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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.
Tags: Game Engine, Open Source, RPG | Apps: OpenMW
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19 comments
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NeoTheFox Feb 20, 2019
Wow, this is very much unexpected. Oblivion support sound amazing, this game is borderline unplayable with a ton of mods.
crt0mega Feb 20, 2019
w00t!
Dunc Feb 20, 2019
That'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.
scaine Feb 20, 2019
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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.
WorMzy Feb 20, 2019
That's awesome news!

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 Feb 20, 2019
Wow, this is quite something. I'm not sure I'll still want to play any of these games in like 5 years but still, it's comforting and good for game preservation. It'd be interesting to give them a spin on a more sound technical foundation at the very least. It'd benefit things like Enderal too.

And maybe that's how Bethesda will finally get a decent game engine to use. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Shmerl Feb 20, 2019
Amazing!
Dunc Feb 20, 2019
Quoting: scaine
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.
Fair point.
Scoopta Feb 21, 2019
If they can get Skyrim running in OpenMW they'll have literally replaced Proton for me.
Botonoski Feb 21, 2019
I wonder if they'll use something like Bullet to replace the Havok physics engine. It'd be fascinating to see how that sort of change would impact the games, if at all.
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