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Morrowind engine replacement OpenMW v0.48 out now with shaders

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Bringing with it some pretty fancy new features, the Morrowind engine replacement OpenMW version 0.48.0 is out now. An exciting release for bringing some modern stuff to this RPG classic.

One of the biggest additions is support for post-processing shaders giving plenty of new eye-candy and various advanced visual effects like bloom, godrays, ambient occlusion, and many more. There's also a new menu on F2, letting you toggle effects easily.

There's also much better looking fog, a visual overhaul of rain ripples, soft particles were implemented, a bunch of improved animations for blocking and spellcasting, big improvements to the sound-system so sounds fade instead of cutting out when moving away, various UI improvements, a data directory section in the launcher for easier modding, font settings in the launcher and lots of other tweaks.


Pictured - OpenMW on Fedora KDE 38

Another major addition is the introduction of their own Lua scripting API named OpenMW-Lua. This was built with eventually supporting multiplayer and reaching parity with MWSE (Morrowind Script Extender) but will not work with normal MWSE-Lua mods because OpenMW is quite different behind the scenes. Future releases of it will continue to expand what it can do, so eventually OpenMW really will be the place for everything Morrowind.

See the full release blog post for more.

Want to set it up on Steam Deck? It's pretty easy as I covered in a previous guide.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Klaas Jul 25, 2023
Quoting: GroganI've only had "0.49" from git (late to the party here) which probably isn't much different than 0.48 at this time, but I can't say I notice any performance problems. My hardware doesn't break a sweat for this. (amdgpu/RX 570/mesa 23.2'ish) and it doesn't feel like I'm running into any cpu/gpu underutilizing behaviour.
Obviously it highly depends on the draw distance and other settings and where you are in the game. Did you increase it from the default? Are you still in the start area? The larger cities have a lot more things to display. One of the consequences of the way the assets were made is an abnormally high number of draw calls.
robertosf92 Jul 25, 2023
Quoting: Grogan
Quoting: KlaasThe main issue is that the game assets are highly unoptimized so without mods the game runs worse than Skyrim.

I've only had "0.49" from git (late to the party here) which probably isn't much different than 0.48 at this time, but I can't say I notice any performance problems. My hardware doesn't break a sweat for this. (amdgpu/RX 570/mesa 23.2'ish) and it doesn't feel like I'm running into any cpu/gpu underutilizing behaviour.

Well since 0.48 has been in RC phase for quite a few months, quite some PRs have been merged with the 0.49 tag. The milestone is at 84% in their gitlab so there might be some nice new features in there.

And maybe we can get 0.49 with a shorter time lapse than that between 0.47 and 0.48 :)


Last edited by robertosf92 on 25 July 2023 at 5:58 pm UTC
Grogan Jul 25, 2023
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Quoting: KlaasObviously it highly depends on the draw distance and other settings and where you are in the game. Did you increase it from the default? Are you still in the start area? The larger cities have a lot more things to display. One of the consequences of the way the assets were made is an abnormally high number of draw calls.

Yes, I have the graphics settings all at maximum, including draw distance.

However, no, we'll have to see about bigger cities then. I'm still in the first area of the game, in Balmora and traveling between sign posts etc. on the way to Caldera.
Jarmer Aug 10, 2023
Quoting: Spirimint
Quoting: JarmerMan, don't tempt me! I shouldn't spend another umpteen hours modding the game and then never playing it, should I?!?!?!?!?

Maybe try this:

https://next.nexusmods.com/morrowind/collections

Whoa! Didn't know this existed, thank you for the link.
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