Hi again.

This week is not full of ground breaking news to be honest, in majority it’s just progress in the same areas as a week ago. Blunted2night is still on the journal task, but he also started cleaning up the worldclass.

Animations are currently under heavy development by Chris. He is doing mostly well, even if remaining tasks are still numerous.

wheybags just finished with the work on the script for containers, and everything is merged into main branch now.

pvdk is rewriting the way the launcher handles the settings files.

Developers also fixed quite large number of bugs but that’s all for now.

Welcome again. There has been progress is some areas and snags in others.

Well, there’s been some nice progress thanks to Chris. He is working on animations again and, well, now idle animations are played on npcs as well as on silt striders. There was also an experiment on playing the walking animation, but there are issues with it. To make long story short, it revealed that pmove is bad for morrowind and using it is a mistake.

Pmove was imported from Quake 3 Arena. As you may have guessed, it includes loads of functions for implementing Quake like movement, which is suitable for multiplayer deathmatch games (yes, you were able to do bunny and strafe jumping in OpenMW). The Pmove code is over two thousand lines long and overly complicated  for our needs.

It appears that using pmove could be a good option, but We are not sure what the consequences can be. There is a prototyped alternative called MovementSolver but it lacks of some features ─ the question is whether it will be easier to extend MovementSolver or stick with pmove. Nopoe thinks that MovementSolver is the way to move forward (pun intended).

Work on SDL mouse input is going nicely… for linux. Unfortunately, SDL 2.0 is still very buggy on Windows and it means we can’t use it yet. Sticking with SDL 1.2 would not give us any of the benefits we are after. So, for now we are going use a modified OIS. This is disappointing, but maybe in the future we’ll try SDL again. It was still good work Angelbracket. :)

Meanwhile blunted2night is going for journal features. We now have keywords, index and more.

At the same time, PotatoesMaster is working improvements for dialogs.

Scrawl as usual works in his very own graphics branch on, well, graphics. ;-)

Now We also have something for Debian Wheezy users. Visit https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?t=1298&p=13216#p13216

Hello,
OpenMW website was off-line for about three and half hour due to switch and rack power supply failure in OVH/MyDevil.net server room. Problem is solved and (I hope) everything is OK now. Sorry for inconvenience.

Hi, I’m back. Did you missed me?

We had a nice year. Although we didn’t reach version 1.0.0 (codename “Answer to everything”), we still had major progress in many areas, especially (but not only) those related to the GUI. OpenMW now feels much more complete than a year ago. This also means that 2013 could be the “make or break” moment for OpenMW after these 4+ years of development.

The challenges are clear, with the largest areas needing work being: AI (this is the first time I’m actually glad Morrowind’s AI is so primitive), multiple game files (it’ll take a long time to finish for sure) and the super-ultra-hyper-critical animation/physics/player control system integration.

The physics/animation/player control integration stands in the way of implementing combat, spell casting, sneaking and countless other gameplay elements. Currently Chris and nopoe are working on it, and doing a fine job despite the complexity and cryptic nature of the task.

There is still a lot to be done in the animations area, but surely less then a week ago, as animations can now move npcs. Additionally, there have been improvements to skeletons and chris is planning to make a brand new character controller. We also have LizTail, from Niftools, to help us understand how the gamebryo engine works.

We saw other major changes to OpenMW this week. The decision was finally made to throw out OIS and replace it with SDL to solve issues with moving the cursor outside the game window. AngleBracket has already made the new cursor work. SDL is available on almost all operating systems and very attractive, because it can be used as an optional audio decoder along with ffmpeg. FFmpeg is easily the better option for the audio decoder player since it allows us to play bink videos but the problem is that it’s a major pain to build on windows with MSVC (no support for C99, thank you very much dear Microsoft).

potatoesmaster corrected GetDisposition so it will return actual value, and not base value.

wheybags annoys reported a bug: you cannot wear boots in openmw. ;-) That’s okay, because we still lack the multiple ESM support so there is no bloodmoon (where boots are a necessity.)

OpenMW should work now with Ogre 1.9 thanks to the mighty scrawl. Also: alchemical effects should hide depending on the player alchemy skill level. Scrawl also had a large number of other commits.

blunted2night (nice nickname btw) has improved the startup performance by a factor 2. Awesome!
potatoesmaster (even better nickname) started a UTF8 component rewrite. It’s getting better.

And Sir_Herrbatka feels more and more lost in the track of openmw development… :(