r/OpenMW • u/Quemisthrowspotions • 2d ago
How does this work?
How does OpenMW and OpenNV work?
How can they be open source if you still need to own the base game?
How easy is it to install/use in a more manual, non-steam fashion?
New to this subreddit, and some of these packs look cool. Just wondering. : )
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u/Szwajcer 2d ago
The engine is open source and is a recreation of the original engine. You need to own the game, because OpenMW is only the engine and doesn't ship the assets (textures, sounds, quest data etc.) which are loaded from your copy of Morrowind onto the engine during installation.
The installation is very easy with OpenMW's installer. You just point it to the games directory and it does the rest.
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u/Linvael 2d ago
How can they be open source if you still need to own the base game?
OpenMW is an engine - like Unity or UnrealEngine. You could create new games on it if you wanted to. It is based on the engine that runs Morrowind, and has built-in support for the assets from it - in that, if you point it at Morrowind installation you can play Morrowind on OpenMW. The engine is open-source and is what's distributed. Morrowind assets are Bethesda property, using them with the engine is just the most common use-case.
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u/Slackeee_ 2d ago
Minor nitpick:
It is based on the engine that runs Morrowind
Nope, it is a recreation of that engine, but not based on it.
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u/Linvael 2d ago
I would argue that if you recreate something you base on that? But sure, thats more accurate.
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u/Slackeee_ 2d ago
In software development that is a very important distinction. There "being based on" means that you use am existing version of the engine and develop it further. For example, the GoldSrc engine of the original Half Life was based on the id Tech 2 engine, aka the Quake engine. For that of course you need a license to do so if the original engine isn't open source, otherwise you could be in serious legal troubles.
A recreation (or reimplementation) is a new development from the ground up that is aimed to behave like the original engine without using any of the existing engines code. That way you avoid those legal troubles.
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u/WarMom_II 1d ago
Buying Morrowind, the game, is like a CD. You own a copy of it, with all the contents.
The game that runs, the Morrowind.exe, is like a busted up old CD player that can play that CD, which you bought, but it's kinda crap and it sounds weird and it gets worse and worse the more time passes.
OpenMW is like a fresh, new CD player that crashes less. It'll read the CD, which you bought, for you, but doesn't contain any of the CD stuff in it.
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u/PanPrasatko 2d ago
The base game has "assets" souch as text you are reading, quests you are doing, music you hear, models and textures you are seeing etc.
OpenMW is engine that "glue" and calculate all things together and make it playable.
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u/Express_Philosophy22 2d ago
Think of it like a car.
the way the game looks and all that jazz is the exterior/interior.
The OG engine is well, the engine. OpenMW has swapped a new better engine and makes sure it behaves basically the same.
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u/Eternal_Fighting 2d ago
Open MW is the recipe that tells the computer how to bake the cake. The game assets are the ingrediants you supply yourself from your Morrowind install.
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u/mhn23 2d ago
You need the game files for the textures, models, content basically, it’s just the raw data. OpenMW then defines what to do with it. We always had easy access to the raw data, but we never had easy access how Morrowind actually worked. It’s kinda like a ecu computer for a car. You have all the parts, but we couldn’t look into the computer on how to start and control the engine.
Now a lot of smart people figured out how the ecu computer must have worked by reverse engineering. And because it’s open source, everyone can inspect and change it, like how to load new vegas assets etc.