image ©Maxim Nikolaev
OpenMW 0.35.0 Released! 2015-02-16 - raevol

The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.35.0! Grab it from our Downloads Page for all operating systems. This release includes over 100 bug fixes and improvements, and brings our “1.0” release much closer. Some notable features include the beginnings of an ess-Importer command line tool to import save games from vanilla Morrowind, proper handling of the Calm effect, and AI fast-forward functionality. Read the full changelog and bask in the glory of the huge amount of work that has gone into this release… Two more things: several OpenMW utilities have been renamed as of this release, including OpenCS being renamed to OpenMW-CS. And we would really appreciate any feedback on the launcher’s Data File selection UI. Enjoy!

Known Issues:

Changelog:

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To Ogr(e)! 2015-02-15 - Vedyimyn

Ostatnio niecierpliwie wyczekiwaliśmy Ogre 2.0, silnika używanego w OpenMW. Druga wersja jest kamieniem milowym w jego rozwoju. Pozwoli nam to uczynić OpenMW jeszcze lepszym niż przedtem. Niestety dostosowanie OpenMW do nowej wersji silnika nie jest kwestią poprawki paru linijek kodu. Ogre 2 różni się znacznie od Ogre 1, a OpenMW musi razem z nim ewoluować.

Część problemów dotyczy „sklejania” części ciała tak, żeby stanowiły całość. Jak wiadomo, postaci w Morrowindzie składają się z torsu, głowy, rąk i nóg. Muszą także być w stanie trzymać przedmioty, co także oznacza „sklejanie”. Jako że takiej możliwości jeszcze nie ma w Ogre 2, implementacja tego silnika pozbawiła grę istotnej funkcjonalności.

Ostatni post Scrawla na jego stronie dotyczy problemów takich jak ten powyżej, więc jeśli interesujesz się takimi technikaliami, koniecznie zajrzyj tutaj.

Oczywiście poza pracą nad silnikiem, pracowano też nad samym OpenMW. Naprawiono ponad 100 bugów z trackera oraz dodano parę funkcji. Teraz, jeśli „przewiniesz czas” czekając lub śpiąc, NPC będą w innych miejscach niż byli przedtem (w końcu chodzili w międzyczasie, czyż nie?).

Zbliżamy się do wydania 0.35.0 dość szybko, więc założono już blokadę kodu. Obecna praca skupia się na wydaniu następnym, w którym już poprawiono tor ruchu słońca. Ktoś zauważył, mianowicie Yann GOUY, że słońce nie wschodzi i nie zachodzi we właściwych miejscach. Księżyce, co prawda, też mają tę przypadłość, ale muszą trochę poczekać na naprawę. W wersji 0.36.0 dodano też możliwość ubierania zwłok.

Pełna lista zmian dla 0.35.0 jest już napisana. Jest to kwestia paru dni, zanim się pojawi, więc miejcie oko na naszą stronę internetową. Albo zlećcie to aptowi/yumowi/pacmanowi…

Zapraszamy do komentowania tutaj.

Announcing switch to OpenSceneGraph 2015-02-15 - scrawl

Ogre3D is the rendering engine used by OpenMW since our very first release. Now, the OpenMW team is announcing the move away from this engine.

Over the course of our alpha versions, Ogre3D has proven extremely useful, enabling rapid development. Thanks to Ogre3D, you can already play a more or less complete game of Morrowind in OpenMW, today, and that is an incredible feat in and of itself.

However, to get OpenMW into a polished state and to add the last few missing features, we have difficult tasks ahead of us that would either require creating a fork of Ogre3D that behaves the way we need it to, or switch to a more suitable engine. After much discussion, we have settled on the second option.

Why switch?

There isn’t one particular show-stopper, but rather the culmination of many different issues.

One blocker for our 1.0 release is the poor framerate compared to vanilla Morrowind. This comes down to scene management and render API bottlenecks in the Ogre3D 1.x series, which are well understood by the Ogre3D team and have since been addressed in the 2.x series. The original plan was to port OpenMW to use Ogre3D 2.x, which is a big undertaking since the programming interface changes are significant. However, we have some fundamental concerns about this port:

On top of these concerns with the latest Ogre3D versions, we’ve also had some longstanding issues:

A new engine

In light of these issues, we’ve looked around for alternatives and found the OpenSceneGraph, which appears a perfect fit for the features required by Morrowind and OpenMW, while also delivering high performance. We’ve carefully evaluated all needed features and verified that they can be found in the OSG source code, or can be easily added by a plugin. A detailed roadmap for the port will be posted in the near future, and updated regularly so you can follow along the progress.

One notable difference is OpenSceneGraph supporting OpenGL only. Ogre3D having inbuilt support for OpenGL and DirectX may be considered one of its strong points. In an ideal world this would result in greater choice for the user while requiring no extra effort from the OpenMW team. Unfortunately this is not quite true; writing shaders does not work in a render system agnostic way. In addition to that, we have found some OpenMW bugs only manifesting themselves when the Direct3D backend is used. So we are in fact happy about this change, as we do not have the manpower to maintain support for two different rendering systems, and most of our developers are working on Linux and thus unable to test the Direct3D renderer anyway.

Pre-emptive FAQ

Q: How long will the switch take?

The good news is that Ogre3D is a rendering engine and we’re only using it as such. The OpenMW code is structured using different subsystems, and this change will, for the most part, affect only the “mwrender” subsystem. Rendering code makes up roughly 8% of our codebase.

Q: What will happen with OpenMW using OGRE in the meantime? Further development (new features), maintenance/fixes only, complete obsoletion?

We will continue developing the OGRE branch as usual, with new features and bugfixes, so long as the OSG port is still in development. We know that OpenMW already has lots of players despite its alpha state, so this is very important for us.

Q: What about the different OpenMW platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android)?

We will continue to support all these platforms.

Q: The gallery on the OpenSceneGraph website looks really basic. If this engine is so great, why are there no fancy games made with it?

In terms of features, OpenSceneGraph is every bit as powerful (or even more powerful in some aspects) as Ogre3D, so it surprised us to see there are not many games made with it. OSG founder Robert Osfield has his own theory on why this may be the case:

As a general note about Games and OSG vs Ogre, I suspect it’s partly
down the roots of each project and the culture that grew up around it.
OSG grew from the vis-sim world and over the years grew into a
general purpose and highly portable scene graph library, with it’s
community coming form the professional simulator, large scale
visualization, VR and scientific markets. Whereas Ogre from the start
was graphics API for Games, it too though can be used for more things
than games but and culturally games looks to have remained it’s
heartland.

Q: I am worried about Direct3D support being dropped, because I get much higher framerates with the Direct3D renderer in OpenMW compared to the OpenGL renderer.

We are aware of this performance difference and know that it can be attributed to the poorly implemented OpenGL renderer in Ogre3D 1.x. Valve has shown that a proper OpenGL renderer can be every bit as fast as Direct3D, or even faster.

Final thank you note

We owe a great deal to Ogre3D and hope to have made up for it with the numerous patches we’ve contributed.

We want to thank all Ogre3D contributors for their great work, everyone on the Ogre3D forums for all the support and encouragement we’ve gotten from there, and a special thanks to Kojack for helping us debug a DDS texture issue.

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It’s Ogre 2015-02-15 - Okulo

In the past few updates we’ve been anxiously looking forward to Ogre 2.0, a major milestone of the 3d engine that is used in OpenMW. It would give our development team much more opportunities to make OpenMW work better than ever before. It is somewhat done now and ready for public consumption, but unfortunately moving OpenMW to Ogre 2 isn’t just a matter of adding a few new lines of code to the program. Because Ogre 2 is different from Ogre 1, OpenMW needs to evolve along with it.

Some of the issues have to do with the way OpenMW “stitches together” the bodyparts of people to make them a working whole. As you might know, people in Morrowind consist of a torso, a head, legs and arms. They also have to be able to hold items, which is another thing to stitch to the model. Since this bit isn’t implemented in Ogre 2 yet, this part will break functionality.

Scrawl’s latest post on his website talks more about issues such as these, so if you are technically inclined and want to know more, definitely give it your eyeballs.

Some more work has been done on OpenMW itself, obviously. Aside from the over 100 bugs fixed on the tracker, some features have been added, such as a fast-forward for NPCs. That is, if you wait a certain amount of hours, NPCs will be at a different spot on the map than before.

Since we’re approaching the release of 0.35.0 fast, it has already gone in lockdown. New work is going into the version after that. Already included in that is fixing the trajectory of the sun. Turns out that this one bugreporter, Yann GOUY, has been paying attention and has seen that the sun doesn’t rise and set in the right spots. The moons aren’t working as they should be either, but they will have to wait a bit. Magnus is now fixed, however. Another very important issue solved in 0.36.0 is the ability to dress dead bodies. I, too, find dressing dead orcs up in nothing but an exquisite right glove of paramount importance to my immersion.

A full changelist has already been written for 0.35.0, and the update should drop any day now, so be sure to keep an eye out on the website or let apt/yum/pacman do the work for you.

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