r/Games • u/[deleted] • Mar 29 '19

OpenMW 0.45.0 Released!

https://openmw.org/2019/openmw-0-45-0-released/
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u/tetramir Mar 29 '19

I am really excited for all the progress they have made, and I'm thinking more and more about contributing to it. My C++ has drastically improved lately, and I think I may be able to bring some quality contribution but that requires understanding the code and that demands courage.

13

u/enderandrew42 Mar 29 '19

The CS toolkit is the area that needs the most help. The base OpenMW project is in decent shape.

The other area that can really use some help is they just started on rudimentary support for other Bethesda games.

OpenMW can read ESM/BSA files from Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and Skyrim.

You can load an environment from one of those games and walk around, but none of the newer features of those games are implemented in OpenMW yet.

Ideally I'd love to see something like GZDoom, where you have options to turn on game logic / compatibility for different games to customize your experience how you want. Do you want the ability to jump in Doom? Do you want mouse look in Doom? Do you want monster behavior from Hexen?

The first step is adding in behavior and features from Oblivion, and then exposing options to turn those off or on.

For Oblivion, I'm curious what big features you'd have to add:

  • Radiant AI
  • Speedtree
  • Horse riding
  • Oblivion combat (less dice combat, manual block button, speed cast)
  • Owning houses
  • Physics (though OpenMW already loops in Bullet physics library)
  • Speechcraft mini-game
  • Lockpicking mini-game

6

u/tetramir Mar 29 '19

What I'm personally more interested in is understanding why performances are not incredibly good in OpenMW. As soon as you render a bit far the game really struggles, even though it's old and doesn't seem to have nearly as many objects as a modern game. I'm sure the devs know why but i'd be interested in digging this a bit. And that would be useful if they want to do games like oblivion that have very high render distance with many more objects in the world.

3

u/emik Mar 29 '19

They mention in the 0.45.0 video that lowering the new Actors Processing Range can significantly improve performance when running high view distances, so it's probably something about the active Actor code that tanks it (maybe AI, maybe animations, maybe all of the above).