Boring, boring, boring and exciting in the wrong way week.

Bugfixes, I always think that this is boring, but let’s be honest: Morrowind team clearly thought the same and the final effect was terrible.

It’s not like there isn’t anything happening with OpenMW. Actually there is a boring bug slaughter, in epic scale.

Scrawl says that he is working on something cool, but he does not want to say what it is and I start to think that he is just trolling me (ah yes, if ElderTroll reads this I want to say that I miss you!).

Gus returned to the work on weapon rendering but it won’t work properly until animation layers will be implemented.

Zini and graffy are still working on the editor. Just like blunted2night on… yes! Journal! How did you know?

And Chris discovered that movement solver still lacks important features so in fact player is not able to slide down the slope. That is quite some problem, We may need to use a Kinematic Controller from Bullet, but this one requires some big changes in order to use. Chris also needs to learn how to use bullet properly. If there is any Bullet wizard out there, and you want to lend a hand, please do! We need you!

Welcome once again, since bugfest last week was hit I decided to begin with a little continuation…

This bug is well known for intel graphic chipsets, in this particular example it was taken on the netbook. One of the most funny bugs I have seen in the OpenMW I would say, but I have something a little more colorful.

As scrawl said: “go home depth buffer, you are drunk.”

Sadly we are going to fix this, eventually…

But enough of this, let’s get back to the development!

Zini commanded the packagers to build the release packages for OpenMW 0.21.0, and this will be done soon for sure, along with the upload, the post on the blog with the (not that impressive again) changelog and obligatory video on youtube that you are waiting for. Oh yes, I know you are ;)

In other news; more important things to see are happening with Chris’ branch. He’s progressing faster than I personally thought he would, even though my opinion was already high. At the moment the list of remaining tasks that still needs to be done is short: non-accumulative movement (movement that is not controlled by animation, that includes jumping and falling down) and correct speed handling (note this is mostly finished). Chris also revealed a bug that will need to be fixed, but following OpenMW for so long showed me that every great feature demonstrates a few small bugs that was hidden before ─ these things are to be expected.

Needless to say, excellent. Zini even placed basic melee combat (in case of morrowind swinging sword untill the target is not cold-dead) on the roadmap for 0.22.0 and although this will require weapon rendering to be working efficiently before even attempting to start implementing (unless we want to make something really silly) I have good feelings about this. Combat and multiple data files would make 0.22.0 an impressive version even without other features planned. I suspect that team will do even more than this… I can’t wait!

Dougmencken also can’t wait. He even created a branch called bigmix by merging different development branches not yet in the master just to see what it will look like. It’s something for those who like to try things that are half-baked; this branch is surely buggy as hell, but It’s worth to mention that it exists ─ even if it’s for pure fun. Videos!

The square sun is still here for dougmencken.

Running around.

blunted2night meanwhile continues to work on his journal GUI. Again. Just like pvdk on the launcher. Or scrawl on graphics.

Graffy76 is busy with the openCS right now. Unfortunately nothing spectacular here right now, but this will change ─ I hope.

And as usual a lot of boring bug fixing. That’s it for this week!

And so we meet again readers,

Chris still works on animations and although there is still much to be done we have swimming animations working. The rest needs movement solver to be expanded and working, good that the code of movement solver is small and simple ─ if any of you have experience with 3D video games and want to help this area is open, Chris will be happy to see some sort of help for sure.

But we have great news for both Chris and all OpenMW users. Let’s give voice to the mystical leader of OpenMW, Zini:

I merged the multiple ESX branch into next today (already been to Solstheim). The whole thing is still a bit rough and I fully expect more bugs to show up over the coming weeks. But unless something is going completely wrong, we should have mostly working support for multiple ESX files in 0.22.0.

Scrawl reports that we have performance regression related as it seems to the multiple data files support.

Also, less important news:

PotatoesMaster works now on the importing archives listed in the openmw.cfg

dougmencken, the owner of the near extincted PowerPC personal computers was able to run OpenMW. Good news for this two, lone in the dark, surrendered by the sea of x86 processors and unable to upgrade owners of big endian machines. This won’t get into the master probably any time soon if ever but still, we can see an interesting collection of funny bugs.

Example 1: Pink font and blue window frames that actually looks cute.

Example 2: Apple patented round corners so for legal reason sun is squared.

Example 3: I told him to not eat this mushroom…

Good news is that Zini works now on the editor, we have even a basic GMST support and the work on open file dialog is now finished.

Welcome once again folks.

Chris is still fighting hard to finally integrate physics and animations subsystems, just like the last week. It’s really hard to tell how many things need to be done before final success but Chris just won’t give up; he’s just not that type of guy.

However, Chris isn’t the only active developer of OpenMW. For instance, Scrawl works on new water ripples effects that are visible when the character is moving through the water. Here is the test performed by our Master of Shaders and Everything That Is Pretty (Performance hit is marginal.)

Blunted2night continues to work on the journal while Wheybags implemented additional missing variables (like OnPCEquip, that is used in the keening and sunder scripts).

And as usual we had some bug fixes. There is also a small amount of work on the editor. Mike-sc started implementing “open file” option.

We are getting ready to publish the new 0.21.0 quite soon. It won’t have great new features but it will definitely be worth a try!