Hello,
I would like to inform that due to main shell server upgrade in MyDevil.net there will be about 4h downtime on Sunday (2013.04.27) between 00:30 and 04:30 CET. Sorry for inconvenience.

Hi,

As you may already know, we are getting ready for 0.23.0. This is going to be another big version with lots of new features and bugfixes. Unfortunately it also appears to be more difficult than usual.

I’m quite sure that 0.23.0 would be here already, if we wouldn’t have been stopped by two nasty crash bugs. The first one was hard to find but easy to fix for scrawl, the second one is more cryptic and was experienced only by Chris. Finding it proved to be a difficult task but somehow gus managed to fix it, saving the AI feature from being cut out of 0.23.0.

But we are already thinking about 0.24.0. Hopefully this time we will be able to add animation layering and weapon rendering so to-do for 0.25.0 will just contain one line:

• everything that was left for 1.0.0, with no particular order

or something like that…

Meanwhile Chris improves our nif support, especially in the area of particles that still lack many features present in Morrowind’s engine. Scrawl works in multiple parts of the engine fixing glitches in the master branch. Glorf decided to solve a few additional bugs, which is always welcome.

Editor is also progressing, just a little slower this time since Zini is busy with merging and getting ready for 0.23.0. At least we have a brand new cell table.

Welcome again,

This week was very good for OpenMW and we got plenty of new features.

First off: scrawl added leveled items handling to OpenMW, so crates around Balmora are now a lot more interesting.

Terrain possibly can be more interesting as well, since scrawl also worked on getting option to have more texture layers than in vanilla morrowind. At the moment OpenMW supports infinite number of texture layers and this potentially allows us to get a lot more detailed landscapes! Making use of this feature may require a new data file format ─ no big deal since we need a new data files format for other things as well.

We also integrated basic pathfinding and the implementation of AiTravel.

Lgro returned to the old plan of setting up a continuous integration platform with a full success. From now on we use the Travis CI platform for autobuilding OpenMW. This gives us two main advantages. First off, we will see if committed code compiles without errors. Does not sound like a big thing, but this can reduce the amount of compilation needed on our part and…

We can now also add some unit tests to it. Unit testing is not that useful for video games, but there are areas when it can help and besides: We also work on the editor…

In fact, OpenCS progressed really good this week. Script, region and sound tables have been added, along with the script editor. Zini worked really hard to make it happen.

And as usual, the OpenMW team fixed many bugs. Big hug for Glorf, scrawl, gus, wheybags, pvdk and others for that!

Welcome fellow readers.

Chris apparently grew bored of Skyrim and as a result we have interesting commits from him again.

First off, isWerewolf script instructions have been implemented, secondly particles. Yes! Candle flames, finally. At the moment it’s hardly finished, and the majority of features remains to be implemented, but at least it looks good on videos:

Although in many technical aspects particles still remain cryptic, Chris is getting good progress on this.

Secondly the enchanting skill is finished and will be present in 0.23.0. New version of OpenMW clearly starts to look cool.

Work on OpenCS is going fine. Zini even implemented factions table. Nomadic1 draws beautiful icons for records that will be used in OpenCS and graffy works on user settings.

Gus has a little problem with recent changes in OpenMW that broke AI. But this won’t stop him for long!

Meanwhile scrawl added support for bump maps and glow maps. Also loose files now have higher priority than files in BSA archives. This means that texture replacers finally work!

As usual various bugs have been solved and new cleanup tasks appeared on the horizon, this time in mwgui. Let’s hope it will go well!

Happy Easter everyone.

This week was far from being epic, but although this is the Internet I wouldn’t call it crap.

First off, enchanting skill is progressing thanks to Glorf. Scrawl worked a little on lights to fit vanilla Morrowind even better (again).

Scrawl is busy right now with his library called shiny that solves quite a few annoying problems with shader development. Soon it will reach 1.0 and will have features that scrawl calls ingame material editor and live shader coding. This allows to get instant preview of shader and material changes in game, without having to restart it. It surely can save some time while programming.

Sadly work on AI has stalled since gus’ laptop just died. He bought another one, but it will take him some time to set up his development environment again. I also want to inform you that clonezilla recently published a new version of this amazing backup tool…

Zini and graffy are working on the editor, as every week.

Vorenon, scrawl, zini and others fixed a large amount of bugs, and this is clearly a good thing. The issue tracker is full of bugs that await to be fixed, and everyday we get new ones. I prefer to write about new features, but after publishing OpenMW 1.0.0 we will be forced to face hatred for every bug that is still present in the game…