It’s hard to believe that OpenMW 0.1.0 was released just over 10 years ago! What began as a barely functional ESM viewer is now a complete replacement for vanilla Morrowind and a complete engine for creating original games. There are still a few features that need to be polished, like shadows and AI recastnavigation, but the project is almost ready to become version 1.0, signalling to the world that OpenMW has full parity with the original Morrowind engine.

But that doesn’t mean that our work is complete. OpenMW’s project leader Zini, with feedback from the project’s most active contributors, has produced the first draft of an enormous design document detailing the next steps that they think the project should take. The major focus is on improving modding capabilities (including “newscript” support, most likely Lua) and beginning the process of de-hardcoding game mechanics to allow mods to drastically alter gameplay.

Now we need your help. We’d like for as many people as possible to review this post-1.0 design document and provide their feedback. Have a change that you’d like to make? Submit either a Merge Request on GitLab or a Pull Request on GitHub. Want to talk about it with other contributors? Discuss it on our forum. This document is far from set in stone and will change as the project evolves.

Let’s work together to plan how OpenMW will enter into its next ten years!

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One pain point for OpenMW has been that contributing means signing up for multiple accounts. Notably, our code repository, bug tracker, and wiki are on completely separate servers with separate login processes. Additionally, some developers prefer GitHub due to its popularity and some prefer GitLab due to it being open source, just like this project. So we’re reorganizing tools to make contributing easier.

Starting today, OpenMW code will be available on GitLab while being bidirectionally mirrored with GitHub. This means that our open source project is now hosted on an open source platform, while still allowing the countless GitHub contributors who have submitted code over the years to continue to do so on that platform if they choose. In addition, our Redmine issue tracker has been retired and all the issues have been migrated to GitLab. Our wiki is still in the process of being migrated, but will be hosted on GitLab as well. This allows everyone to use a single account for tracking issues, contributing code, and writing wiki documentation.

We hope that this will make the process of contributing to OpenMW better for everyone, and look forward to all sorts of new contributions!