OpenMW, the excellent open source game engine for Morrowind has made some interesting progress towards supporting later games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
From their latest news post:
Let’s begin with a recently merged feature which might seem like a small change at first, but rather is part of bigger project. OpenMW is now able to read the BSA files of Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and New Vegas – thanks to the hard work of both cc9cii, who first wrote the code for OpenMW 0.36, and Azdul, who ported the code to the current OpenMW master. This brings us one step closer to actually running assets from later TES and Fallout games in OpenMW. However, a lot of work lies ahead of us – next on our list is support for newer versions of NIF, ESM, and ESP files. We’ll keep you posted.
This is quite exciting, since some of those games are notoriously buggy even on their original platforms. Having an up to date game engine to run them as well as Morrowind, would be pretty epic. As they say though, a lot of work lies ahead and so to support another game we could be looking at quite a long time.
They've also been working on optimisations, improving both the look and the performance of distant terrain, work towards enabling OpenMW to support some popular Morrowind mods like Sotha Sil Expanded and so on.
On top of that exciting development, they've finally merged in support for shadows back into OpenMW which was removed when they switched from Ogre3D to OpenSceneGraph so the next release of OpenMW should be a rather nice one for completeness.
Need a copy of Morrowind to play in OpenMW? You can grab it on GOG and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: DuncThat's... ambitious. But then so was reverse-engineering Morrowind in the first place. Good luck to them. I just hope it doesn't distract from the main goal.
What main goal? Pretty sure they've pretty much nailed Morrowind. Fully playable, shadows are back... not sure what's left! It's been a while since I looked at their roadmap though.
I look forward to the day I can play all these games without wine/proton, and without all the bugs of the original engines. \o/
qptain Nemo 20 Feb, 2019
And maybe that's how Bethesda will finally get a decent game engine to use. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Vortex_Acherontic 20 Feb, 2019
It's a bit frustrating that I was not able to get my Skyrim (security copy) to run since Win XP times o.o
Edit:
It seems like OPenMW has still some serious bugs.
Just got my fresh new Copy of Morrowind, installed the Flatpak and run the Setup to locate the Datafiles.
Launched a new game, talked to the Elf (?) in the Ship tiped my name, followed the guard, got outside the Ship, tlaked to the 2nd guard, choosed my character and klicked on okay and nothing ever happend again o.O
Restart the Application, same procedure, same bug.
Started a new game (With out exiting the game) stuck at the first conversation with the Elf inside the ship and now guard appeared to bring me upstairs o.O
Edit 2:
Played the original version via Steam Play and also noticed some dialogs where not triggered in OpenMW o.o
I think this is worth a Bug ticket? o.o
Last edited by Vortex_Acherontic on 20 February 2019 at 9:29 pm UTC
Quoting: scaineFair point.Quoting: DuncThat's... ambitious. But then so was reverse-engineering Morrowind in the first place. Good luck to them. I just hope it doesn't distract from the main goal.
What main goal? Pretty sure they've pretty much nailed Morrowind. Fully playable, shadows are back... not sure what's left! It's been a while since I looked at their roadmap though.
I cannot overstate how excited I am to see an open-source Oblivion or Skyrim. Just imagine the modding possibilities! And the stability!
I'm also very excited for a possible New Vegas using that engine (and ofc Tale of Two Wastelands). Last time I tried to play that game it always crashed because it ran out of memory.
With such an engine maybe we will eventually get a complete mod of all Tamriel, without having to worry that a new TES game release would put an end to such project, like it happened repeatedly in the past.
But still, I think we are a long way from having this in a usable and enjoyable form.
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