[HN Gopher] OpenMW 0.50.0 Released - open-source Morrowind reimp...
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OpenMW 0.50.0 Released - open-source Morrowind reimplementation
Author : agluszak
Score : 257 points
Date : 2025-11-07 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openmw.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (openmw.org)
| evanjrowley wrote:
| This project never fails to impress me.
|
| If you scroll to the bottom of the announcement, you'll see maps
| from Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Oblivion loaded into OpenMW.
|
| Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural
| significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking
| publishers. Each time Bethesda announces an update to Skyrim or
| Fallout 4, I cringe, because what the updates do above all else
| is break the existing mods. OpenMW is solving this problem for
| older Bethesda titiles, but I am pessimistic about Elder Scrolls
| 6 and Fallout 5. Those two are years away and already lost causes
| IMHO.
| kqr wrote:
| Not to mention the immense effort from the modding community.
|
| The _Tamriel Rebuilt_ mod opens up much of mainland Morrowind
| for exploration (the official game covers only the island of
| Vvardenfell) and it is huge. It 's as if they had released a
| Morrowind 2 but made it twice as big and still in the exact
| same style as the original.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Also:
|
| * Graphics updates with shaders for improved water and fog
| (which you can combine with much higher view distance),
| godrays, HDR, etc, improved meshes, improved grass, high
| resolution textures with normal maps and PBR.
|
| * Modernized UIs
|
| * Multi-mark (extra marks as you level mysticism)
|
| * Turn the books into audiobooks and add full voice acting if
| you're a mild heathen.
|
| * Combat and leveling system overhauls if you're a full
| heathen.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=iFZm4VZnHy0
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I
|
| https://modding-openmw.com/
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| one of my favorite games i've ever played is Enderal:
| Forgotten Stories[0], total conversion mod for Skyrim. liked
| it way more than Skyrim, includes some new gameplay elements
| and the story is absolutely phenomenal. while playing it i
| was constantly in awe of the fact that this was a free
| conversion made by a low amount of people. played it for
| about 90 hours over a couple of weeks.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enderal
| akerl_ wrote:
| > Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of
| cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-
| seeking publishers.
|
| It's not clear to me what you're suggesting here?
|
| 1. Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship
| updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods?
|
| 2. Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after
| they ship something based on how many people use it or how much
| society likes it?
| afavour wrote:
| > Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship
| updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods?
|
| Reading between the lines I think OP is suggesting backwards
| compatibility is retained when publishing updates.
|
| > Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after
| they ship something based on how many people use it or how
| much society likes it?
|
| I'm assuming OP's answer is something along the lines of
| "because it's good for society". Why shouldn't society do
| things that are good for society, even if they increase a
| burden on a profit making company? Obviously every case is
| different but the principle is sound, IMO. Like copyright
| expiry. At the very least it's an interesting thought
| exercise.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Consider books in the vein of _Hardy Boys_ [1]. Many of
| these books get revised over the years by the publisher.
| Imagine if the book on your shelf changed and when you went
| to read it again, the prose differed from how you
| remembered. People can disagree as to the extent to which
| the changes are good or bad (some are clearly fixes for
| "whoa, that was racist even for the year it was published"
| others are claimed by the original authors to have stamped
| out the small bit of originality they were able to slip
| past the editors), but something is lost when you lose
| things the way they were originally experienced.
|
| 1: For those who don't know, this is a kids book series
| with a single pen-name, but with each book written for-
| hire. _Nancy Drew_ and _Tom Swift_ were created by the same
| publisher in a similar manner.
| akerl_ wrote:
| Nobody is coming into your house to change the bits on
| your hard drive.
| skotobaza wrote:
| But publishers can restrict your access to the game if
| you decline the latest update.
| akerl_ wrote:
| They can restrict your access to the server-side
| infrastructure that they run, yes.
| skotobaza wrote:
| Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything
| (even single-player modes).
| afavour wrote:
| Which is often required for the simple act of starting a
| game, even if the game runs offline.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on
| launch was a thing even a decade ago.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| In a famous incident many years ago, Amazon "memory
| hole'd" a copy of 1984 from people's _personal_ Kindles
| when they lost the license to sell it.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-del
| eti...
| akerl_ wrote:
| My pitch is that it's generally bad and dangerous for
| society to make rules that retroactively apply based on how
| the universe reacts to your action.
|
| If I ship a game and my obligations about updates change
| depending on how popular the game gets, that limits what
| games I'm willing to release.
|
| Sorry, No Man's Sky sold too many copies on day 1, so now
| we can't ship any fixes that break backwards compatibility.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| >make rules that retroactively apply based on how the
| universe reacts to your action.
|
| I'm struggling to understand what you mean. Almost all of
| our rules depend on "how the universe reacts to your
| actions".
| akerl_ wrote:
| Can you give an example?
|
| To pick one of my own: defamation is something that is
| determined based on your actions and the state at the
| moment they happen. If I say something potentially
| defamatory about you, it's judged based on what I knew at
| the time, what I said, and how it would be understood by
| a reasonable person at that time.
|
| You can't rock up later and say "well looking back at
| this thing you said 10 years ago, we now know it was
| false" or that a reasonable person today would think
| differently about it.
|
| By contrast, if we made a rule saying that culturally
| significant games are due some set of societal
| protections, a game dev has no way to know if their game
| would meet that threshold when they release the game.
| why_at wrote:
| I'm not the OP nor am I advocating for their point, but I
| believe there are some cases, e.g. with car
| manufacturers, where different regulations apply
| depending on how many you produce. It's not too much of a
| stretch to imagine something similar applying to how many
| copies of a video game you sell.
| akerl_ wrote:
| Your example seems to agree with me?
|
| Applying different rules based on how many of a physical
| object a manufacturer produces is 100% something the
| manufacturer knows at the time they take the action.
|
| If the regulation says "manufacturers have a higher
| standard for logging safety data for cars where more than
| 10,000 were produced", the manufacturer knows the new
| rule applies to them when they choose to build the
| 10,000th car. They can opt to do or not do that.
|
| The equivalent here would be if we said something like:
| there are different regulations that apply to car
| manufacturers if somebody drives one of their cars for
| more than 10,000 miles. Because in this case, the person
| making the car has absolutely no clue if or when that
| will happen.
| why_at wrote:
| Yeah it's true that basing a regulation off of how much
| any one customer uses the product seems impractical, but
| I don't think that's necessarily what was being
| suggested.
|
| >Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of
| cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-
| seeking publishers.
|
| I just take this to mean that exceptionally popular
| things should be subject to some protections and not
| necessarily grant the original creators unlimited control
| over them. One way of doing this would be to have some
| regulation which forces companies to make their products
| accessible to modders or open source projects like OpenMW
| after they've reached a certain level of popularity.
| Using copies sold as a proxy for popularity seems
| reasonable to me.
| akerl_ wrote:
| Again: that's contrary to how our laws and regulations
| work.
|
| Having a rule that applies to game developers after
| they've done something, entirely unrelated to anything in
| their control, is frankly horrifying. "Sorry, you can't
| ship any more breaking changes, your game hit a
| popularity threshold yesterday".
| mnahkies wrote:
| I think backwards compatibility is desirable, but really
| the bigger problem is the way that stores like steam
| essentially force auto updates.
|
| If you could pick the time to update, after you've read the
| patch notes and/or waited for your favourite mods to
| confirm compatibility/update that would solve most problems
| regarding updates.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Why shouldn't society do things that are good for
| society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making
| company?
|
| I agree. Look at how many times since 2011 Bethesda has put
| some "new" version of Skyrim up for sale. I myself probably
| bought the game at least 3 separate times.
|
| At this point, Bethesda has made their money off of it and
| then some, what's the harm at this point in opening it up?
| Give it to the community under some form of no-commercial
| use/sale license, as an act of public good. Outside of
| excess profit, there's little reason to continue to hoard
| IP after a certain time.
|
| Would be nice if all offline games followed something like
| that, although I fear if such copyright expiry was the law
| we'd never see fully offline games again.
| pfix wrote:
| Ohh, these are excellent questions!
|
| I understand OPs sentiment fully - and the response is
| probably "it depends" :D
|
| Culture and Art is a volatile thing and let's assume a game
| and it's mods are a piece of culture and art. Then an update
| of the original that interrupts the original aspects is
| basically the destruction of art.
|
| In olden times, in those 90s, when games were offline, you
| could mod to your hearts desire and nobody could take it
| away. And by now it's recognized as cultural heritage - even
| though those old games become less and less appealing to the
| audience that is used to better game ux (This is a bold
| statement by me. My generation grew up with those graphics
| and love them - our grandchildren will ask us why we did that
| like they will never understand why people used those loud
| noisy typewriters when you can tell your phone to write the
| text up)
|
| Still - typewriters are still usable. But copyright law and
| online only games and forced updates really destroy that game
| you played 10 years ago as you cannot (legally) access it
| anymore. Mods can be updated but that requires recreating
| that art - if still possible with changed APIs.
|
| But then game developers need to life off something and
| updating and improving games should always be in their right,
| see no mans sky and how it changed over the years to be a
| completely different game in a way that would not have been
| possible otherwise.
|
| IMHO it would be simple to keep significant old versions
| available for the general public like WoW did with their
| Classic rollback (not sure if this is the best example) - or
| like system shock, there's the rewrite and there's the
| original and everyone can use that version they prefer
| without preventing the original developer from publishing and
| improving.
| akerl_ wrote:
| WoW classic is a really odd example, because the developer
| chose to ship it and made many changes to the underlying
| game when they did so.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| > 2. Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted
| after they ship something based on how many people use it or
| how much society likes it?
|
| IMHO this should mostly kick in after the original developer
| has stopped supporting the game. E.g. what's commonly known
| as abandonware, such abandoned games should automatically go
| into the public domain, so that copyright or IP disputes
| can't hinder fans who want to preserve the game. The
| abandonware deadline needs to be much shorter than copyright
| deadlines. Something like 5 years after the publisher stopped
| 'exploiting' the IP would make sense.
|
| Of course especially Bethesda is infamous for milking their
| IPs until the sun goes supernova.
| prmoustache wrote:
| My opinion is that while assets could be licensed
| differently, proprietary licenses for code should be illegal
| and only code released under an osi approved open source
| license should be published, commercially or not.
|
| This should apply to all softwares not only games. That would
| make portability accross operating systems easier, and allow
| consumers to enjoy and maintain the products they buy
| forever, even if the original developers do not want to
| support and provide updates anymore.
| akerl_ wrote:
| Oh. Well that's certainly an opinion.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I've felt that properties that earn a certain threshold should
| become public domain. You've made enough money, and now you are
| part of the culture. The heft of having created a cultural
| landmark or cornerstone ought to be enough weight to ensure
| their other projects get enough of a boost.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I keep hoping they'll release Cyberpunk 2077 for open
| development. They abandoned the RedEngine and the city is
| really well built.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Did they really abandon it after all that work? The engine
| itself was basically the only interesting part of that
| game! (ignoring gameplay-oriented engine stuff).
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| They moved devlopment to Unreal 5
| danso wrote:
| Given how lackluster most everything was (beyond the
| visual design of the city) -- e.g. physics, crowd
| interaction, scripted events -- maybe the engine was what
| held their creative vision back?
| godshatter wrote:
| I don't agree with respect to games that are still being
| worked on by the dev studio, but I would like this for
| abandoned games, where the studio no longer exists.
| popcar2 wrote:
| Absolutely. I was just reminiscing about a '97 game called
| "Claw". The studio that made it shut down earlier this year
| and I wish I could make a sort-of remake of it, but you
| legally can't. It's not even clear who owns the rights to
| it anymore.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| This Claw?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claw_(video_game)
|
| I mean it's 2D platformer, you should be able to reverse
| engineer the engine and reuse the assets. I mean the have
| bit perfect decompiles of N64 games to C now. It's
| doable.
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| My thought has been a 20- or 30-year term, with one or two
| renewals at a nominal fee, would work wonders. Orphaned works
| basically disappear overnight, and the vast majority of works
| will have exhausted their useful commercial life within those
| 20-30 years.
|
| I'd also argue that works eligible for copyright must submit
| a modifiable edition (eg: source code or a DRM-free copy)
| that is made available to archivists immediately and the
| general public once the copyright term expires.
| djexjms wrote:
| 20 to 30 years would ensure that abandoned media that was
| formative to a person growing up will enter the public
| domain within their lifetimes which would be a nice thing
| to have in my opinion. It would also ensure that any work
| done by an artist during the early phase of their career
| (the phase where artists are most likely to agree to
| lopsided contract terms) would stand a chance of reverting
| back to the public domain before the end of that artist's
| career. Very very few works are making any significant
| revenue after 30 years. I think a system where initial
| copyright is free for 20 years, with the option of renewing
| for an additional 10 years for some fee, and then the
| option to renew annually after that would be fair. For the
| very small number of works that are still commercially
| viable after 30 years, the publishers can figure out how
| long it makes sense to keep renewing the copyright.
| Otherwise it really is in the public's best interest to
| have a robust public domain. Many fewer works would go
| missing that way.
|
| The way the copyright is structured right now is the result
| of regulatory capture. The cost of these long terms of
| copyright is the loss of books, movies, music, games, etc.
| Millions upon millions of hours of creative labor have been
| lost. These costs are born by everybody that will never
| have to chance to have access to that media. The benefits
| of these long copyright terms are only the publishers.
| Having an annual renewal fee for copyrighted works
| published 30 or more years ago would be something that
| would be a visible cost in the books of large publishers.
| As it is it is too easy for them to ignore the downsides of
| long terms of copyright. I am not claiming that no media
| would be lost if we had no copyright, but the efforts of
| archivists are difficult enough as it is. Media that is no
| longer being copied is destroyed eventually. Obviously
| making it a felony to copy something will reduce the number
| of people making copies of it. That's the whole point after
| all.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The real red pill is to realize that everything Bethesda made
| starting with fallout 3 is pretty bad.
|
| Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever. The
| combat and exploration from a 2005 game, Dark Messiah of Might
| and Magic was infinitely better. Skyrim was "big" and had a
| good soundtrack and that's about it.
|
| If you don't believe me, see some gameplay:
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE
|
| 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE
| skotobaza wrote:
| > Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever
|
| Agreed. Most of the systems do not work as intended, the
| amount of content is very low compared to previous entries.
| There is no excuse for it to be released in such poor state,
| since Bethesda had already released two games for the same
| generation prior to that. And they did what they always do -
| ship a couple of updates and then just drop the game until
| the DLC is release and then promptly drop all the support.
| Even though there are still many bugs left in the game.
| They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise
| them for some reason. A very irresponsible developer.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > They've been doing that for years, yet people still
| praise them for some reason.
|
| Because of the lore, setting, and the openness of both (and
| the engine).
|
| For a lot of ES fans (myself included), we aren't expecting
| an engaging game as much as a fun world sandbox set in the
| ES universe, with the ability to extend/mod it into
| whatever we want. The games are less about defined goals
| and more about roleplaying, exploration and world-building.
| skotobaza wrote:
| > The games are less about defined goals and more about
| roleplaying, exploration and world-building.
|
| And Skyrim lacks in each aspect, especially compared to
| previous Elder Scrolls games. You have even less skills
| than in Oblivion (which in turn had even less skills than
| Morrowind). The dungeons (caves, forts etc.) do not offer
| any meaningful rewards, so there is little incentive to
| just randomly explore the world. The guild questlines are
| much shorter which doesn't help roleplaying when you can
| become a grandmaster in one evening of playtime.
| Moreover, there are randomly generated quests thrown in
| to pad the time, which is even worse.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| I agree with Skyrim, but at least the bones are there for
| the modding community which ended up doing Bethesda's
| work and turning it into a decent game. I didn't mind the
| paring down of skills as much as I hated that they
| butchered the magic system. But modded, it's still one of
| my favorite games even if doesn't beat out Morrowind as
| my all time favorite from the series.
| Flere-Imsaho wrote:
| Or was it that Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was criminally
| underrated?
|
| Skyrim was good in that it felt "epic", you could put so many
| quality hours into it.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| The real reason to be pessimistic about elder scrolls 6 is that
| Bethesda has tried multiple times already to get paid modding
| where they take a huge chuck of the profits to stick. They will
| stop taking no for an answer at some point
| saubeidl wrote:
| On a related note, there's a fork of OpenMW that lets you play
| the game multiplayer with your friends: https://tes3mp.com/
|
| Unfortunately, it's a bit outdated (based on 0.47), but OpenMW
| devs have announced their intention to add multiplayer to
| upstream as well.
|
| Additionally, one can't talk about Morrowind fan projects without
| mentioning Tamriel Rebuilt, a 24-year-and-counting effort to
| build _all_ of Tamriel within Morrowind. It 's not done yet, but
| it already has twice as many quests as the base game [0], massive
| landmasses, joinable factions and a city that's way bigger than
| anything the base game has to offer, all while staying lore-
| friendly and neatly integrated.
|
| Times are good for Morrowind fans.
|
| [0] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-
| quest...
| iberator wrote:
| Why not rebuild whole morrowind and Skyrim i. daggerfall unity?
| Map is already there hehe
| saubeidl wrote:
| You're welcome to start your own multi-decade project heh.
| Seriously tho, TR is _amazing._
| NeveHanter wrote:
| Nit/Correction; Tamriel Rebuilt is not about adding all the
| Tamriel but only Morrowind mainland. What you might be thinking
| about is Project Tamriel [0] which tries to add Cyrodill,
| Skyrim, High Rock and Hammerfell. They're working in
| collaboration with Tamriel Rebuilt so they are all compatible
| and share many resources.
|
| [0] https://www.project-tamriel.com/welcome
| mdtrooper wrote:
| I love this kind of free software (or open source) project.
|
| It is a hard work for several years.
|
| I think that the goal or finish of this work is the engine and a
| new (similar to old close game) set free assets (sprites, 3D
| models, maps, music...). And I know few projects in this point,
| OpenTTD and FreeDoom.
|
| Are there more projects in this point?
| saubeidl wrote:
| There's a whole lot! Here's a list I found:
| https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| OpenRA (Command & Conquer), CorsixTH (Theme Hospital), ET:
| Legacy (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) and FreeCiv
| (Civilization) are the examples I have spent the most time
| playing. I know there are others targeting games like Age of
| Empires and Heroes of Might and Magic but I haven't played them
| and I'm not sure if they are as mature.
| saubeidl wrote:
| VCMI (the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 one) is amazing!
| klaussilveira wrote:
| https://osgameclones.com
|
| Also: https://freegamer.blogspot.com/
| NortySpock wrote:
| I've been enjoying and contributing patches to Beyond All
| Reason, which traces its inspiration back to the Total
| Annihilation real time strategy game.
|
| It's truly incredible what a community can achieve over the
| course of ~20 years of open-source contributions.
| Lapsa wrote:
| BAR is a surprisingly good game
| rhdunn wrote:
| Widelands is based on/inspired by Settlers II.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Still my all time favourite game, and the work the OpenMW team
| are continuing to do is incredible. Really breathing new life
| into an old game while remaining faithful to the original vision.
| I didn't even realise they are aiming to support later game
| engines, that is very exciting.
| agluszak wrote:
| If you have some spare time, please consider contributing! The
| community is really nice, I have sent a few PRs myself :)
| boriskourt wrote:
| The Lua integration has grown massively over the last couple of
| years. Can really get up to some very cool stuff now. Its been
| fun to see how it contributes to a lot of the dehardcoding in the
| C++ codebase too.
| Caius-Cosades wrote:
| OpenMW my beloved.
| sys32768 wrote:
| I want to play again so long as there's a mod to reduce the cliff
| racers.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I used to hear that screeching in my dreams...
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| There is. As well as a mod to turn off the assassins that try
| to kill you when you rest.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Oh hell no, I need those guys to give me free, good early-to-
| mid-game light armor. Saves me from having to think about
| armor at all until I can get ahold of some glass (except
| subbing in the odd enchanted piece).
| Lapsa wrote:
| farm vivec guards and sell to crab dude
| accrual wrote:
| Wow, congrats on the significant release, OpenMW team!
|
| > In out-of-combat situations, Morrowind updates awareness only
| every so often, and characters don't have superhuman (or
| superelvish) reaction time while observing your... exploits
|
| I laughed. This reminded me of playing Oblivion, carefully
| stealthing my way through an NPC's belongings, only to pick up 1
| gold and hear "STOP! You've violated the law!".
|
| > As the 0.49.0 release announcement boasted, running Oblivion
| and later Bethesda open-world engine games is in the engine's
| eventual scope.
|
| So cool! I see the demo Oblivion screenshot. I would adore
| playing Oblivion on a Morrowind-like engine. Both games have
| their merits but I always liked the more retro/polygonal charm of
| Morrowind.
| yard2010 wrote:
| "I've heard someone saved king kassimir" "Really? Any idea who
| it was? I want to buy this person an ale" "DRAGONS? in our own
| homeland?" "Come on help us out here! We can't stand here all
| day!"
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I enjoyed openmw in 2020 with many settings and mods for super
| far rendering and other better graphics. I can't imagine how many
| improvements it must have had in those 5 years, it was already
| perfect then :)
| phantasmish wrote:
| It also crashes a hell of a lot less than the official binary.
| I did a play through a couple years ago, with plenty of mods,
| and saw _zero_ crashes in tens of hours of play, which is
| practically unachievable with the official .exe.
|
| It'd be a must-have for that quality alone, even if it improved
| nothing else.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Don't follow closely but immediately looked for and was happy to
| find:
|
| > As you may have heard, the headline feature of this release is,
| undeniably, the improved gamepad support introduced by our
| talented new contributor enoznal. By enabling the Controller
| Menus option in the launcher, you will be able to use the
| controller action buttons to navigate more conveniently through
| the slightly altered in-game UI. You are no longer limited to the
| combination of emulated mouse and A button use available
| previously. For example, you can brew potions and enchant items
| entirely without using the emulated mouse. While the alternative
| UI is not at all reminiscent of Morrowind's famous official Xbox
| port, it should be intuitive enough for those familiar with it.
|
| I read: I can play on my steam deck now :).
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| So it's interesting that I never hear much about the Morrowind
| modding community.
|
| Daggerfall has a huge one because of how archaic it is by modern
| standards. Oblivion and Skyrim had mods since day 1 (in fact I
| think some of my favorite New Vegas mods were Oblivion mods
| first).
|
| But I rarely hear about Morrowind mods. Is the consensus just
| that it doesn't need them?
| zabzonk wrote:
| Morrowind has zillions, largely because the original CD version
| (the one with the big colour map) came with its own mod editor,
| used by bethesda to develop the game. I remember using it to
| cut down on the cliff-racer count.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Ah, so the StarCraft Map Editor approach.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Did you play a lot of Morrowind? I am shocked you haven't heard
| of Morrowind mods. The biggest most popular mods are Tamrield
| Rebuilt, which builds the mainland. There are also mods for
| graphics and drawing distance, new houses, a lot of mods around
| balmora, new guilds, new armors, ones that change how unarmored
| and unarmed work, how enchanting work, etc. I think Morrowind
| Vanilla is fine, but there are a few I like, personally I like
| mods that make enchanting your own items worthwhile, unarmed
| and unarmored are broken vanilla, and a few bug fixes mods, but
| I prefer a vanilla like experience.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| No, I didn't! That's part of what informs my question.
|
| I had the original Morrowind on Xbox and never got anywhere
| with it (I think I spent like 30 minutes creating my
| character, opened a chest in the first room in the game
| because apparently I wasn't supposed to do that, got
| beaten/arrested, and then I put the game down).
|
| I did buy the PC version specifically for OpenMW use--because
| until Proton that was the only way to play it on Linux, but
| I've not gotten around to doing a full playthrough. I wanted
| to know about mods because those usually can help provide
| some QoL adjustments that can ease the learning curve if you
| didn't grow up with the game.
| dangus wrote:
| Some nice resources here: https://modding-openmw.com/
|
| OpenMW is definitely the way to go for a fresh game.
|
| There's a lot of random advice I could give but here's my
| important ones:
|
| - Replace the vanilla leveling system.
|
| - If you are playing a modpack with relatively vanilla
| mechanics, you want a magic-based character. Being bad at
| magic is a huge disadvantage in the vanilla game, it's
| heavily biased toward glass cannons.
|
| - Make sure you have a teleportation (mark/recall) mod.
| Many of them are balanced so that they don't feel like
| cheating, but the vanilla game makes fast travel and
| traversal too tedious.
| bobim wrote:
| Teleportation? That would kill the hiking simulator vibe!
| kqr wrote:
| There's a "signpost fast travel" mod that lets you
| teleport to any town mentioned on signposts as long as
| you have visited it before, while paying a small fee for
| an imaginary guide. That's a decent compromise, given how
| tricky actual real-time pathfinding can be in Morrowind.
|
| (Otherwise my favourite system comes from Daggerfall
| Unity, where there is a mod that lets your character
| automatically, in real time, follow roads until the next
| fork/intersection. With an option for time compression
| that really hits the sweet spot of being explicit travel
| without being tedious.)
| saubeidl wrote:
| I would suggest playing with a modlist like Path of the
| Incarnate [0] - it'll give you QoL improvements, graphics
| improvements, quest and landmass mods all integrated into
| one tested setup.
|
| The Morrowind modding scene is huge and was a big part of
| my teenage years. It's nice to see it's still going strong.
|
| [0] https://www.modlists.net/docs/6poti/Home
| omnibrain wrote:
| Morrowind had (and still has) a huge modding scene. Especially
| because it's even more mod friendly as its successor. A big
| plus back in the day was that the Construction Kit came with
| the original game disks. So you had direct access to the real
| dev tools. Like Unreal came with UnrealEd but with access to an
| Open World RPG instead of "just" a shooter.
|
| Nexus Mods started as portal for Morrowind mods.
| phantasmish wrote:
| I started using mods in Morrowind from basically my second
| play-through, way back around the time it was released.
|
| Mods to make plants either vanish or (even better) switch to a
| different model when they're "harvested" instead of acting like
| static containers is a must. And I think most consider some
| kind of mod to at least chill out the cliff racers a little bit
| to be a must-have.
|
| My usual mod set back in the day also included some light
| improvements to graphics (some of the later, heavier fixes
| involving wrapper-binaries and such didn't exist yet, or
| weren't stable), NPC schedules, and an Imperial Library just
| outside Vivec that would pay a little gold to be allowed to
| copy any books you provide that it doesn't already have (it
| starts empty) which would then spawn neatly organized on its
| shelves, mostly to give me a low-effort outlet for my book
| hoarding tendency in those games.
| zeagle wrote:
| I wish there were one click or download large mod packs to
| modernize the game. I find for this, new vegas, oblivion I spend
| two evenings getting everything to play nice/give up then run out
| of steam and don't actually plan anything.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| There are. These days there are OpenMW-specific mod packs. You
| run one command to download everything, another command to
| install and configure it. The instructions are really good,
| it's hard to mess up.
|
| See here: https://modding-openmw.com/lists/
| zeagle wrote:
| That's helpful. I'll take a look. Thank you!
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I recently completed a playthrough on 0.49, with the Total
| Overhaul pack.
|
| It's remarkable what modders have done. They've breathed a lot of
| life into such an old game.
|
| Don't be fooled though, even with OpenMW it still runs quite
| poorly at times. Any water reflections cause effectively the
| whole scene to be rendered twice, and it just kills the
| framerate. Many of the shaders like volumetric clouds can kill it
| too.
|
| And if you have one of those mods that messes with waterfalls,
| that'll do it as well. Or if you allow the sun to get _really_
| close to the horizon all the sudden the shadows are super long
| causing a bunch of extra stuff to be rendered.
|
| It needs a lot of technical work like proper occlusion culling,
| draw call batching, LOD, shadow culling, etc.
|
| I'm hopeful though, it's an amazing project!
|
| EDIT: Also dear god give me a proper UI for filtering and sorting
| in things like shops and (mainly) containers. It's so painful
| right now.
| Lapsa wrote:
| best mod: "All Khajiit are Garfield"
| https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50731
| stasm wrote:
| Thanks to OpenMW, my SteamDeck has become a "Morrowind machine"
| -- it runs so well and it's so convenient to have all that world
| with me on the go. You can use https://luxtorpeda.gitlab.io which
| registers as one of the runtimes Steam uses to launch games --
| Proton being one of them -- and behind the scenes Luxtorpeda will
| download and run OpenMW instead of Morrowind.exe.
| lawlessone wrote:
| question, do you use the Linux native version of OpenMW or the
| Windows native version via Proton?
|
| Anecdotally i've heard some of the windows/proton versions of
| games have better performance than linux natives of the same
| game?
|
| So theres this weird situation now where some windows native
| versions of games run better on linux than on windows and also
| run better than the linux native versions lol.
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