image ©Maxim Nikolaev
OpenMW Spotlight: Turning the Pages 2020-06-26 - lysol

Hello again,

we hope you are all having a pleasant time with the new release! While you’re busy killing vicious cliff racers, our team is busy with further improving the engine and the editor.

There is one particular feature that recently got merged that we want to bring to your attention: object paging. What’s that, you ask? Well, object paging is a system developed by bzzt, the man behind the improved distant-land feature introduced in the latest release. This system takes several objects that are close to each other and merges them into a single object. This is done in real time during gameplay and shouldn’t be noticeable to the end user. But we can hear you thinking: why should I care about this? – Because it reduces draw calls! – Okay, and …? – Because draw calls are the main bottleneck if you want to display statics (buildings, rocks, trees, etc.) over a larger distance. – Wait! Are you saying … distant land with distant statics? – Yes, we are.

One feature that was developed in the same merge request as object paging is the “active-grid object paging”. It is basically the same feature, but applied to the player’s active cell(s). This means that the system will not only merge objects in distant cells, but also those in the cells your character is located in. This increases performance, especially in draw-heavy areas like cities and towns. Yay!

2020-05-01 20-53-49

Watch “2020-05-01 20-53-49” on Streamable.

There is an issue with this feature as of now however, which is why we decided to set the “active-grid object paging” setting to “false” by default. The issue is that OpenMW still has a hard limit of 8 lights per object, a limitation inherent in the old fixed-function pipeline of Morrowind that OpenMW faithfully supports for legacy reasons. The limitation is sometimes an issue even without object paging, but you don’t generally notice it with vanilla Morrowind’s assets. If you start to merge several objects into a single one however, the limitation really starts to show: Lights will pop up and disappear frequently which simply looks bad. Once the light limit is removed (for which there exists a sizeable work in progress), active-grid object paging will become a lot more interesting.

2020-05-09 13-37-58

Watch “2020-05-09 13-37-58” on Streamable.

The feature can now be tested in all freshly baked nightly builds in your neighbourhood. There are still things that need to be addressed in future merge requests. For example, we still don’t have a system to generate lower-detail meshes from high-detail ones to be used in the distance. This isn’t really an issue if you’re mostly using vanilla assets as they are very low in detail for modern standards anyway. For mods that use high-detail assets, however, this might be an issue. Work will continue on this. In any case, please help us out by installing the latest nightly build for your operating system and putting object paging to the acid test!

Want to leave a comment?
OpenMW 0.46.0 Released! 2020-06-15 - psi29a

After over a year of development, the OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.46.0! Grab it from our Downloads Page for all supported operating systems. This release, potentially the largest ever since the move to OpenSceneGraph, finally reintroduces the long-awaited real-time shadows and also introduces a new improved navigation mesh-based AI pathfinding system based on recastnavigation library, among tons of other improvements.

Mod compatibility has been significantly improved in this release, and you can expect dozens of mods that worked poorly previously to become playable starting with this version.

Check out the release video by the splendiferous johnnyhostile and see below for the full list of changes. The corresponding OpenMW-CS release video is planned to follow soon.

One more thing: one of our major contributors, Capostrophic, has recently started a Patreon. AnyOldName3 (our resident Master of Shadows) also has a Patreon and psi29a, OpenMW’s new project lead also has a Patreon. So consider supporting them if you want to help OpenMW grow. Other contributors accept donations as well: you can find links to their Patreon pages in our FAQ. Don’t forget to support the software that helps make this all possible: OpenSceneGraph, OpenAL-Soft and SDL2 to name a few.

Known Issues:

0.45.0 Regression Fixes:

Major New Features:

Minor Feature Additions:

Editor Feature Additions:

Bug Fixes:

Editor Bug Fixes:

Other Improvements:

Want to leave a comment?

A rumble in the deep 2020-06-05 - psi29a

Let’s just jump right into it! We’ve recently forked off 0.46.0 into its own branch and started our release candidate (RC) process. This will be officially our biggest release yet! If you would like to help us test, feel free to join us on the forums, IRC or Discord.


Sunrise
Sunset