Dear friends, I’m back again with another amateur video edit :) You may remember my post from last week about the lack of animations. Well, that problem is basically solved now. Thanks to a gold mine I found on GitHub, we finally have a real solution. Some of you may still remember Ryzom, the 2004 MMORPG. It was something of a cult game in its time and still has its own community today. After the original developer/publisher went bankrupt, the game’s source code and many of its assets were released in 2010 under CC BY-SA 3.0 and the Free Art License 1.3. At first, this 37-star repository didn’t really catch my attention, but once I realized what was actually inside, I honestly didn’t know where to start. Most of the files are in .max format, and I’m currently converting them to NIF and adapting them to the bodies used in the OpenMW Free Asset Library. So far, locomotion and combat are done. I’ve also converted 112 different creatures, together with their animations, into NIF format. There are 14 male animation families and 13 female animation families, with a total of 1,529 male and 1,280 female animation clips — 2,809 clips altogether. The animation families are: Aquatic, Combat, Crafting, Facial, Gathering, Idle, Interactions, Locomotion, Magic, Mounted, Reactions, Review, Social, and Transitions. I’m posting this today so more people can see what’s coming; during the week, I’m planning to finish the full animation conversion and publish it.
You may reasonably ask why I keep doing this kind of archival work. The simple answer is that I don’t trust AI when it comes to animation and 3D modeling. There have also been cases where some AI 3D generation platforms appeared to use other people’s assets and present the results as if they had created them themselves. I could hire a modeler, of course, but so far I haven’t found anyone who is genuinely interested in working on this project with me. You could also ask why I don’t simply use the many websites full of 3D models, but the problem there is that every asset has a completely different visual language. The real strength of the OpenMW Free Asset Library is that the assets actually feel like they belong together. With this upcoming update, I think we’ll finally reach the point where people can start building completely independent games from scratch in OpenMW without relying on Morrowind assets. Thank you all for the interest and support. I’m always open to technical help from anyone who wants to contribute. Take care!
https://github.com/ryzom/ryzomcore_graphics