OpenMW: Open-source TES3: Morrowind reimplementation | Hacker News Reader

OpenMW: Open-source TES3: Morrowind reimplementation

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363 pointsagluszak173 comments

Bethesda games community is amazingly insane.

For example yesterday I found out that modders managed to "merge Fallout 3 and its DLC into Fallout: New Vegas, allowing both games to be played in a single playthrough".

It is called Tale of Two Wastelands and it goes above and beyond modding. This is art. More info: https://taleoftwowastelands.com/faq#What-is-ttw

If you like playthroughs, Gopher youtuber is recording an amazing series of it:

- Playlist of Chapter 1 (57 videos): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-Dekit0ce4ni...

- Playlist of Chapter 2 (4 videos): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-Dfag97E44fF...

- Playlist of Chapter 3 (32 videos): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-DcRVZclOtOY...

- Playlist of Chapter 4 (10 videos): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-DeLxMTphztm...

- Playlist of Chapter 5 (9 videos and counting): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-DcDxBImozYs...

While this mod is great, I'd recommend playing Fallout NV on it's own first. TTW can ruin pacing and when i played it (admittedly close to a decade ago) I had quite a few near playthrough-ruining bugs.

> I had quite a few near playthrough-ruining bugs.

Sounds like it preserved the core authentic experience then.

I tried to play NV vanilla a few months ago and ran into multiple of these within the first couple hours. Never went back

I forget the name, but there's a mod fix pack for every fallout game.

The mod does its job beautifully: it allows players to play The Capitol Beltway with their Fallout: NV crew and mechanics.

F:NV was the better game, but even as a huge NV fan, exploring post-apocalyptic DC and its suburbs was way more enjoyable a locale than exploring the nuked desert. This gives the best of both worlds.

I agree that the capitol area was amazing, but the design of the game, characters, and experience in NV felt far more fallout-like than 3, which makes sense given who made it.

Fallout NV is an amazing game but its largely composed of bugs.

That's, why modders exits and are active even today. Bigfixes for FNV are complex and makes game absolute solid piece of game.

> It is called Tale of Two Wastelands and it goes above and beyond modding. This is art.

Glad to hear, because I invented this art genre with ArsDoom. Still striving

I'm guessing this is your work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9r_f8un3NE

The description of that video credits one of the creators as Reini Urban, which I'm gonna infer means yes in this case

The game mod yes, the video not.

I don't understand how there can be so many people putting in so much time and talent into projects like these. I've tried getting into modding many times but it's always overwhelming. I don't even know where to start, so that there are enough people pushing through the obvious hurdles and produce things like this is mind-blowing.

These aren't massive communities, these big modders often know each other and work together.

I'd say it depends on your background and availability. Most people in any of these intense tech scenes are a combination of a)young/low-commitments - in school, summer, no kids, etc. so they have the time and energy to dedicate b) grew up in these scenes so that the barrier to entry to start creating is much lower than someone like you or me trying to figure out how to mod a game for the first time and c) members of a strong community. I used to be in the fansub scene and there's something about being celebrated by your peers for achieving something that only they recognize. Same with the crack scene. I'm sure modders in these communities feel the same way when they can release something and receive so much positive feedback. It's great!

Which just shows -- having kids leads to a massive productivity drop / personal advancement opportunity failure.

Consider wisely...

Alternatively, I think if you just compared accomplishments of population with families vs without you would not be impressed.

Its a tiny population that would turn less responsibility into more productive output.

(I for one would probably not consider making fallout mods a great tradeoff, and that's probably better use of time than most)

Some people have kids

Some people don’t

Some people get into art

Some people get into monster trucks

And because everyone is doing their own thing without worrying about conforming to one pattern, you literally get a billion slices of life to choose from.

One big difference is that if you decide that art isn't your thing, you can move on and try something else.

But Children are a big commitment. For many people it's well worth it, for others maybe not. And that's fine - so long as it is considered.

Not for any weird anti-child reason, just that it's something that probably should be thought through and considered more than trying out a hobby.

> Not for any weird anti-child reason, just that it's something that probably should be thought through and considered more than trying out a hobby.

I'm not sure there is any basis to this statement. It seems prudent but otherwise unfounded.

Only a relative minority of parents report regret at having had kids (<10%)[0]. Of those 10% many probably did consider it extensively, and even if they regret it it does not mean there was any likelihood they wouldn't have kids anyways. Put another way, regret does not mean they were not desperate to have kids before they realised they would regret it.

It's incredibly complex gaining insight about these kind of major life altering decisions.. especially because it's clear people change once they have kids.

I see no reason to think about having children more deeply than just deciding you will try. Getting pregnant unexpectedly is it's only can of worms especially as access to abortion is at the whims of government. Not to mention pregnancy and labour suck.

[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/head-games/201909/wh...

I think the underlying question is to see if regret (or other difficulties like financial hardship or things that require a state actor to intervene) are correlated with planning and consideration. Measuring that is the difficulty.

And as that article state - that "less than 10%" number is coming from a population where it is taboo to admit to regret. People have been shown to be economical with the truth on otherwise anonymous surveys - [0] is a humorous example, so how much that may skew the results would likely need to be looked in to. And that's just the responders who know they're replying inaccurately - with such cultural pressure, they may not admit to themselves - there's lots of examples where people deceive themselves about how they feel about things that may go against society's grain at their time. Introspection is really hard.

So I'd see that number as a lower bound, not necessarily accurate.

EDIT:

Additionally the cost - 7% of artists not reaching their ambitions is sad, but 7% of children being unloved and resented is a tragedy.

[0] https://www.iflscience.com/men-cant-be-trusted-to-measure-th...

Great link and mostly agree.

I do question if we can assume any correlation between "regret" and being unloved. Again it would be highly taboo to state you don't love your child.

But I suspect regret does not lead to open resentment or a child feeling unloved.

There are plenty enough cases of parents/step-parents going so far as to kill a child through regret. I suspect many do "love" the child ironically. Because it's a personal subjective experience, at least you can get a tape measure out for a wiener.

I suppose I regret much of my life and current career trajectory but somehow I wouldn't change it for the world because I love so much about it!

> 7% of artists not reaching their ambitions is sad

I know it's irrelevant to your point but I'm sure 99.999% of artists do not even come close to their ambitions. I don't find it sad at all. It's like being sad you don't win the lottery.

A month or two ago, I stumbled onto the RegretfulParents subreddit [1] thanks to an HN comment. After reading all those horror stories... yeah, consider wisely.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/regretfulparents/

Some of those stories are tragic, but they are a tiny fraction of the number of people who would literally given up anything they own (including their own life) for their kids.

The vast majority of people on that subreddit would too. They don't regret their kids, they regret the life of parenting that they got into, often without knowing that they were really in for or even worse, as part of an manipulate/abusive relationship or because of societal pressure.

Having kids is way more rewarding than working on any software project. You'll enjoy raising the kids unless you have some kind of personality disorder.

Also, I have a newborn and I work in my projects just fine. [0] Manage your time :)

I would also say that a lot of the time you see that drop-off because having kids is more rewarding than the project, not really because they don't have any time for it.

[0] https://github.com/netpanzer/netpanzer/pull/4

Rudeness aside, if you only have a newborn you may find yourself eating these words in the near, and medium term future.

OMG. Newborn is the easy part. Especially if you’re the bloke.

Breastfeeding is indeed a lot of work. To try to be even, I do everything else. I wish I could do more, she certainly deserves it. We joked I could get hormones...

Just you wait until they're teenagers.

How could teenagers possibly take all your time? Surely they should be socializing?

Like I was mowing lawns by myself unsupervised at 10, what are people doing with their kids all day? :D you have to cook food and provide structure, but...

Oh you mean how tough teenage years are. No sense worring about that.

I am actually excited for the teenager years. I can teach them how to properly drive and slide around a car :)

"You'll enjoy raising the kids unless you have some kind of personality disorder" is one of the most unpleasant, exclusionary and normative things I've read in a long time.

You are talking about 20% of the population. More than any other minority group in America. [0] That is large enough to be a perfectly ordinary slice of human variety. Even if you object to that study's methods it is a huge chunk of the populace.

The portion of the population that doesn't want to and will not enjoy raising children is also a group of people who should not be parents, obviously.

Describing them as having a "personality disorder" achieves what? At best, it pressures probable bad parents into reproducing.... or is that at worst?

Being aware that one won't find raising children rewarding and responding appropriately is highly moral. It isn't a mental illness.

And this nasty, toxic approach to 1/5th of your fellow humans is just something you toss off dismissively in a thread about video game modding? This is the behavior of a person who ostensibly does not have a personality disorder?

[0] https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2023/childfree-study-confirmed...

If you dig, most people you consider successful probably have kids, you just don’t hear about it.

It seems to me like a gauntlet that can provide drive and focus that can potentially outweigh the ability to dabble or move at the drop of a hat.

I'm super glad I had kids.

> Consider wisely...

You could, for example, also consider being a good parent a productive thing, and a personal advancement opportunity :-)

The whole me vs. the kids thing is a false dichotomy. If it's something you want in your life, it is you.

Consider productivity over time, having a kid or three is a force multiplier.

You have but one lifetime. Over the combined lifetimes of your progeny, your productivity is potentially exponential.

I was modder few years ago. Eventually I find out that I sent more time by modding than playing game itself. I finished Morrowind once a did not pay much attention to sidequests which is about 80% of whole quests.

It is rabbit hole but it gets better. For example I totally abandon graphic mods. It alters vanilla aesthetic, there is literally endless options and usualy coast GPU performance. So focusing on bugfixes is achievable in complexity.

Many a True Nerd is also in the middle of a playthough: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwH1xJhcXG0dR6Ue5o39y...

Is there anyone who doesn't have an excruciatingly painful and annoying commentary over almost every second of the gameplay?

I realise your question is more of a commentary on MaTN's voiceover, but can't resist answering..

CouchWarrior on youtube has a vast oeuvre[1] of Bethesda letsplays with varying degrees of in-character narration and meta commentary which I find highly non-excruciating.

Most of it is (variously modded) Skyrim - here's one where a high level assassin mage gratifyingly takes out the Black-Briar household by commission which contains both a "silent" and a separate commented version: [2] (skip to 18:30 if you want the commentary).

There's also a partial Fallout 4 playthrough, mostly done with engaging in-character narration as "Saint Billy" [3]

It may not be for everyone, but the thoughtful, relaxed and character-based roleplay-centric approach beats out the squeaky-voiced minmaxing of standard letsplays every time as far as I'm concerned.

1: https://www.youtube.com/@couchwarriortv/playlists?view=1&sor...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OADtS8yAsCk

3: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq3QdWvJDnh024UmnWHvK...

Damnit!

Reinstalling...

I apologize. Have fun!

Get some!

Is there anyone who did playthroughs who doesn't swamp it in extremely-irritating-neckbeard "commentary"?

I didn't make it past 15 seconds of the second video (ie where the game starts, in the OB/GYN room.) I've never heard someone so excruciating.

I played the main quest, a high fraction of the sidequests & major faction quest trees, one of the expansions, and most of the other one, in OpenMW something like 18-24 months ago. With a few mods, and draw distance cranked up fairly high, and at 4K resolution.

Worked perfectly. Zero glitches the whole time, and the official engine would have crashed at least a dozen times in such a playthrough, while this one didn't even crash once.

[EDIT] I mean, zero unexpected glitches. Obviously the entire game is made of glitches.

"All of this just works" - Todd Howard

Would you care to share mods that worked as expected with OpenMW? I've just started my journey today, so any input will be appriecieted.

Unless it says "MWSE" it should work with OpenMW. 99.9% guaranteed.

I can't remember which ones I used. Texture mods IIRC worked fine, pretty sure I had hi-res replacement mods for most of the textures in the game. I did some loading art replacer thing so they'd be widescreen and hi-res, but that wasn't so much a mod as replacing some images. I think I may have used some of the "Comes Alive" stuff—I know I used to "back in the day", so I assume I did this time, and I'd probably remember if it hadn't worked. One obscure library mod that I like, that adds an empty library just outside Vivec that you can fill by giving them books to copy, that worked fine. Twin Lamps, fairly certain I used that one.

As I recall, the main things that don't work are graphics overhauls that require patching or wrapping the original executable in some fashion. Usually these do some kind of shader magic to e.g. make the water look nicer.

[EDIT] Oh, and I think I had Herbalism installed. If not that, something similar. A mod that turns plants from containers into pick-ups is one of those don't-play-without-it things, for me.

There is a cool site with mod lists that are confirmed to be compatible with OpenMW. I'm currently running 'I heart vanilla' which is basically the vanilla game with extra content and some balance and bug fixes. Highly recommend checking it out.

https://modding-openmw.com/

As polytely said, https://modding-openmw.com/ is a great resource for openmw mod lists.

Also, for certain mods, you do need at least OpenMW 0.48 release candidate [1], a development build [2] (it's below Release Versions), or just build from source. I'm pretty sure it was after 0.47 when they added the ability to add shaders, and configure them using the F2 menu. The modding-openmw site will tell you if you actually need a 0.48 build for a particular mod.

I usually use "I Heart Vanilla" [3] as a base and then pick extra mods from "Expanded Vanilla" [4], which includes the load order if you also want Tamriel Rebuilt [5] (which lets you explore the mainland). The Expansions Integrated, Tribunal Rebalance, Bloodmoon Rebalance, and Expansion Delay are all nice mods too. Makes the expansions really feel like they are part of the base game. When adding extra mods like that, I just use the load ordering they suggest.

One of my favorites (in "Expanded Vanilla") is called Natural Character Growth and Decay [6], so you don't have to worry about min-maxing the level mechanics. It has some options, and I turn off the decay bit for a more relaxing time. It allows you to just play the game as you want.

I love the addition of shaders, and use Zesterer's Volumetric Cloud & Mist Mod for OpenMW [7] as you can have the game keep some of that hazy feeling yet still have distant land and objects. I also use Bloom Linear shader [8]. If you want some other shaders, you can use OMWFX Shaders [9] and/or Zesterer's OpenMW Shader Pack [10]. I have used Zesterer's OpenMW Shader Pack, but you have to edit the config.glsl if you want to set it different from the vanilla preset. The game looks nice with just FXAA, clouds and mist, and linear bloom (very mild). The "Expanded Vanilla" guide under shaders gives a good preset, and then you can change them using the F2 menu in-game.

This all said, it's been awhile since I've properly played last. I take my old list and update it occasionally as mods change or new features are added to OpenMW, thinking I will play through it again one of these days.

[1] https://openmw.org/2022/openmw-0-48-0-is-now-in-rc-phase/

[2] https://openmw.org/downloads/

[3] https://modding-openmw.com/lists/i-heart-vanilla/

[4] https://modding-openmw.com/lists/expanded-vanilla/

[5] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/

[6] https://modding-openmw.com/mods/ncgdmw-lua-edition/

[7] https://github.com/zesterer/openmw-volumetric-clouds

[8] https://modding-openmw.com/mods/bloom-linear/

[9] https://modding-openmw.com/mods/omwfx-shaders/

[10] https://github.com/zesterer/openmw-shaders

>https://modding-openmw.com/lists/expanded-vanilla/

If I'm reading this correctly, this is a list of 268 mods, each of which must be downloaded and installed separately. Is that right?

As far as I know, downloading and installing each mod is the main method for the modding-openmw lists.

There is a tool to try to automate game modlist installs called Wabbajack [1]. It was briefly discussed on the openmw forums [2]. I'm not sure if anyone has tried further to get the modding-openmw lists working with it. I have never used Wabbajack, so I don't know too much other than it exists. It still seems to have extra requirements according to the post, including a premium NexusMods account if you don't want to manually download everything.

Just as I typed all the above I saw a mention of portmod [3] in the modding-openmw guide about mod managers. Seems it's like Gentoo's portage, but for game mods. I see it has some meta packages for modding-openmw in their ebuild-like repository [4], but I don't think any of the big lists have been updated in awhile. Also, there again seems to be issues with it auto downloading from NexusMods mentioned in the issue tracker. Nevertheless, it looks to be an interesting project.

[1] https://github.com/wabbajack-tools/wabbajack

[2] https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?t=7581

[3] https://gitlab.com/portmod/portmod

[4] https://portmod.gitlab.io/openmw-mods/meta-momw/

I'd suggest taking a look at Morrowind Rebirth

All the alternatives seem to involved managing a plethora of mini-mods that hopefully work together.. it's really easy to install and it turns the game instantly from a drab/stale/dated look to something a lot busier and lively - at least at a surface level. Maybe it has some issues that I'm just not aware of - I never really got far in playing it

I'd be curious what other people thought of it. It seems to never be mentioned in lists and "hardcore" players seem to not like it for some reason

I noticed that view distance can also remove some of the mystique from a game.

When it's cranked too high, the world feels much smaller even though it takes just as long to walk anywhere. Probably because my mental understanding of the world is so fuzzy that it allows my brain to overestimate how far apart the more concrete nodes are like cities. Walking the path from Balmora to some quest location and being distracted half the time with cliff racers and dungeons doesn't really establish how far I walked in my head. It could have been kilometers.

But looking at the whole 3D model of the world removes all of that fuzzy uncertainty that made the world feel big. The best example of this is looking at all of Vivec in your viewport. Without the fog and short view distance, Vivec looks so small despite the amount of times I got lost in it as a kid.

There seems to be a healthy balance of fog + view distance.

I agree. Also, I really liked the hazy vibe that Morrowind has from an immersion point of view. It's a volcanic island, it makes sense for there to be tons of smoke that clouds your view! It really goes well with the bizarre out-worldly vegetation and fauna.

When I played Oblivion and Skyrim, both great games, I felt I was back in a medieval setting rather than some fantasy land. (Skyrim is a bit better, Oblivion's look and feel is too Europe in the Middle Ages).

Yeah, that's why I could never get into Skyrim even when playing it after I beat Morrowind a few years ago on OpenMW. It's cliche criticism, but it felt like a generic medieval setting. The generic dragon opener of an otherwise interesting hook also crystalizes the feeling.

It just can't compete with Morrowind's giant mushrooms and random people calling me a filthy N'wah.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utG17UeUv00 (19 seconds)

I remember reading somewhere that there was a single writer behind most of the distinctive, weird setting of Morrowind (and I think the first two Elder Scrolls, too?) and he didn't work on IV and V. The person or people who replaced him didn't have that kind of creativity, or weren't allowed to express it, so we got Generic Fantasy instead of all the delightful weirdness we should have (some of the early lore about other parts of Tamriel is nuts, I wish we'd gotten to see more of it).

You may be thinking of Douglas Goodall, who designed and wrote the majority of Morrowind’s questlines. He left Bethesda shortly after Morrowind’s release.

I don’t know if the general strangeness of Vvardenfell could necessarily be attributed to Goodall, but various central themes and dialog certainly could be.

You have probably received the response you were looking for, but Kirkbride is another of those contributors to Morrowind lore that helped make it special. Sermons of Vivec, Dragon break, etc.

Michael Kirkbride is mostly responsible for Morrowind's unique flavor: https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281082/elder-scrolls-mor...

I read somewhere that he would come up with his weirdest lore during all-nighters, delirious from sleep deprivation & some kind of intoxicant which I forget.

This reminded me of something the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wrote on the "intoxicant" part: https://uesp.tumblr.com/post/179903892360/is-it-true-that-mi...

> All of these rumors are false. The truth is that people on the Internet saw someone adding writing beyond a grade school level to a video game, and decided that to produce such a thing required you to be on drugs. Ignoring the dangerous message to budding creative types who may see the message that to be creative you have to be on drugs, it’s also extremely unfair to Michael Kirkbride himself. He’s a real person, with a real career. It’s not the best thing in the world to be a noted professional, and whenever someone googles your name, one of the top results relates to a fictional history with substance abuse.

Kirkbride's description tones it down to just some coffee and bourbon: https://www.imperial-library.info/content/thirty-six-lessons...

> "It was one dev, naked in a room with a carton of cigarettes, a thermos full of coffee and bourbon, and all his summoned angels."

And: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/hrmdzk/comment/fyd...

> You know that comes from a Photoshopped image, right? Come on now.

> Anyway, that’s all a lie. I’ve already given an account of how the 36 were written: a week of bourbon, smokes, and solitude. I’ve never dropped acid in my life.

Gettin high on skooma no doubt

There’s plenty of weird environments in Skyrim too. Even if you do not necessarily see them during the main quest.

That's good to hear. I sheepishly never made it more than a day into Skyrim but I owe it a fair shot.

Yeah, high enough to see most of Fort Ebon from Vivec and vice-versa is roughly the sweet spot, IMO.

(Or is it Ebonheart? That sounds right.)

This is definitely true. A good compromise I've found is the mod that adds volumetric fog to OpenMW. Looks absolutely stunning and retains the mystique of distance in a more immersive way.

Oh man, does it have a way to set the fog to different density in different areas? Vanilla's max draw distance seems way too low in the relatively-nice parts of the island, especially the South, West, and coastal East, but if you set OpenMW's draw high enough to feel right in those areas, it's way too high in the ashlands and around the volcano and all that.

Not directly, but it is dynamic based on weather and atmosphere in each region.

> But looking at the whole 3D model of the world removes all of that fuzzy uncertainty that made the world feel big.

The map also plays a trick on you. Many of the paths are deliberately winding through valleys and such to make the travel seem longer. Personally I felt this the most in the northern Ashlands. Combined with the Fog, limited Fast Travel, and a bunch of distracting Dwemer ruins the whole island felt huge.

...I might have to reinstall

The fast travel's not actually that limited, you just have to work for some of it. Like if you don't learn the mark, recall, and the two intervention spells pretty early on, yeah, it's painful. Otherwise, it's barely less fast-travelly than the next two entries in the series. The game provides the tools to solve the problem, it just doesn't give them to you for free, and it doesn't push them at you with flashing lights around them like "DEFINITELY GET THESE ASAP".

... which means that younger-me totally did two entire playthroughs without ever learning any of those spells, of course. Ouch.

I think everyone's first playthrough should be the vanilla game if possible.

There are hi-res texture packs & mesh improvements that are pure wins, even for a first time player, IMO. They don't change the art much, they just make it look way better on a modern screen. And I'd recommend a mod to make plant harvesting more like the later games (there are a few, I think the one I usually use is Herbalism—the vanilla behavior of treating them like containers and not marking which have been harvested simply sucks). Plus the usual unnofficial-patch mod that's basically required for any Bethesda game.

That'd be the extent of the mods I'd recommend to a first timer.

I guess the next generation of open world games will have a much larger scale ... you will be able to stand on a hill and watch miles of procedurally generated landscape populated by ChatGPT powered farmers and bandits.

While that sounds great ... I bet AAA titles will find ways to make that repetitive as hell in the name of providing predictable fun.

It's definitely an important factor! Open world games are at their best when the player navigates the space naturally - without quest markers and the like, but with "oh, that thing on the horizon looks cool, I'll go there!". FNV is amazing at this. The Morrowind devs definitely considered this, but they were of course limited by the hardware of their time. So the game is made to evoke this feeling even at small render distances.

But if you then crank them up, you won't have one or two cool landmarks to see, but way too many! You can see this done well in Elden Ring - you can see very far, and the map is big enough to still space out points of interest.

The only way to "fix" this for higher render distances is to rebuild the world with those in mind.

This got me to finally play through and beat Morrowind in my 30s, avenging my 13yo self who had looted and lost an essential quest item got stuck in the main quest line.

I played it while taking notes about the quests which was a bit more fun than just following quest markers. Though that was only fun because of Morrowind's weird alien world. There are only a few games intriguing enough to warrant note-taking.

Something interesting in the ecosystem is the tes3cmd cli tool anonymously(?) written in Perl: https://github.com/john-moonsugar/tes3cmd/blob/master/tes3cm... for manipulating game/mod files.

> This got me to finally play through and beat Morrowind in my 30s, avenging my 13yo self who had looted and lost an essential quest item got stuck in the main quest line.

Hah, I had the same experience in my teens as you did.

Was it worth the replay? Any tips, other than note-taking?

I don't know. I played it during covid when I had a lot of time and patience. I'm also not a big gamer anymore so Morrowind wasn't competing with much more stimulating games. That's probably going to be the biggest obstacle for most gamers: why play Morrowind when you can hop into Diablo 4 or whatever with your friends in your limited free time.

With OpenMW, you can be playing as soon as the game files download, so just give it a shot. If you get to Cassius' House in Balmora and still can't give a damn about what's going on, then just shutter it for some other time.

> why play Morrowind when you can hop into Diablo 4

10 years from now, Diablo 4 will be dead and you'll still be able to play Morrowind :)

Gracias! Me, I'm much more of a 'tinker with qemu-system-ppc for hours trying to get this obscure System 7 game to run' kind of gamer than one who requires instant gratification, but I totally hear what you're saying.

I like the idea of playing it in a different language. I'll see if I can pull up a version in the language I am learning; could be quite fun.

OpenMW is nothing short of amazing.

I only wish there was a similar undertaking for Oblivion. The PC version is playable, but the game came out in the weird, awkward dark ages for PC configurability and accessibility, so there are some stumbling blocks.

For example, despite first playing and loving Oblivion on my Xbox 360, the PC version still does not have controller support, and any attempts to hack it in require mapping the mouse to a joystick (Which is not a great approximation).

OpenMW seems to be on the early road for that, too.

For now, it can load assets & worlds from Oblivion, FO3/NV & Skyrim. ‶Only″ thing missing is... well, all the game mechanics.

hah, as soon as I posted this comment I googled it and saw that Oblivion support was nascent. Here's hoping it gets to a good enough state! Oblivion co-op would fulfill the dreams of 15-year-old me

This is somewhat antithetical to your desire of playing it on PC but Oblivion got updated to run backwards compatible on Xbox Series X at 4k 60fps. Unreal you can pay $10 for a used copy and play this classic and it runs like a dream.

In general I love Microsoft’s investment in backwards compatibility and wish we had more 1st party support from all the companies so these games could be more easily enjoyed for the rest of time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_...

Agreed - Microsoft's Xbox backwards compatibility is awesome. I bought Xbox 360 LEGO Batman ages ago and play it with my son now 2 player on Xbox One.

Microsoft is not my favorite company, but one thing that has stood out to me is that they really value backwards compatibility in general.

I see Microsoft bending over backwards to support old third party apps that rely on API bugs or ancient versions of windows. On the Apple side, I see 32-bit apps being cut off, Pages not supporting old versions of Pages files, etc. To me this reads as not caring much about backwards compatibility.

Microsoft is very committed to support apps compatible with Windows versions from 1995 to about … 2007 or so.

I see. Coincidentally, my experience with windows mostly falls into that range of dates. (Actually goes back to the 80's, and ends around 2003.)

I’m not entirely sure where the cutoff date is. But my general point is that Microsoft started churning lots of dev stacks which aren’t easy to install or deploy on their newest Windows versions, all the while a random Win32 program from 1999 works just fine.

OpenMW already has basic support for Oblivion. They are having trouble with getting the trees to load (something about SpeedTree). Skyrim trees work though.

There is a project attempting to re-implement Oblivion in the Skyrim engine. Could that be a good alternative? Controller inputs etc. should at least work natively. It's not done yet, but they are targeting 2025 as a deadline for full release.

https://skyblivion.com/

Oh, I'm 100% looking forward to SkyBlivion. They've been making great progress. But it's more of a remake than a remaster, if you catch my drift. The underlying mechanics are going to be more Skyrim.

NorthernUI (a mod for Oblivion) allegedly can add full gamepad support, they have a lite version that does this without altering the vanilla UI: https://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/48577

I'm so looking forward to F:NV support, which I understand is some ways off yet.

It's a pain to play and mod on Linux at the moment, and I'd find some kind of OpenFNV extremely welcome.

Skyblivion (https://skyblivion.com/) is an improved remake of Oblivion running on top of the Skyrim engine. It’s due for release in 2025. And possibly one of the biggest mods ever made.

There's a fantastic fork of this project which adds multiplayer also: https://tes3mp.com/

It's a bit awkward to set up, but I played coop with a friend and it worked great.

Morrowind was just fantastic. I loved that everything seemed to always exist. You could wonder around and find a super powerful artifact or kill or lose something required fornthe main quest. It felt more immersive that way.

I didnt like morrowind, when I played it, only because it felt such a massive map and I would get lost easily...

and if I stepped away from the game even for a short while...

https://i.imgur.com/jB0TZm6.jpg

Funnily that's one of the things I loved the most!

Nowadays games with massive world-maps have navigation on the HUD, and always-available fast travel. Morrowind had neither. A quest's instructions were like "take the road to Balmora and then on the second fork, go past the tree and you will find a cave". And then you would spend hours trying to find that spot. And unless you had the proper scrolls, you wouldn't even be able to teleport back to a main spot.

It made the world so wonderful to explore.

One of the things I really like about the new Zelda game is that, while it has quest markers and all that for many of the quests (but not all! Some will just mark where you need to return when it's done, and the rest is up to you!) you also get lots and lots of hints about locations of interesting or valuable non-quest things, and those are purely up to you to pursue, based on what you've been told. Not even a quest entry, just something you can do if you want to.

Yes I find being overladen with quest markers and journals so immersion breaking. And it also devalues conversations with non quest demoting NPCs because the game mechanics are laid bare.

In Final Fantasy pre-12 the game obfuscated progression steps and quest givers to some extent. As a result the game rewarded you for talking to everyone and, as you never knew what was a quest and what was just filler it you would pay a bit more attention which ended up immersing you in the lore a bit more.

Games are often a lot of smoke and mirrors and once the trick of the magic is clear it's often much more disappointing. I feel that way when games just descend into busy work fetch quests with markers and highlighted words.

Yeah the ES games feel super immersive in a way that hasn't really been replicated. You can sit down anywhere, pick up any item, etc. That makes the game more "real" than any amount of graphical fidelity.

The game was fantastic. Buggy, awkward, sometimes barely functional - and yet it conjured a cohesive world in a way that every successive generation of TES game has managed less and less well for me.

The lore- and world-building, circa Morrowind, was top notch.

One thing that drove me mad about Oblivion was the level scaling of items which meant it sometimes made sense to be strategic about when you completed a quest in order to best optimise/metagame the mechanic.

I really love it when a game is completely happy to allow you to innocently wonder into a zone far above your level and let you get completely squashed by the monsters you find there.

or save scum it to get the loot. I got umbra gear not too long after getting out of the sewers in Oblivion by opportune saving.

Dark Souls (released the same year as Skyrim) famously lets the player walk into high level zones mere seconds from the starting area. It's easier to find the cemetery than the path up to the proper first area.

Oh, that explains why i abandoned the game. Terrible design. It doesn't even tell you what's going on.

Part of the fun is figuring it out yourself. It can feel oppressive at times, but I personally really enjoyed it.

I didn't even realize there was an alternate path, but heard about people say the game was intentionally difficult. Banged my head on the graveyard for a few hours, then gave up.

One of my playthroughs of Oblivion I did at level 1 without levelling. It made everything much easier (oh, and Umbra's sword). Unfortunately it also meant that you there was much less monster diversity since some monsters only appeared at higher levels. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Under_Leveling

Still something interesting to try.

I actually preferred that because the low-level creatures seemed more appropriate for most of the Cyrodiilic environments. I'd imagine the imperial presence would quickly drive out most of the tough beasts in most areas of the countryside and the less special dungeons.

I guess lore-wise Cyrodiil was supposed to be larger and then tough creatures would make more sense, but in-game, most of it felt like the back yard of the imperial city.

It's not just the beasts that are out of place - common bandits wearing glass armor at high player levels is pretty ridiculous.

F:NV was a lot better about this IMO.

Right after leaving the docs place you can head to the strip in a straight line, and it will take you through a route with some of the most powerful creatures, like giant radscorpions and cazadors, and if you somehow manage to get past them there is a mining site filled with deathclaws!

There are in game warning signs telling you to not take the route but you are totally free to ignore them.

> You could wonder around and find a super powerful artifact

If that's true they got rid of this in later elder scrolls games. One of the reasons I abandoned Skyrim before finishing was because the loot leveled with you. You could walk across the world and find a secret cave, yet all the chests therein contain crap. So I had virtually no incentive to explore knowing the loot was randomly generated based on my current level.

Compare to FromSoftware games like Dark Souls where you can run halfway across the world and find super rare and powerful items.

Morrowind also has random loot based on your level: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Leveled_Lists

This is especially obvious in the Mournhold sewers were basically every chest you find draws from the "silver weapon" list.

Tribunal also had the usual expansion pack problem of basic enemies carrying better equipment than the top level items in the base game. (The goblin sword is worth 100 gold, but does 10-35 damage! The Daedric Wakizashi, the best short blade in the base game, is worth 48,000 gold... and does 10-30 damage.)

Morrowind level-scales loot in containers (although not to the extend that later ES games do) but does not level items directly in the environment, which includes most of the top equipment.

My fav bit about MW is they went hard on the role playing bit. Could level up all these random skills which then compounded with skills and enchantments.

Being able to jump crazy far and breathe underwater were my favourites. The idea of alteration was so fun, hate that they took it out made later games feel much blander esp when I've always thought TES combat sucks . Also the weapon diversity was so much more interesting, they really dumbed down the weapon set in future games, I miss halberds

OpenMW is one of my favorite open source projects. The upcoming 0.48 apparently fixes the Lady birthsign bug. Someone must have bit the bullet and reworked the magic effect system. Thanks guys!

"I fear not the man who has released 10000 games once, but I fear the man who has released 1 game 10000 times." - Todd Howard.

I really miss the old commentary videos on youtube :/

For weirdsexy life got in the way and suddenly stopped doing the commentaries and was replaced by some german dude (sorry don't know his name). Somehow watching the release videos wasn't as fun anymore as it was before. I don't want to talk down on the work the new guy does, but only want to highlight how exceptional high quality (especially for their time) the old release videos were.

Also... I can't stand the german accent

There is also a fork that has very basic initial support for Skyrim. Here are videos: https://www.youtube.com/@PetrMikheev/videos https://www.youtube.com/@cc9cii/videos

I wonder if there's some new opportunities for these game engines with generative AI.

One possibility is treating the game like scaffolding. It feels like textures and images could all be replaced fairly easily with generative versions. Toss them in Midjourney with /describe, play around to create replacements. Or Stable Diffusion or whatever. (Not sure how many things are "images" and how many are other structures like shaders.)

Maps are harder, at least I imagine harder to deconstruct into atomic pieces that can be replaced. Though it's interesting to think about whether an LLM could decompose them into more semantic pieces, if it could understand the underlying structure that may only have existed in the mind of the original map creator.

I imagine things like quests, stats, etc., would all be amenable to generation.

Maybe the big question is if things really are separable enough to use the old game as scaffolding: can you replace 10% of the game, or 50%, or 90% and have a meaningfully playable game?

It may be unimaginative but I'm really looking forward to really deep NPCs with relationships and interests and personalities and all.

You might want to check out what Nvidia is doing with RTX Remix -

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/rtx-remix/

This is a plot point in the Orson Scott Card novel 'Ender's Game'. Ender plays a generative video game on an iPad-like device that responds to his decisions and incorporates people/events from his personal life, to the point of manipulating his subconscious thoughts and dreams.

A game like this could be interesting, but you would not be able to discuss it with others as a shared experience that has fixity the way you can with any modern media, and it could certainly be used to manipulate people.

Morrowind's predecessor Daggerfall had randomly generated dungeons. Overall, they were pretty bad although they were kind of interesting and added variety. I got the impression they randomly stuck basic dungeon chunks together to build them.

The idea of using the AI to generate new similar textures is a pretty cool one.

Speaking of daggerfall, a while ago I saw it got ported to Unity. Its free on GOG if you wanna try it out. Makes the game look way better.

IIRC, daggerfalls map is as big as europe, so it was easy to overlook the replicated chunks.

https://www.gog.com/game/daggerfall_unity_gog_cut

Seems like a huge waste of GPU / CPU when Dwarf Fortress has had all this for years…

It re-implements a little more than MW :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8jkNO-M9cg

That's cool, but let's be honest here, Skyrim SE runs perfectly fine on recent computers. It's Morrowind that doesn't, which is why OpenMW is necessary.

Disagree. Skyrim has all kinds of problems that an openSK could address.

- 60fps cap

- no native support on mac/linux

- engine bugs/limitations

Open open source engine would be absolutely huge for stability & moddability. Stock Skyrim SE mostly runs fine, but is still prone to crashing, corrupting save files, etc.

Many of those can be addressed by mods such as the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch and various mods aimed at overhauling the save system but an open source engine would be really great.

Skyrim doesn't have a native Linux version, OpenMW does.

I love this just on principle, but maybe someone can clarify something for me. Does this:

1) Provide a better experience of the game immediately?

or is it

2) The (very high) value of this tool is that it will lend itself to faster/better/easier fan base development and modification of the game, enhancing the entire ES ecosystem?

3) something i didn’t think of

4) some combination. Of the above

Regardless, it makes me want to kick my current gameplay to the curb (it’s Shadow of Doubt, it’s incredible check it out) and dump another 100 hours into Morrowind right now.

Nice work!

It performs better on modern hardware and fixes a number of issues in the original game. This is generally the purpose of source ports. It also simplifies modding, as you can use the launcher to enable/disable mods as you like. Graphics are also improved. For example: the water effects look much more realistic in OpenMW.

Fun fact: OpenMW now stands for ‘Open Microwave’

> This is generally the purpose of source ports.

While the purpose is the same, OpenMW is not a source port but a engine reimplementation which is something on a whole different level of effort.

There's also an Android port: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=is.xyz.omw with more info at https://omw.xyz.is/

It has onscreen and physical controller support + an emulated mouse mode that can be helpful for navigating menus and such. It works well on the Retroid Pocket 3+

Sadly, that version is fairly outdated and has issues with newer Samsung devices. There has been a couple forks[1] of it that still work with newer devices and are based on newer releases.

[1] https://github.com/Sisah2/openmw-android/actions/runs/493540...

Just some advice if you want more people interested, put some images and/or videos of the gameplay. Clicked around and could not find even a single image of what the game looks like.

Blessings to you, n'wah.

Yet we must remember that, unlike your endeavors, OpenMW is not a highly scalable monthly-subscription SAAS to be built out of a coworking space… it is a client, for Morrowind: the third chapter of one of -if not _the_- the most popular RPG series of all time.

I've used this project, really appreciate the ambition and quality.

Hmm, this got my hopes up. Turns out this is just a random mention, and not a new release. Last release seems to be from 2021.

OpenMW is in active development, but for some reason there are no longer release announcements on the webpage/GH. The newest version is 0.49 (the one you mentioned from 2021 was 0.47).

I did a recent full playthrough of Morrowind and all the expansions on OpenMW, using one of the available curated mod lists as a starting point. It was rock solid throughout, looked much better than the original, and was at least as much fun as I remembered it was. Highly recommended for TES fans.

For those that have a liking to the blog style project updates some other projects do, the main website is a good feed https://openmw.org/en/.

I like the blog, but I wish it were updated more often. Even little updates would be welcome.

Another interesting blog in a similar space is the Daggerfall Unity bloc over at https://www.dfworkshop.net/.

Interesting. So it's basically the game engine without the assets.

I'd like to mod Cliff Racers into every Bethesda game.

OpenMW is a great way to play Morrowind on Android.

I found an unmaintained version on gitlab and github, is there a current version that you use?

I believe that Sisah2's fork on GitHub is the newest version that's stable/widely used and on version 0.48[1].

I haven't played through OpenMW in awhile, but I was able to do it on a Blackberry KeyONE from 2017 and it ran smooth and was quite fun!

[1] https://github.com/Sisah2/openmw-android/actions/runs/493540...

The old version is, essentially, complete. There's nothing wrong or missing with it as far as I can tell.

Not seeing a binary for mac. Is there one?

Yes! It runs pretty well on an M1 Mac edit: there’s a .dmg on the GitHub

The last release is from 2021. Is that correct?

I did not know 0.49 had been released. I wonder what the highlights are.

0.48 is not even released yet (still a RC) you'll have to wait a bit more for 0.49.

There's nothing preventing you from building it yourself though, the master branch is stable and you can complete the game without a single crash or game-breaking bug.

The README.md certainly is confusing then:

  Version: 0.49.0

I don't think it has been released.

0.48 is in RC phase.

This is only Singleplayer, right? How is the Linux support?

Good.

TES3MP is a sister project built on OpenMW which adds multiplayer.

https://tes3mp.com/

>Open source.

>You need to own the game to play.

So, what's the point?

>OpenMW is a game engine recreation and only replaces the program. OpenMW does not come with any “content” or “asset” – namely the art, game data, and other copyrighted material that you need to play the game as designed by Bethesda Softworks. You have to provide this content yourself by installing Morrowind and then configuring OpenMW to use the existing installation.

https://openmw.org/faq/#whatis

The point is that it makes the game available on more platforms, more graphic features, stability etc.

https://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=Features

The code can be updated, adapted and audited. Or someone could provide alternative artwork and data.

1 - Having an open engine allows for enhancements.

2 - Having an open engine means opportunities to fix defects (OpenMW crashes far less than the original, even in its final version)

3 - You can recompile it for other architectures and operating systems, that weren't supported by the original.

4 - Someone could write a whole new game for the engine, and release the entire thing for free.

5. Probably also easier to add large new sections or expansions if other games are any judge.

- Playing in 4K

- Playing on Linux

- Playing on a better implementation of the engine

- Changing what you don't like in the game

What's the point of Linux when your wifi card driver is proprietary ;)

As a hobby project, I'm adding AI text generation to the OpenMW NPC's. I'm trying to figure out how this would work for a 'real' project without having to develop an entire game first.

I would definitely not be able to do that if OpenMW did not exist.

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