Whew, this one took a while. Around three years of development went into OpenMW 0.49.0 which is now available to play Morrowind with lots of enhancements.
An absolutely massive update for the open source game engine reimplementation, with so many things new it would be impossible to list them all here. Easily one of my absolute favourite projects because Morrowind is such a classic it deserves to be kept alive and well.
Should look better than ever too with many new graphical updates like water ripples, water transparency, specular lighting, improved post-processing and more. There's physics improvements, upgrades to the scripting system for modders, UI improvements, a faster launcher, translations support in the launcher, animation blending support, pathfinding improvements and it feels like the list goes on forever. The list of bug fixes is also rather long.
General gameplay was a focus for this release too, like getting melee combat to actually look and feel correct. As they said "Nobody knows how it works, and if you think you do, you don’t. Even if your name is Todd Howard. Nevertheless, trying to get it right was a focus for this release, and we replaced the physics-based hits of previous releases with Morrowind’s more simple scanning of the player’s surroundings based on a hit cone defined by the game settings". The result is that it should feel better and hitting flying enemies is now much easier. But it's also now easier for flying enemies to actually hit you too.
Perhaps even more exciting is that they've begun prototyping work to support Oblivion (2006), Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4. What they said about it: "You’ve read that right. Leveraging community research, we’ve begun prototyping support for Oblivion (2006), Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4, games based on later revisions of Bethesda’s open-world game engine. Their game files can be enabled as “mods” for Morrowind or the OpenMW Example Suite in the launcher. The console can then be used to teleport to their locations. As we’re picking the low-hanging fruits, early support includes very basic “walking simulator” functionality".
See more in their release announcement. You need to own Morrowind to play it which you can grab on GOG and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Pyretic a day ago
Glad to see it's still going strong, though I hope the VR version is just as stable with all these new features, since it's been my dream to play this game in VR.Last edited by Pyretic on 4 Jul 2025 at 5:30 pm UTC
Caldathras a day ago
The last time they did a version update (0.47 to 0.48), the launchpad PPA deleted my installation and wouldn't let me reinstall 0.47, even using the GitHub installer. That was Mint 20.3 when it was still under active support.
Now, I've got 0.48 running on Mint 21.3. Upgrading to Mint 22 resulted in OpenMW failing to run, so I fell back to Mint 21.3. If the PPA tries to upgrade to 0.49, will I face the same problem I did with 0.47 to 0.48?
When you look at the PPA files, there is literally only one file for jammy (22.04) or noble (24.04) -- the core executable and other dependencies are not listed.
I'm seriously thinking about dropping the PPA altogether and just using the GitHub installer.
TheRiddick a day ago
Klaas a day ago
Some parts (except rendering/draw calls) are using multi threading, but the main bottle neck in rendering is the way the original assets are structured.
Caldathras 18 hours ago
An impressive wish list but I'm not sure we'll see Vulkan support anytime soon. Not sure about multi-threading though.
One of the developers on the OpenMW team (AnyOldName3) has said "We'd have to drop OSG support in favour of VSG support and that would mean OpenMW would become incompatible with lots of hardware it currently supports.". He says they lack the manpower to implement both.
OpenMW on Vulkan API?
https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?t=7469
VulkanSceneGraph and vsgopenmw are unofficial experimental forks. There are apparently no short-term or long-term plans to integrate vsgopenmw into the main project at this time. The most recent comment on the matter was in March 2025 (see above link).
R Daneel Olivaw 11 hours ago
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