openmw.org

Hello everybody, I am Mark, the guy behind the Crystal Scrolls project, another attempt to write an Open Source Morrowind engine. As you may have already heard, I want to join your project.

Why? Simple. I do want to see one of the various Morrowind projects succeed, and OpenMW hat made the best progress so far. Sharing code, ideas and more between our engines should accelerate the process. Well, admittedly, this is the idea behind Open Source software per se, but actually having written/understanding the code one is trying to port is always a great asset.

I have enough experience with the file formats involved to hate them to some extent, mainly since some custom NIFs keep breaking stuff that works with regular NIF files. I have recently implemented code for supporting multiple plugins and data merging, including a more intelligent terrain merging, so that less compatibility plugins are required. References are also there, even though not all data is interpreted yet. Enough talking, I have just (finally) found the time to do a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1zcEo0v2BI

First, I'll have to get your source code and manage to build it so I can actually start doing anything (which is something I wanted to do anyway at some time). I am also going to have a look at your list of open tasks and find something to do. I hope I'll have everything set up until next weekend, but if you already have some suggestions or questions, go ahead - that's what a forum is for .

Welcome mark! It's nice to see you, joining us.

I want to say that we have no multiple esm/esp support just yet (and it's on roadmap for 0.14.0)

Excellent, welcome aboard.
If you have any questions about setting up the development environment, or any other question, feel free to ask here or on our irc channel #openmw on Freenode.
Take a look at the contributors checklist and setting up a dev environment for starters.

Having a go at multiple ESX file support seems indeed to be the obvious choice. It's one of the most complicated tasks left, but if you are comfortable with starting with something big, that should be the right task for you.

Most likely we are using completely different data structures than you, so we probably won't be able to reuse any code. But we could certainly reuse your experience with this task.

I wrote a summary about the task in another thread, including unsolved problems.

Note that the part about implementing terrain merging in a separate branch is irrelevant now, since we have merged the terrain branch into master.


That is obviously only a suggestion. If you want to work on something else or want to take a smaller task first as a warm up, I am also okay with that.

This is awesome, welcome

Brilliant to have you Mark. My internet is going really slow, so I am watching your video in chunks. That's some really impressive work you've done and I still have two minutes left!

I have a virtually unused virtual machine with few GB of space and decent connection (sorry, I do not recall the details) if you still need space I can give you a shell account.

Edit: 100MiB/s of bandwith and no daily or monthly limits. but I cannot abuse it much.

Welcome Mark! Great to have you on board!! This project gets more exciting by the day!

Could you look into our animation system to see if there is a better way of rendering/animating? Right now it eats up loads of cpu.

If everything else fails, I think we should put the animations into a seperate thread. That way it wouldn't affect the FPS of the rendering thread, and animations playing with 25 frames per second are pretty much acceptable.