[HN Gopher] OpenMW: Open-source reimplementation of TES3 Morrowind
___________________________________________________________________
OpenMW: Open-source reimplementation of TES3 Morrowind
Author : agluszak
Score : 241 points
Date : 2021-10-18 08:53 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| Da-V-Man wrote:
| I recently re-installed Morrowind and played it through OpenMW.
| It was a great experience. It was certainly more stable than I
| remember the original being, having never crashed once in my
| play-through. I think the main thing that might hold some back
| still is the ability to support Morrowind Script Extender mods.
|
| If you're interested in modding it, there are some good guides on
| compatible mods and curated mod lists at https://modding-
| openmw.com
| NovaS1X wrote:
| There's also a great VR implementation of OpenMW:
| https://gitlab.com/madsbuvi/openmw
|
| VR is such a great twist for replaying an old classic, but you
| have to mod a few things unless you enjoy swinging your arms at
| cliff racers 300 times early on!
|
| Morrowind was a very important game to me growing up and still my
| favourite Elder Scrolls release. I remember contributing to the
| Tamriel Rebuilt project when I was in my early teens and
| represents my first contribution to a community project. I like
| to give it a replay every couple years.
| neartheplain wrote:
| OpenMW can also be used to play Morrowind in VR:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUrvAAn9hFo
| dancemethis wrote:
| Once in the times where ICQ was king, I somehow got a pal from
| Denmark.
|
| Once he sent me a letter with a CD of a game called Morrowind.
| But it never ran on my old, old even for that time's reckoning
| computer.
|
| But I was pretty sure it was about jet fighters. With a
| multiplayer component.
|
| The CD is long, long gone, and so is the contact. But I still
| remember it and my distraught over the years to see this company
| with an ugly name - Bethesda, really? - STEAL this game's name
| and make any and all references of the original, true Morrowind
| in my mind, disappear from the web.
|
| To this day I bear a grudge against the ES series and won't play
| it. Name stealers.
|
| ...Fuzzy memories are a hell of a beast.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I liked ICQ (before it was bastardized) a lot better than chat
| clients that came after. You could control your visibility by
| person or group. You could actually search your history and
| carry it with you over the eons. It was lightweight, fairly
| unobtrusive and ad-free.
| JackGreyhat wrote:
| And it had a sort of "live chat" function. You could see your
| conversation partner's keystrokes in real-time, including
| typos and corrections. This has, as far as I know, never been
| introduced in other chat clients...
| emteycz wrote:
| Could you be more specific, e. g. approx year? Perhaps _the
| collective mind_ knows...
| syntheticnature wrote:
| I know this won't matter to your fuzzy memories, having a few
| similar ones myself. That said, Morrowind is a province in the
| game, that was named in TES: Arena, released in 1994. ICQ was
| released in 1996. In-game maps in Arena show it:
| https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Maps (topmost one is a fan map,
| note)
|
| I did some searching for something similar, but the only thing
| I came upon even vaguely related would be The Morrow Project, a
| tabletop RPG.
| aasasd wrote:
| Perhaps this was an instance of "Don't mind the case, I lost
| the original one so the case is from MW".
| kalev wrote:
| Bummer, I thought it would be an OpenModernWarfare (cod mw2)
| reimplementation.
| skocznymroczny wrote:
| I remember this project. Their first implementation was actually
| in D. Later on they transitioned to C++ because it was easier to
| find C++ devs and the D ecosystem was less mature than it is now.
| testman42 wrote:
| Just for everyone's edification, the main development hub for
| OpenMW is located here:
|
| https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw
|
| Including the issue tracker and CI.
|
| If anyone is interested, they can join the forums:
|
| https://forum.openmw.org/
|
| or Discord:
|
| https://discord.gg/bWuqq2e
| livionion wrote:
| My understanding is its at the point where its complete enough
| there is work underway extending the engine to also support
| Oblivion/Fallout as they use similar asset formats. Very exciting
| stuff in my opinion.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Which is great because both those games are hobbled on modern
| platforms. For example, if you want to play Oblivion with
| analog sticks you'd have an easier time emulating the 360
| version than adding them to the PC version.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| This! I'm all the more frustrated by the claim (seemingly
| validated by the grandparent about Oblivion/Fallout
| compatibility) that Bethesda just kinda gives the old engine
| a new coat of paint then merrily releases a new generation of
| videogame. You'd think that there'd be fan-spearheaded
| attempts to tear out and replace some of the wonkier
| components. And, after reading about all of this, I guess
| there are.
| refracture wrote:
| Wow, that would be amazing.
|
| I haven't tried OpenMW in a year or more but I was really
| impressed with what they had managed, it was the first time I
| had ever played MW with a decent frame rate.. that original
| engine seemed to run poorly on any configuration of hardware I
| had over the years.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I feel curious if this is going to let me play Fallout 3 on my
| TV-attached Raspberry Pi 4 using a BlueTooth gamepad.
| Johnnynator wrote:
| I don't think a Pi 4 would be fast enough to provide a
| enjoyable experience. I just tested OpenMW on a Pinebook Pro
| (RK3399 SOC, should be slightly faster than a PI 4) and I do
| get like ~30-40 fps with lowest draw distance in Morrowind.
| Fallout 3 should be even slower due to far more and more
| detailed objects.
|
| edit: Rendered at a meager 800x600 px
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| https://youtu.be/Fb1UUesbNlY shows a Pi 4 running OpenMW
| not badly at 720p with medium draw distance.
|
| Still looks pretty bad, I think I'd rather run the Android
| port of OpenMW with an HDMI adapter I think.
| Johnnynator wrote:
| Maybe I'm used too much to playing with 60+ fps, but I
| would call a highly unstable framerate with dips below
| 20fps bad.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| How comes the Android port is supposed to be faster?
| Isn't Raspberry PI 4 similar to a good Android smartphone
| in hardware?
| wongarsu wrote:
| I would have characterized it more as a midrange phone
| from half a decade ago.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Half a decade is not much. My phone is a flagship from
| more than a half a decade ago and everything (except the
| GPS module - it usually takes minutes of standing still
| to hit enough satellites and knocks out the whole new
| battery in under half an hour) works perfectly fast.
| selectodude wrote:
| Half a decade in mobile CPU time is massive. The A15 is,
| at minimum, literally 5x faster than the A10.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I played Fallout 3 on a Core 2 Duo with Intel graphics. I
| used the lowest graphics settings possible (the display's
| native resolution though - 1440x900, not the minimum) but
| enjoyed. Is Raspberry Pi 4 supposed to be even slower?
| WithinReason wrote:
| I just replayed Morrowind and tried both OpenMW and also the
| original with Morrowind Code Patch and Morrowind Graphics
| Extender, and ended up playing with the latter (mainly because of
| the much nicer graphics, due to longer render distances and also
| some features OpenMW doesn't have which now I forget...)
| crashcoot wrote:
| OpenMW mods can duplicate this experience for the most part, if
| you're on Linux where the graphics extender doesn't work.
|
| Additionally one can tweak settings like draw distance [1] in
| the settings.cfg file, as well as lots of other settings [2].
|
| https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?t=3398
|
| https://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/modding/se...
| crashcoot wrote:
| Oh here's the link to a site which is convenient for browsing
| mods
|
| https://modding-openmw.com/lists/
| evh wrote:
| There's also a fork with multiplayer support (to an extent):
| https://github.com/TES3MP/openmw-tes3mp
|
| OpenMW is great, played it a lot a couple of years ago. I love
| when games get future-proofed like this. See also the various
| Quake and DOOM source ports, although those started from id
| Software releasing their engines under the GPL so had an easier
| start.
| krageon wrote:
| The fork is great, but the main developer is incredibly hostile
| to contributions (i.e. very, very rude and combative for
| absolutely no reason). If you are thinking of contributing,
| keep that in mind - it's not you.
| roenxi wrote:
| In defence of the maintainer. With this sort of project there
| is a real possibility that there is 1 person in the whole
| world who will keep the thing alive. If that person happens
| to have particular standards for what code looks like then
| good luck to them.
|
| Perfect is the enemy - the active and vigorous enemy - of
| good when it comes to OSS maintenance.
| krageon wrote:
| If you alienate everyone who is excited to contribute, you
| make sure there is one person in the whole world keeping it
| alive :)
|
| I don't think it's so rationally motivated. The
| conversation was so fundamentally illogical I must conclude
| it was purely emotional.
| phraseologist wrote:
| You're not "everyone", you're just someone who didn't
| read the contribution guidelines in the readme and still
| feels like complaining about it to this day.
| izietto wrote:
| Any public examples?
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| First issue I clicked on...
|
| https://github.com/OpenMW/openmw/pull/3176
| mmastrac wrote:
| I thought the parent comment up the thread was referring
| to the multiplayer fork rather than the main codebase but
| I could be wrong
| krageon wrote:
| I was referring to the multiplayer fork, yes
| izietto wrote:
| I see a discussion but it's not too harsh to me. Do you
| come from a Western country? People coming from Western
| countries tend to be more demanding about discussion
| friendliness sometimes for my experience
| circularfoyers wrote:
| Contrary to both your comment and the parent's, one of
| the project's developers (not sure they are _the_ main
| developer, but one of them) admitted in the referenced
| pull request that they were too harsh in their response
| to the contribution:
|
| > Now I am rereading my first comment an see that it is
| too rude. I am sorry for that. I was in a bad mood when
| wrote this.
| izietto wrote:
| Yep and he apologized as you noticed, so I can't see
| anything too frightening to me.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| What countries would be less friendly in your experience?
| HolidayguyNOR wrote:
| I'm not GP, but many Asian cultures apparently have a
| much more blunt culture than many "western" countries.
| izietto wrote:
| Let me clarify that I'm not talking about countries and
| people, I'm talking about language. For example, English
| language puts "please" every time you are telling someone
| to do something, in my language (Italian here), you don't
| do that. If you are not a good English speaker (like me),
| you suddenly become someone who gives commands to other
| people in a rude way.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| > People coming from Western countries tend to be more
| demanding about discussion friendliness sometimes
|
| > People
|
| I'm a bit confused, are you talking about people and
| countries or not? In your original comment you explicitly
| said "people" and "countries"
| bee_rider wrote:
| They are talking about the way people from these
| countries typically phrase things as a result of their
| native language, rather than trying to characterize the
| actual personalities of the people from these countries.
| We just add more friendly sounding little filler phrases
| in our speech and often phrase instructions/commands as
| requests in English. This doesn't make us fundamentally
| nicer or more reasonable, it is just a social convention.
| HolidayguyNOR wrote:
| I agree. There are also huge individual differences. I
| have a military background and we generally don't "gift
| wrap" our feedback. "This bad because X" is constructive,
| helpful and to the point, and it doesn't mean that the
| person receiving the feedback is incompetent. Some people
| seem to take it that way.
|
| Accepting failure is integral to learning and growth, but
| a key part of that is identifying the weak points and
| learning from them.
|
| Edit: s/gift wrap/sugar coat
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| They did apologise for that to be fair.
|
| https://github.com/OpenMW/openmw/pull/3176#discussion_r72
| 858...
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| I... don't see anything wrong with that discussion?
| tauin wrote:
| not to mention petrmikheev isnt even the main developer,
| let alone the lead of openmw, psi29a is.
| Narann wrote:
| Direct for sure, but not rude.
|
| Someone want a modification to be merged and push a lot
| of template code giving a 3 line PR explanation.
|
| This kind of situation comes often in OSS, specially in
| C++ project and I wouldn't be surprised if OMW had a lot
| of PR like this.
|
| With this kind of PR, the maintainer have to go into each
| line and try to understand what the point because the
| original author didn't explain that much + it's C++
| template and not everyone like that.
|
| This is not a excuse to be arsh or anything, another
| option would have been to put a tag "need clarification"
| and let the PR in a hole and force the author to
| motivates its modifications.
| hoseja wrote:
| Not just a simple template, a template template, which is
| certainly quite obscure.
| krageon wrote:
| No, I got yelled at (for asking which issues were not
| picked up yet and then saying I'd pick one up) in private.
| I'm definitely not the only one.
| phraseologist wrote:
| This is incorrect. You decided you were going to do a
| unilateral implementation of a feature without discussing
| it at all. It was an anti-collaboration mindset from you.
| tauin wrote:
| example? I cant think of anyone especially combative working
| on openmw
| krageon wrote:
| I was talking about to the fork, which is referring to the
| multiplayer fork. The openmw team is great and I have only
| good things to say about them.
| phraseologist wrote:
| You've never contributed to OpenMW. If you tried the same
| kind of unilateralism regarding features with them, they
| wouldn't appreciate it either.
| odysseyfox wrote:
| Yep, agreed. I decided to make a private branch on gitlab,
| update it to the latest OpenMW .47 build and since then fix
| quite a number of breaking bugs as well. I originally was
| motivated to do this for my own players but unfortunately
| don't feel welcome to bubble the contributions back up. Pity
| really, but this is now a hard fork from tes3mp (although I
| plan to open the fork at some point with a new project name).
| phraseologist wrote:
| There wasn't anything rude or combative in asking you to
| allow TES3MP to catch up with breaking changes in OpenMW
| one at a time, especially considering you had never
| interacted with anyone from TES3MP at all.
|
| Your attempt to take in many breaking changes at once
| resulted in what you yourself called an unstable and "truly
| hacky" build.
|
| Consider why you feel the need for such hard unilateralism
| in your approach before you complain about others.
| odysseyfox wrote:
| Ok, well, that isn't even close - I offered a link to my
| own public repository for other people if they wanted to
| bring their binaries up to .47. It wasn't a PR. The
| current version of tes3mp has bugs that make the game
| unplayable and is way long in the tooth - 3 years since a
| release.
|
| But anyway - not interested in drama. My branch is up to
| speed, many bugs fixed and we're having a blast.
|
| Peace and I wish you well with your tes3mp efforts.
| phraseologist wrote:
| Most of those bug fixes and complicated updates towards
| 0.47 were done by me on the work-in-progress branch, but
| you're pretending it's your credit somehow just because
| you took my unfinished work before I could do a release
| of it (mainly due to COVID-related problems).
|
| If you're not interested in drama, perhaps you shouldn't
| start it so needlessly.
|
| Also, nice edit to your comment. Here's what you said
| originally:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/PGszuuE.png
| phraseologist wrote:
| If you are thinking of contributing, you should at least read
| what it says in the readme instead of pretending that not
| reading the readme was unfairly held against you:
|
| "For code contributions, it's best to start out with modestly
| sized fixes and features and work your way up. There are so
| many different possible implementations of more major
| features - many of which would cause undesirable code or
| vision conflicts with OpenMW - that those should be talked
| over in advance with the existing developers before effort is
| spent on them."
| disambiguation wrote:
| i can highly recommend tes3mp! i did a playthrough with some
| friends early in the pandemic and it was a lot of fun, a really
| great way to re-experience an amazing game.
|
| granted there are some limitations you have to be willing to
| overlook to enjoy the game .. mainly around questing and
| syncing since all players share the same quest ledger. for
| example (SPOILER) when curing myself of corpus my character
| received the cure and attribute buffs but my teammates did not.
| in the main story line these sync issues are infrequent and
| were manageable, but at times got especially bad in the DLC --
| be prepared to hop in to the command line a lot to revive quest
| givers, update the journal, acquire items, alter stats.
| supperburg wrote:
| The update videos published by the openMW team were my beloved
| companion through a decade of my life.
| HolidayguyNOR wrote:
| Same with me and Black Mesa: Source.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Hey, at least that one's out, now.
| roenxi wrote:
| Best enjoyed with something like https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/
| installed as a mod.
| 0des wrote:
| I'd love to try it, but the install is pretty involved, and the
| instructions are hard to find and haven't found any that are
| linux specific and provide paths for content locations.
| bloqs wrote:
| this runs great on my modern gaming PC. The polygon count will
| always be lower than a current game, but it plays very well.
| Additionally, from a gameplay perspective, this got the scaling
| and scale right, it stands alone as a fantastic RPG I will
| definitely replay again.
| LukeB42 wrote:
| How is this open source Marrowind if I need a copy of Marrowind
| to play it?
| IanSanders wrote:
| That's how most opensource game revivals work, one is not
| legally allowed to distribute original in-game assets. If you
| come up with free textures and sounds, you'll get the 100% free
| alternative
| LukeB42 wrote:
| Thanks for your explanation.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| The title is misleading, the creators don't even claim this
| themselves:
|
| "OpenMW is an open-source game engine that supports playing
| Morrowind by Bethesda Softworks. You need to own the game for
| OpenMW to play Morrowind."
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Because software copyright was and is a bad idea, and courts
| (especially the 9th Circuit) have generally carved out
| exceptions for compatibility-related copying in the software
| domain that absolutely would not apply to other copyrightable
| work that ships with the software. You absolutely can legally
| reimplement a computer program such as a game engine, but doing
| so to the story, assets, level design, or what have you would
| just be ordinary copyright infringement. As a result most game
| reimplementations either do not ship with any art, or ship with
| an entirely separate custom-made campaign to demonstrate the
| capabilities of the reimplemented game engine.
| HolidayguyNOR wrote:
| Ducking it wasn't very helpful, what's the 9th circuit? Is it
| a court of appeals of some kind?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is an appeals
| court that covers basically the entire west coast of the
| United States within it's jurisdiction. As a result of
| that, it covers a _lot_ of copyright cases and has a lot of
| it 's own copyright jurisprudence that doesn't
| automatically apply in other circuits. (Notably, Oracle v.
| Google would have taken half the time it should have been
| had it not included patent claims, which moved what should
| have been a 9th Circuit case into Federal Circuit
| jurisdiction.)
| HolidayguyNOR wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying!
| Scarblac wrote:
| Presumably the code is open source, the art isn't?
| LukeB42 wrote:
| Thanks for your explanation.
| computerex wrote:
| I believe they have rewritten the underlying game engine, but
| you still need the game for the assets like character and world
| models, audio, etc.
| LukeB42 wrote:
| Thanks for your explanation.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Fun fact: Morrowind used the Gamebryo engine, which is
| apparently still in active development in 2021! (Or at least
| the website is still up)
| Bayart wrote:
| The assets are still under copyright. On paper you could "re-
| implement" assets as well, ie. remake all the models, textures,
| music, voices and rewrite all the quests.
| LukeB42 wrote:
| Thanks for your explanation.
| have_faith wrote:
| This is what the Skywind project is doing.
| lgeorget wrote:
| It's funny that I see that popping in HN, I've just reinstalled
| OpenMW the other day and am currently on my way to reveal myself
| to be the Nerevarine very soon.
|
| The project is making excellent progress in my opinion. I
| remember a few years ago when they were actually many little
| things lacking (don't ask me for specific examples but I remember
| some game mechanics being broken) and now it's the opposite,
| their additions to the UI are very good (in the alchemy menu for
| instance) and some game mechanics have been rebalanced somewhat.
| handrous wrote:
| I'd been waiting for OpenMW to fix shadows before trying it,
| and IIRC late last year or early this year they fixed them, so
| I tried it. I played the whole main quest, finished several
| major side-quest story trees, finished Tribunal, and got
| started on Solstheim before getting distracted and dropping it.
|
| 20-30 mods, mostly texture-related but a couple additions and
| gameplay mods--there's an obscure and untouched-for-many-years
| library mod I _adore_ that adds a nearly-empty library just
| outside Vivec, which you can fill up by giving them books to
| copy, for instance, and of course modding plant harvesting is a
| must, plus I think I had some of the Morrowind Comes Alive
| stuff enabled--all managed through Mod Manager 2. Draw distance
| set very high, 4k resolution.
|
| It ran _great_. Zero bugs, zero quest glitches, zero crashes,
| the entire time, even with mods. Vanilla Morrowind has always
| been pretty crashy, so that 's a damn good achievement.
| dEnigma wrote:
| A few years back I was playing OpenMW quite extensively,
| always on the lookout for potential bugs. I remember it
| getting harder and harder to find new issues, and for most of
| the ones I found in the last few months of that period I had
| to double- or triple-check with the original version to make
| sure it was an OpenMW-specific bug (often times it turned out
| it was a bug with the original game as well). I contributed
| some 100-150 bug reports, most of which I think are fixed by
| now (a bit hard to tell because they switched bug tracker in
| the meantime).
|
| Funnily enough sometimes OpenMW worked _too_ well. E.g. there
| is a script that damages the final boss for each of his
| "captains" that you kill, which never worked in the original
| version because IIRC the engine couldn't modify the health of
| an unloaded mob. In OpenMW it worked perfectly, with the side
| effect of subtracting exactly 100% of his health if you
| killed all underlings, resulting in you encountering a corpse
| as a final boss.
| fractal618 wrote:
| Love this!
| aasasd wrote:
| And other open-source game clones: https://osgameclones.com
|
| Also, the list says there's this project TES3MP, which adds
| multiplayer to OpenMW, but development is 'halted':
| https://tes3mp.com
|
| "This branch is 2536 commits ahead, 2724 commits behind
| OpenMW:master" whoa daddy.
| phraseologist wrote:
| Development isn't halted, it was just slowed down by all the
| problems caused by the pandemic.
| aasasd wrote:
| Strange: you'd think that nerds shut in their rooms is the
| perfect circumstance for coding.
| phraseologist wrote:
| Not if a family member has died.
| capableweb wrote:
| Contrary to popular belief, nerds are not impervious to
| being affected by emotions caused by lockdowns, trauma,
| worry about the future and similar things.
| skymt wrote:
| TES3MP is being merged into OpenMW.
|
| https://openmw.org/2019/time-to-make-stuff-official/
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(page generated 2021-10-18 23:01 UTC)