OpenMW is now almost playable thanks to our efforts in the last 12 months. We are almost there… Still missing few skills but we have managed to implement artificial inteligence. We have also introduced support for multiple data files – many users waited impatiently for this… We have also changed few things. We moved away from pmove to our own custom written controller. Thanks to this walking animation works and controlls the movement. Modern effects were added. Normal mapping is a major improvement and brand new distant terrain look great ─ even without any objects. New (drastically improved) implementation of input was introduced. We have implemented new game button. We have completely re-evaluated the usage of OpenCS editor. The old version was scrapped and new one was introduced. We have solved hundreds upon hundreds of bugs and small annoyances…

Damn… That was a lot of work… but thanks to our fantastic team it was progressing fast and smooth. At some stage the work was going so well we honestly believed that we will be able to release version 1.0 before the end of this year! That wont happen unfortunatelly but we are close… Very close… Year 2014 brings new challanges for the OpenMW team ─ ie. improving performance, optimizing code, adding new functions to the OpenCS editor, implementing missing OpenMW features and squashing as many bugs as possible… I am sure we can handle those tasks and then… it will be OpenMW 1.0 release time… I am waiting impatiently! Are You?

Such a active week!

First of, any interesting news. As you may know, number of content files in vanilla Morrowind engine is limited to the 255. 255 seems to be a large number in this context, at least for me, yet still ─ some users reported that they where able to cross this limit. This is not a problem anymore with OpenMW ─ we don’t have content file limit anymore, though we have a dependency count limit. No content file can depend on more than 255 files. I really don’t think that this is not enough but if somehow in fact it is not enough… zini can remove this limit as well.

Other than that: although bugs are still legion, our team with smart mind and brave spirit dived into dark abandoned source files to slay many of them. Really, it’s nice to see that we are somehow able large number accumulated bugs. Especially when there are only three non-implemented skills.

Scrawl also focuses on bugfixes. He probably could implement marksman (one of not implemented skills) at this point, however we miss formulas! We do not know how to calculate chance to hit, or how to calculate damage from projectiles. If someone could help us here, it would be very helpful.

Sadly, progress on physics is slow, but it comes with no surprise: bullet is difficult to use, physics in video game is a difficult topic with quite a lot of crazy linear algebra involved and in general, everything here is just annoying.

And to spoil your eyes, another portion of specular, paralax, and normal mapped terrain!

Greetings fellow OpenMW’ers!

We had another good week, with decent progress.

For instance, don’t you think that we could use some facial animations? Well, actually this is possible now, thanks to scrawl. This video shows the current state ;-)

Also, npcs became a lot more… lethal since Lgro’s patch enabled the autocalculated stats. Guys on IRC are already crying like little girls because opponents just started owning them like bosses.

Chris returned to work on physics, and I’m so excited to see much more news and progress! Zini still works on saved games, and It seems that he is a little annoyed with the amount of fixing, correcting and gluing together he has to do in order to finish this feature. Lots of stuff was problematic.

Mr. Corristo pushed few bugfixes specific to the OSX. It seems that we had plenty of bugs there, but this comes to no surprise ─ bug testing on OSX is still suboptimal.

Scrawl, as usual, also pushed quite an impressive number of bugfixes for OpenMW, related to different parts of the engine. I’m too lazy to list it all, you have to trust me ─ also as usual.

Welcome, let’s start with some videos that will show specular mapping, normal mapping in OpenMW. Adding those state-of-art (actually, those are not “state-of-art” anymore, but It sounds just cooler this way) techniques makes it look like they are actually… Oh just take a look on those!

As you can see there is a lot that engine can for content quality. Of course, there is a lot that has to be done to apply those effects for every object in game, but after seeing how amazing things were made by community I’m sure we can make Morrowind looking really great!

As you can also see, magic works just fine. I don’t have video to show this, but also propylon chambers effects are rendered correctly. Nifflip controller is also implemented, so we can support additional set of content. Everything thanks to scrawl.

Meanwhile, zini works on the saving/load feature. After cleaning up, it seems that He progresses quite well.

Pvdk, finally started working on the installation wizard that will aid you to install Morrowind to use with OpenMW.

Greetings,

We now have Issue 1000:

Morrowind is a great game to play and a beautiful world to experience. And through the years, modders have expanded it to every imaginable direction. The last piece of the game that remained static, since it’s pretty hard to alter, is the game engine. It is a piece of software built on decade old technology, that runs on only one OS, has a long list of known bugs and has held back the capabilities of modders since the game’s release.

It’s our vision, that Morrowind could be so much more with a new, living engine that would reinvigorate and immortalize the game and give creators all the tools they need to materialize their visions.

For this reason, we set the goal of building an alternative engine that is so good that most Morrowind players in the future will prefer it as the default vessel to experience the Morrowind world.

As you can see, this is largely non trivial bug ─ but it will be resolved, eventually.

Other than that:

Zini just finished preparation on save load feature. Although it took more time than anybody could possibly imagine, it’s now working. What else can I say? This is something that we were waiting for a very long time.

This week was outstanding, when it comes to the bugfixing. Our development team was able to fix a lot of those, especially scrawl… And we still have so many to fix.

Ah, about that bullet bug; it is resolved now, but it seems that our problem is related to something else. At the moment we haven’t progressed with it, yet. But hopefully KittyCat will return to save us.

To all who helped us by starring the said bullet bug: thank you! It was amazing to see it reaching over two hundreds stars in no time!

Lgro recently helped a little with our manual. Although it is still very incomplete, has some amazingly bad grammar, it can already be useful in some aspects. It seems that getting something helpful for all new users along with 1.0 is possible.