can now change races and the race menu window updates accordingly. The fact that it was possible to implement this feature also means that we can get a lot of other important tasks done.

Scrawl (trivia: did you know that Scrawl is the top remover of code in the OpenMW project?) continued work on the global map. This week he’s brought us the explored area overlay. We decided to a go slightly different path then vanilla Morrowind, but the effect should be cool enough.

Gus is working on weapon rendering. This is already working, well kind of… The weapon can be seen and that’s serious improvement, but there is still much to be done.

mark76 is slowly making progress the last couple of weeks on supporting multiple esm/esp files. We have support for multiple esm context in the cell store and basic loading references. This is nice progress, but better not to expect this to be resolved overnight!

lgro is back and plans on working this coming week on text formatting for books. The formatting is currently not working for some languages. For example, in the German version of Morrowind the tags are currently spliced between pages, which looks bad.

trombonecot, another new developer, bravely stepped into the fray. He is going to implement the failed action feature. Way to go!

We always need to recruit new developers to balance the losses. For example, jhooks1 has been absent for some time. He has been a great contributor to the project, putting so much effort into the animation and physics systems. He was also active for a very long time, even completely alone when the team was weak. We hope you are doing well J! Thanks for your amazing work and we hope to hear from you soon.

-See you next week

Voila, OpenMW 0.19.0 is at your fingertips.

Death was a major feature addition in 0.19.0, but it isn’t fully implemented yet with many missing things in the dialogue code. These will be fixed in time for version 0.20.0. We’ve got a two point plan to do it:

1) Zini will work on it.
2) Zini will fix everything.

As you can see it simply must work. ;-)

But other things are working with the death, including the kill counter. So it is possible to complete quests involving the killing of people and or things.

Zini recently added the bounty feature to the player’s stats. This is similar to disease feature. Now npcs will be able to recognize if you are a wanted criminal and use different greetings accordingly.

Gus worked on bartering, which has been present in past versions but with limited functionality. Previously, the player was not able to bargain for a better price. This is now implemented. Also, thanks to scrawl, now rejected offers will hurt an NPC’s disposition towards the player character.

Scrawl is working on the persuasion feature. The menu is already done and you can get a disposition bonus after a successful attempt.

Greye is busy with the character model task. Get ready to finally see your character’s race change! Before even being able to start this feature, Greye had to add some other features in “player-dynamics” branch. We love you Greye!

The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.19.0! 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 Sleeping, Potions, DEATH!!, Spell Creation, Travel, and many other features.

Check out our release video by WeirdSexy:

Known Issues:

• Launcher crashes on OS X < 10.8
• Extreme shaking can occur during exterior cell transitions for some users

Changelog:

• Implemented sleep/wait
• Further implementation for alchemy/potions
• Implemented death
• Implemented spell creation and spell creation window
• Implemented travel and travel dialogue
• Implemented first layer of global map
• Implemented trainer window
• Implemented skill increase from skill books
• Implemented ESM/ESP record saving
• Fix for Character shaking in 3rd person mode near the origin
• Implemented gamma correct rendering (does not work without shaders)
• Fix for fortify attribute effects on the last 3 attributes
• Fix for NCC flag handling, fixes some collision issues
• Sort birthsign menu alphabetically
• Various fixes/cleanup for the launcher
• Fix for sound listener position updating incorrectly
• Implemented dynamically generating splash image list
• Fix for markers interfering with raycasting
• Fix for crash after picking up items from an NPC

Hi all,

Nothing super new this week: everybody is continuing to work on the things mentioned last week, with two small exceptions. emoose, a new developer, is working on an issue related to interior doors and scrawl has implemented one of the most beloved features in videogamedom: the looting of corpses. We (ok, fine: mostly zini) also solved bugs of various importance.

There is one exciting bit of news to talk about; we’re readying the next version. As you read this (well… if you’re reading it within several days of its publication) we are focused on leading an assault using devastating RC fire, after that our squad of developers will capture and secure sector 0.19.

First We take Manhattan, then We take Berlin…

The actual awesomeness to the potential awesomeness ratio for version 0.19 is not huge, so it’s not the most amazing release, but the point behind every release is to get and encourage TESTING. You know, that silly thing that tells developers that the software actually works.

Stay tuned. Stay sharp. Stay ready!

And get ready to test!