OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation

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.

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Unfortunately, it's a bit outdated (based on 0.47), but OpenMW devs have announced their intention to add multiplayer to upstream as well.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...

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.

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.

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 :).

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.

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.

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.

If you have some spare time, please consider contributing! The community is really nice, I have sent a few PRs myself :)

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.

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?

best mod: "All Khajiit are Garfield" https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50731

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 :)

I want to play again so long as there's a mod to reduce the cliff racers.

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?

This is probably a minority opinion, but going of the screenshots and videos, I feel like they're making it too sunny and pretty, I liked the drab English weather in the original, with a lot of soft overcast. The screenshots look very contrasty, like it's falling into the HD texture pack trap. And the skyboxes often seem overly bright compared to the world.

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/

Thanks again. That is much easier than in the past. Fired it up yesterday, tried downloading 30+ mods manually, got a premium nexusmods account to automate and speed up the downloads and it just works. Damn, there is a lot of content and upgrades from a few hours in it. Wish I could be a teenager spending many hours a week on it again!

That's helpful. I'll take a look. Thank you!

Don't follow closely but immediately looked for and was happy to find:

I read: I can play on my steam deck now :).

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.

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.

best mod: "All Khajiit are Garfield" https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50731

If you have some spare time, please consider contributing! The community is really nice, I have sent a few PRs myself :)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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?

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.

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.

"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!"

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.

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.

Times are good for Morrowind fans.

[0] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-quest...

I love this kind of free software (or open source) project.

It is a hard work for several years.

Are there more projects in this point?

I want to play again so long as there's a mod to reduce the cliff racers.

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?

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

Why not rebuild whole morrowind and Skyrim i. daggerfall unity? Map is already there hehe

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.

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.

There's a whole lot! Here's a list I found: https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes

Widelands is based on/inspired by Settlers II.

There is. As well as a mod to turn off the assassins that try to kill you when you rest.

I used to hear that screeching in my dreams...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah. Especially Tamriel Rebuilt adds a boatload of content. They're still working on it, but a good chunk of the mainland is explorable and full of quests. :)

That's helpful. I'll take a look. Thank you!

Not to mention the immense effort from the modding community.

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/

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

[0] https://www.project-tamriel.com/welcome

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.

BAR is a surprisingly good game

Why not rebuild whole morrowind and Skyrim i. daggerfall unity? Map is already there hehe

You're welcome to start your own multi-decade project heh. Seriously tho, TR is amazing.

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.

It'd be a must-have for that quality alone, even if it improved nothing else.

"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!"

Yep, paid modding is Bethesda cooking and eating the golden goose. As soon as it happens it kills what makes their games special.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

The real red pill is to realize that everything Bethesda made starting with fallout 3 is pretty bad.

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

> 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.

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.

Yeah. Especially Tamriel Rebuilt adds a boatload of content. They're still working on it, but a good chunk of the mainland is explorable and full of quests. :)

Widelands is based on/inspired by Settlers II.

There's a whole lot! Here's a list I found: https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes

I used to hear that screeching in my dreams...

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.

I keep hoping they'll release Cyberpunk 2077 for open development. They abandoned the RedEngine and the city is really well built.

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.

I feel it should be twofold. The release itself should be 20 years, after which non-commercial things can legally happen - mods, remakes, etc

The ip itself should be 10 years after the last release before its pretty much a non-commercial free for all...with a more complex requirement for third party commercial products.

VCMI (the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 one) is amazing!

There is. As well as a mod to turn off the assassins that try to kill you when you rest.

BAR is a surprisingly good game

You're welcome to start your own multi-decade project heh. Seriously tho, TR is amazing.

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).

Ah, so the StarCraft Map Editor approach.

Also:

* 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/

I played it a year ago. To my surprise, in some ways, the advanced graphics broke my immersion. Standing in Vivec and expanding the render distance to Seyda Neen takes away part of the mystery.

I had the same with Gothic, where my more powerfull computer could render Xardas' tower when standing in the old camp.

Both games partially depend on limited render distance to provide an illusion of vastness.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enderal

I found Enderal so compelling that I watched a full playthrough, it's the only game I've ever done that with. I wanted to play it all the way through myself, but my PC at the time had very strange audio cracking issues with Skyrim so I wasn't able to get far.

Yep, paid modding is Bethesda cooking and eating the golden goose. As soon as it happens it kills what makes their games special.

> 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?

Of course especially Bethesda is infamous for milking their IPs until the sun goes supernova.

Ohh, these are excellent questions!

I understand OPs sentiment fully - and the response is probably "it depends" :D

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Oh. Well that’s certainly an opinion.

> Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever

> 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.

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.

I started using mods in Morrowind from basically my second play-through, way back around the time it was released.

Nexus Mods started as portal for Morrowind mods.

I feel it should be twofold. The release itself should be 20 years, after which non-commercial things can legally happen - mods, remakes, etc

The ip itself should be 10 years after the last release before its pretty much a non-commercial free for all...with a more complex requirement for third party commercial products.

VCMI (the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 one) is amazing!

Ah, so the StarCraft Map Editor approach.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I keep hoping they'll release Cyberpunk 2077 for open development. They abandoned the RedEngine and the city is really well built.

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).

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.

I played it a year ago. To my surprise, in some ways, the advanced graphics broke my immersion. Standing in Vivec and expanding the render distance to Seyda Neen takes away part of the mystery.

I had the same with Gothic, where my more powerfull computer could render Xardas' tower when standing in the old camp.

Both games partially depend on limited render distance to provide an illusion of vastness.

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.

farm vivec guards and sell to crab dude

IIRC, you can adjust the fog to still be there and get the best of both worlds.

Morrowind can indeed be small to look at, but big to play in <3

Volumetric fog is the solution. Gives you the best of both worlds: distant peaks over the mist, yet difficulty navigating to the next settlement.

Nobody is coming into your house to change the bits on your hard drive.

>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".

Oh. Well that’s certainly an opinion.

> 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).

> 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.

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.

No, I didn't! That's part of what informs my question.

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.

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

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).

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?

They moved devlopment to Unreal 5

IIRC, you can adjust the fog to still be there and get the best of both worlds.

Morrowind can indeed be small to look at, but big to play in <3

farm vivec guards and sell to crab dude

Volumetric fog is the solution. Gives you the best of both worlds: distant peaks over the mist, yet difficulty navigating to the next settlement.

Nobody is coming into your house to change the bits on your hard drive.

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-deleti...

It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on launch was a thing even a decade ago.

But publishers can restrict your access to the game if you decline the latest update.

>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".

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.

> The games are less about defined goals and more about roleplaying, exploration and world-building.

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.

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.

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

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.

- 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.

Teleportation? That would kill the hiking simulator vibe!

They moved devlopment to Unreal 5

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?

It took them nearly 2 years, but the game has advanced a lot since it's launch. The Phantom Liberty DLC plus the 2.0 update/rebalancing made it more fun (even if it made it more 'console' and less PC)

It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on launch was a thing even a decade ago.

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-deleti...

But publishers can restrict your access to the game if you decline the latest update.

They can restrict your access to the server-side infrastructure that they run, yes.

Can you give an example?

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.

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.

Even as a framework for mods it just mostly reuses previous tools. At least Bethesda themselves could have made the script extender rather than waiting for the community to develop. It tells us that they are willing to give modders the bare minimum and expect them to make additional tools themselves, which would be fine if the base game had well functioning mechanics. But it doesn't, and some things you cannot change via modding, so we are stuck with them unless an entirely new engine is developed. But Bethesda doesn't want to do any of this, nor does it want to help the community.

But still, even with all that, their primary focus was to make a game, not a modding framework, and they miserably failed, even though by that point that had enough experience to do so.

Teleportation? That would kill the hiking simulator vibe!

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.)

Teleportation is actually in the base game, just with only one mark and recall point, as you may know.

The mods I’ve seen add a selectable list and scale out how many locations you’re allowed to save based on your associated magic skill.

So it’s both a boon to quality of life and still relatively balanced and not too overpowered.

They can restrict your access to the server-side infrastructure that they run, yes.

Which is often required for the simple act of starting a game, even if the game runs offline.

Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything (even single-player modes).

But still, even with all that, their primary focus was to make a game, not a modding framework, and they miserably failed, even though by that point that had enough experience to do so.

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.

Teleportation is actually in the base game, just with only one mark and recall point, as you may know.

The mods I’ve seen add a selectable list and scale out how many locations you’re allowed to save based on your associated magic skill.

So it’s both a boon to quality of life and still relatively balanced and not too overpowered.

Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything (even single-player modes).

Which is often required for the simple act of starting a game, even if the game runs offline.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

Again: that’s contrary to how our laws and regulations work.

OpenMW 0.50.0 Released! 2025-11-07 - capo

The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.50.0 of our open-source engine! Grab it from our Downloads Page for all supported operating systems.

This round number release overhauls the gamepad experience, makes foundational steps in dehardcoding combat, further expands our Lua scripting API and, among the host of user interface fix-ups, introduces the highly requested quick item transfer.

Keep reading to learn more about what 0.50.0 brings, polishes and translates into Polish!

Known Issues

On macOS, launching OpenMW from OpenMW-CS requires ‘OpenMW.app’ and ‘OpenMW-CS.app’ to be siblings
[#7511] On Windows, a freeze may be reported if engine startup takes too long; ignoring the message is usually harmless, as it should eventually disappear, but if it doesn’t, share the freeze dump with us
[#8233] Hardware antialiasing may cause driver timeouts on AMD GPUs of the RX 6000 and 7000 series; this is a driver bug AMD has yet to address
[#8255] On Intel GPUs, the game may freeze visually while still responding to input. This appears to be a recently introduced driver bug; as a workaround, you may need to install an older version of the driver. We’ve had reports of something similar happening on recent AMD drivers; the same workaround should apply
[#8345] OpenMW-CS might crash randomly on Linux and macOS during global search or saving
[#8464] Shader rendering is tinted red on Apple Silicon; enable per-pixel lighting to prevent that

AI and Pathfinding

Contributions from Aussiemon, Capo, elsid and Evil Eye

OpenMW’s navmesh-based pathfinding is already more elaborate than Morrowind’s. Some even wish it were less so.

There was, however, a case where it failed. The original content-supplied path grid works as a hint on where roads and bridges are so that wandering characters aren’t ignorant of the infrastructure. This is all well and good until you realise the content might be wrong and put some points inside rocks. Miraculously, Morrowind avoided the problem, so we had to solve it: wandering NPCs will now ignore the points they cannot reach.

Another situation where OpenMW could fall behind Morrowind was sneaking. 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. It doesn’t mean the reaction time would reflect that of a real person, but it does the job. Sort of.

OpenMW, meanwhile, would update awareness every frame, which could mean the sneak indicator would be rather unreliable in figuring out whether you’re hidden. 0.50.0 still updates awareness every frame to react to sudden changes in how difficult it is to track the player, but it will cache the random dice roll result used for the relevant check for 5 seconds. This makes Sneak experience farming, err, that is, gaining less challenging.

Fixes

[#5331] When a Command effect stops, the affected actor will accept their new location as their new wander point
[#6029] Hostile actors will no longer engage in combat with the player if the player is under the effect of >=75% Chameleon
[#6029] Awareness rolls of non-hostile actors are cached for 5 seconds to allow easier gain of Sneak experience
[#7871] Immobile actors such as the Kwama Queen in Morrowind can initiate combat, however futile
[#7979] Paralysed and knocked down NPCs can no longer use combat actions: to match Morrowind, they won’t yell taunts or drink potions to get themselves out of their predicament
[#8433] Improved Wander pathfinding: actors will try to avoid moving into unreachable waypoints when possible
[#8612] Actors will no longer harvest herbalism-enabled plants non-stop when the Activate package is used

Configuration and VFS

Contributions from Duron27 and Evil Eye

New Features

[#8077] Setting files are now saved when you exit the settings window, rather than only when you exit the game

Fixes

[#8599] Non-ASCII paths using native encodings are now supported in Morrowind format BSAs
Improved BSA archive reading stability in various cases, e.g., for corrupted files or files where directory hash collisions occur

ESM Format and Saved Games

Contribution from S3ctor

We took care not to change the saved game format. This means that you should be able to revert to 0.49.0 on your ongoing playthrough if you experience issues in the new release, although this is not really recommended.

Fixes

[#8333] Reading quest status subrecords no longer causes the rest of the quest record data to be discarded

Gameplay

Contributions from Aussiemon, Capo, Evil Eye, Foal and Kuyondo

As usual, and as we’re striving for a reasonably faithful reimplementation of the original experience, we have to sort out minor game mechanics inconsistencies. Do you think this will end at some point? Me neither.

You might already know prison time can improve your Sneak and Security skills. One thing that wasn’t replicated is the improvement counting towards level progress if you’ve chosen one of them as a major or a minor skill. On its own, this may not sound notable, but it was actually implemented by dehardcoding jail skill progression (well, mostly regression). Like the rest of the level progression previously dehardcoded in 0.49.0, it was moved into the built-in scripting.

But there were also more obviously problematic differences solved in this release. For example, Next/Previous Spell key bindings are now able to cope with enchanted items that come in stacks, rather than get stuck equipping the items of this type. Another example is that pickpocketing is now slightly less obnoxiously unfair, as OpenMW’s judicial system will no longer try to indict you for the same crime twice due to a design flaw.

Fixes

[#6039] Next Spell now skips over items that belong to the same stack as the current item (it would previously get stuck if there were multiple copies)
[#7622] Ranged attacks will now hit underwater if you’re up close to a target (this matches Morrowind)
[#7649] Sounds and visual effects of resisted effects no longer play
[#7693] Potions and ingredients no longer visually end up back in the inventory for a single frame before getting picked up again for convenient consumption (0.49.0 regression)
[#7996] Instant (zero-duration) effects can now act immediately. For example, instant Cure Poison can immediately cure the instant Poison preceding it
[#8303] Underwater spell projectiles cast by objects will explode rather than immediately disappear (this matches Morrowind)
[#8340] Multi-effect enchantment service price is now noticeably lower and should match Morrowind; it’s now based on the accumulated strength of the final effect rather than the enchantment’s overall strength
[#8371] Silence no longer affects powers
[#8383] Bound helm and boot effects cast on beast race characters are now interrupted immediately
[#8399] Jail-induced major/minor skill increases count as level progress
[#8404] Actors will no longer equip items to all slots when they want to replace their equipped light with a more appropriate shield. This allows the prevent merchant equipping option to work more intuitively for exterior merchants
[#8446] Travel prices are calculated more accurately when the player has multiple followers: instead of calculating the offered price based on the base price for one character and multiplying it, the base price is multiplied first and then used for the offer
[#8459] Spell prices are autocalculated properly for autocalculated spells
[#8485] Base diseases bypass disease resistance
[#8500] Fight rating change crime reaction accounts for the number of items in the stolen stack
[#8519] Pickpocket crimes will no longer be erroneously detected twice
[#8540] Effects with no magnitude can no longer be resisted partially
[#8557] Charm no longer influences the disposition clamping range
[#8606] Floating-point imprecision should be less likely to mess with container capacity
[#8615] Increased waiting/resting progress speed to better match Morrowind (tuned based on the expected framerate of 60 FPS)
[#8680] Permanent effects are no longer erroneously restored on dead actors, e.g., when the player rests
[#8710] Creatures can no longer break the game by casting an Absorb Skill spell
[#8734] Shield sheathing animations work properly (0.49.0 regression)

Graphics

Contributions from akortunov, AnyOldName3, Aussiemon, Capo, Evil Eye, wareya and wazabear

0.50.0 comes with improved compatibility with various modded assets, thanks to the skinned geometry implementation being reworked to account for the skinning origin.

Wait, you probably don’t know what any of this means…

We’re not going to give you a course on 3D animation here, but long story short, most animations are based on moving bones around in the object’s “skeleton” (not literal bones, more like points). The object’s geometry is oriented relative to the bones. Spooked yet? More importantly, though, the geometry may be set up by the model artist in a way that it will graciously react to their movement by moving its triangles closer or farther from some bones in a process called skinning. Actors’ bodies and equipment tend to do this. Aside from bone weights and orientations, Morrowind’s (or rather, NetImmerse‘s) skinning data format includes the “base” bone of the geometry and its adjusted orientation. Previous releases of OpenMW would try to get away with ignoring those, but it didn’t work out so well. For example, the sails of some ships in abot’s Boats would be shifted vertically. Well, not any more.

Wait, is that mod STILL not compatible?

0.50.0 also comes with fixes for OpenMW’s very own features: normal mapping and parallax mapping.

Terrain normal maps previously erroneously used the OpenGL vertical convention. Like objects, they were supposed to use the DirectX convention. Essentially, they were flipped vertically. No more headache for artists: the convention is now finally consistent between objects and terrain.

Parallax will also no longer be flipped inappropriately — more specifically, when it’s applied to “mirrored” geometry. It will also not abruptly disappear forever when the parallax-mapped object glows due to enchantments and triggered traps.

There aren’t any shiny new graphical features in 0.50.0, but we should have already surpassed Morrowind in various areas here, so it’s not an issue, right?

Modded Morrowind vistas graciously provided by DetailDevil.

Fixes

[#4437] Skinning base transformations and root bone are now used
[#7799] Harvesting herbalism-enabled plants will no longer trigger expensive object paging chunk regeneration
[#8176] Error marker loading is now thread-safe, preventing a potential crash when cell preloading and cell loading fail to find a model simultaneously
[#8341] Magic glow will no longer disable parallax on the affected geometry
[#8375] Moon phase cycle should now match Morrowind, e.g., “skip” days less often
[#8447] Non-vanilla threshold-based turning is no longer used for the player, fixing werewolf swimming turning animation getting stuck
[#8490] Water normals exposed to post-processing no longer sometimes disappear when refraction is disabled
[#8560] Global filtering settings are used for overridden textures of spawned magic VFX
[#8593] Mipmaps are properly generated for post-processing render targets
[#8598] Post-processing shaders can be loaded from BSA files
[#8610] Terrain normal maps now use the correct (DirectX or -Y) vertical convention
Parallax should behave correctly for flipped geometry

Scripting: mwscript

Contributions from Aussiemon, Capo, Evil Eye and Kuyondo

New Features

[#3769] GetSpellEffects now detects enchantments, similar to how the relevant Morrowind Code Patch option works
[#8509] FillJournal debug instruction, which adds all topics and journal entries into the journal

Fixes

[#4885] Disabling actors through dialogue scripting should no longer cause crashes
[#8245] ShowVars debug instruction now lists the global scripts
[#8318] Improved dialogue filtering: filters are handled more consistently for creatures, while missing global variables no longer break the dialogue window
[#8414] Water Walking effect no longer makes the player collide with water when collision is disabled
[#8432] Moving between an interior and an exterior properly spawns in the (postponed) collision shapes of objects spawned by scripting
[#8466] ShowMap now requires a non-empty argument

Scripting: OpenMW-Lua

Contributions from akortunov, Calandiel, DaisyHasaCat, Evil Eye, fallchildren, Foal, S3ctor, trav and wazabear

So what is it about combat that is no longer locked up in the C++? That would be some of what happens when an attack connects: applying armour and difficulty to the damage, spawning blood, playing hit and miss sounds and damaging armour condition. What this means for modding is that scripts can now intercept attacks that land on a certain target, whether they succeed or fail, alter some of their outcome, and potentially override the mentioned mechanics entirely. Eventually, this functionality will be expanded to cover more of what happens before, upon and after impact.

0.50.0’s API also opens up more of the game world by means of its weather and terrain APIs and region record bindings. The early terrain API, for example, exposes the terrain textures, allowing for such incredible feats as letting the player touch grass, while the weather API lets you manipulate various built-in weather settings.

Additionally, scripts can now access the player’s journal and create entirely custom NPCs. No plugins necessary.

Important: OnUpdate handler behaviour has changed for previously skipped paused frames! They are now handled with a simulation time of zero. This will affect scripts that assume simulation time is always positive, so they will need to be updated. It was necessary to allow scripts to react more fluidly to events happening during the pause, like combat music reacting to combat state changes during dialogue.

For a full overview of the current state of OpenMW-Lua, please consult the scripting API reference.

Now Dehardcoded

[#8399] Jail skill impact
[#8642] Various mechanics triggered when attacks hit the target: armour condition damage and hit sound, damage adjustment due to difficulty and armour rating, blood spawning and miss sound playback. Shield hit redistribution tweak copied from Morrowind Code Patch is now optional

New APIs and Interfaces

[#6976] core.weather: weather API, which allows manipulating various built-in weather settings
[#7879] core.regions: region record bindings
[#7966] types.Player.journal: API for player journal entries for both topics and quests
[#8112] core.land: API for terrain, which currently lets you recover the terrain height and texture for the default exterior
[#8320] core.mwscripts: API for mwscript script records, which allows recovering their source
[#8642] Combat: interface for interacting with the combat system, primarily attacks (as a part of on-hit mechanics dehardcoding)

New Bindings and Utility Functions

[#8285] postprocessing.getChain(): the chain of active post-processing shaders
[#8334] types.Player.addTopic(player, topicId): mwscript AddTopic equivalent; adds a topic that the given player will be able to ask characters about
[#8355] Interfaces.UI.isWindowVisible(windowName): returns whether the given UI window is currently visible
[#8629] Cell.pathGrid: the path grid record relevant to the cell, i.e., the traversable path links and nodes

New Events

[#8597] AddVfx, PlaySound3d, BreakInvisibility, Unequip, Hit, ModifyItemCondition, ShowMessage, SpawnVfx, ConsumeItem, Lock and Unlock events (mostly self-explanatory, see documentation)

Other New Features

[#8654] Custom NPC records can now be created

Fixes

[#7693] ItemUsage interface returns the item to its original stack if it could not be equipped or consumed, instead of moving it to the player’s inventory
[#8012] OnUpdate engine handlers are now called with a simulation time of zero for paused frames
[#8582] Local scripts started by another script no longer start out inactive
[#8614] Fixed a sol3-side memory leak when indexing user-defined types
[#8650] Checking if a container is resolved no longer initialises its contents, which could previously cause herbalism-enabled containers to be automatically harvested
[#8720] Fixed potential custom UI element corruption during error handling that could lead to instability
[#8757] Fixed a crash when the object type is accessed in a coroutine
[#8758] Fixed a crash when nested UI elements are created twice without destroying the original parent

Sound

Contribution from Epoch

New Feature

[#7813] The Doppler effect is now enabled for the 3D audio. The Doppler effect is a real-life phenomenon that shifts the sound’s pitch depending on its velocity relative to the listener

User Interface

Major contributions from Capo, enoznal and Kuyondo
Contributions from akortunov, bmdhacks, Charles Horn, DaisyHasaCat, elsid, Evil Eye and Igilq

Translator (French): jvoisin
Translator (Russian): Capo
Translator (Swedish): Lysol
Translators (Polish): Igilq, Karoline Pauls, mc003 and trav

Kudos to the international community of our Discord/IRC servers for helping us translate OpenMW!

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. The following screenshots use GUI scaling for better readability; the option does not scale UI on its own.

No, Galbedir, you’re not getting your soul gems back.

Folms Mirel is the more competent enchanter anyway.

At least the Dwemer didn’t dabble in planned obsolescence.

This release also introduces Polish translations for user interface lines that are not translated by the game settings. Polish is one of the languages in which Morrowind was officially released, and we expect the sizeable Polish community to appreciate this addition.

Gamepad actions are also translated.

If you neither possess a gamepad nor understand how to pronounce “Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz”, you might still welcome another addition: quick transfer of container items through Alt-clicking. This is something that has been asked about way too often through the years.

New Features

[#2522] Alt-clicking transfers items immediately in container menus
[#3740] Improved controller menu navigation with an alternative UI (find it in the launcher)
[#8290] Player gold is now shown in the spell creation menu
[#8313] Character name is shown in save info if it doesn’t match the current profile
[#8580] Character save profiles are now sorted by date rather than filesystem order
[#8665] Polish translations for OpenMW-specific in-game lines

Fixes

[#2967, #8431] Container menus should always react appropriately to scripted item additions/removals without crashing
[#6792] Tweaked birthsign tooltip appearance. Descriptions are now printed in multiple lines
[#7371] Failing to equip an item plays a sound when it’s moved back to the inventory
[#7740] Enchanted item backgrounds no longer overlap the selected weapon/enchanted item HUD boxes
[#8265] Topic hyperlink generation respects word separators and will no longer inappropriately highlight the middle of a word
[#8349] Non-existent destinations are no longer shown in the travel menu
[#8349] Exterior cells set as travel destinations by name are supported in the travel menu
[#8359] Quick keys menu looks more like Morrowind’s
[#8359] Assigning an item to a quick key plays a sound
[#8359] Scripted items that are normally impossible to equip can no longer be assigned to quick keys
[#8385] Fixed Unicode handling problems in formatted strings that go through the YAML localisation system
[#8408] Both potential hindrances for waiting (enemies being nearby and the player not being on solid ground) can be reported by the rest menu
[#8436] Pinned spell window reacts to selected spell and enchanted item changes triggered by quick keys
[#8437] Pinned inventory window button remains visible when out of menu mode, like for other HUD windows
[#8551] Quick keys will remain bound to now-unavailable items when they’re loaded, rather than “forget” them
[#8584] Reworked the appearance of various service menus to match Morrowind
[#8585] Increased padding between non-special dialogue menu topics to match Morrowind
[#8609] Reduced the size of the crosshair to match Morrowind

OpenMW-CS, Launcher and Tools

Contributions from AnyOldName3, Capo, Evil Eye, Igilq and S3ctor

The launcher and the wizard have also been translated into Polish!

Our content file editor’s selection markers got a design overhaul for better usability, while created/cloned instance numbering has been updated to be less eager to take over the numerical IDs used by other instances. This is particularly important when working on content that may override the instances from some other content. Which is actually a lot of content, come to think of it…

New Features

[#8113] Launcher: Subdirectory addition dialogue now supports extended selection
[#8139] Editor: Revamped instance selection markers for better look and usability
[#8579] Editor: Bulk indentation support in the script editor
[#8665] Polish localisation for the launcher and the wizard

Fixes

[#6573] Editor: Fixed cube/sphere selection behaviour on high-DPI displays and scaled windows
[#8587] INI Importer: Improved consistency with how the other tools handle config file editing
[#8620] Editor: Created and cloned instances should no longer erroneously reuse RefNums
[#8686] Editor: Fixed a crash when the terrain is smoothened in an undefined cell

Other

[#8578] Removed Qt 5 support

Beyond Morrowind

Major contributions from ptmikheev
Contributions from Capo and cc9cii

Didn’t get the memo? As the 0.49.0 release announcement boasted, running Oblivion and later Bethesda open-world engine games is in the engine’s eventual scope.

Petr Mikheev, the OpenMW-Lua pioneer, though mostly retired from his Lua maintenance role, keeps a special interest in advancing OpenMW’s relevant capabilities. During this release cycle, he thought to try his hand at finishing cc9cii’s work on a terrain texturing reimplementation, cleaning it up, fixing various issues and, importantly, implementing texture sampling for distant terrain— as well as implementing distant objects most straightforwardly: by plugging all cell references into OpenMW’s object paging functionality used for Morrowind’s LOD-free world.

That is, yes, any trees you see are full-detail trees. Any trees you think you should see but do not are probably SpeedTree trees.

See that mountain? You can climb it.

Stay classy, New Vivec.

I saw a mudcrab the other day. Horrible creatures.

While it makes the different provinces of Tamriel and states of America look much more appealing, this approach has a considerable memory and loading time impact, so, uh, don’t go overboard with the viewing distance in Fallout 4 just yet.

New Features

[#6000] Terrain texturing, finishing the initial terrain rendering implementation
Initial distant object rendering through the means of object paging
Door opening sounds
Faster decompression of files in zlib-compressed archives: quicker loading times for all games other than Skyrim Special Edition and Anniversary Edition

So, that’s it for this release. Thank you for your interest in OpenMW and for reading this. We hope you’ll enjoy the big 5-0. Let us know what you think in our Discord/IRC community or the forums, or should it come to it, the issue tracker, and see you later!

Hacker Times

Hacker Times

OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation

Discussion

Discussion

AI and Pathfinding

Configuration and VFS

ESM Format and Saved Games

Gameplay

Graphics

Scripting: mwscript

Scripting: OpenMW-Lua

Sound

User Interface

OpenMW-CS, Launcher and Tools

Beyond Morrowind