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The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.14.0!
This release precedes Morrowind’s 10th Anniversary by 2 days!
Release packages for Ubuntu are now available via our [URL='http://launchpad.net/%7Eopenmw/+archive/openmw']Launchpad PPA[/URL]. Release packages for other platforms are available on our [URL='http://code.google.com/p/openmw/downloads/list']Download page[/URL].
This release brings many notable features, including terrain and water rendering!
A video highlighting many of the new changes in this release made by our very own WeirdSexy can be found [URL='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNjlgg8yRe4']here[/URL].

Please note:

There is a regression in the Launcher in this release, from which you will observe that the rendering subsystem will default to OpenGL regardless of what was previously selected. This will be fixed in the next release. This can be overcome by setting the rendering system explicitly from the launcher each time, or running the OpenMW binary directly from the command line, which will select the renderer that has been set in your config file.
There is a known issue where a crash may occur underwater with the underwater effect enabled on OS X

Changelog:

Fix for meshes rendering with the wrong orientation
Fix for better grabbing of small objects
Fix to enable toggling of collision rendering
Updates to be compatible with Ogre 1.8.0 RC1
Fix for Wireframe mode applying to HUD and Console
Fix for terrain crashing when moving away from predefined cells
Fix to allow OS X Launcher to handle spaces in the binary path
Fix to support TGA textures
Fix to support wireframe mode in water
Added water rendering
Added terrain rendering
Added ability to render Path Grid
Added Factions support
Added Local Map
Added Compass/Mini-Map
Added Clothing/Armour redering
Added Window Pinning
Added Auto-Equip.
Added support for containers tracking changes to their contents
Added several NPC Dialogue Window improvements
Added backend for a game settings manager
Added backend for a Spell List and selected spell
Added backend for NPC holstered/drawn state
Added a Morrowind.ini Importer (not yet included in the binary packages)
Refactored the Sound code
MyGUI updated to version 3.2.0

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Hello Everyone,
Just a little more bug fixing and some code writing for build automation (which will speed up future releases) and we'll have 0.12.0 out the door. The code is in [B]lgro's[/B] trustworthy and clean hands (they are frequently washed). 0.12.0 includes [B]Jhooks1[/B] work on animations. These will be activated through the console for now as we don't have proper AI for yet.


Two exciting features will make their debut in version 0.13.0
[LIST=1]

[B]Dialogue GUI![/B] GUS has done a lot of work on this feature already, but there is some broken backend stuff. [B]Zini[/B] will work on broken things/backend stuff after finishing equipping item task.

Water rendering. You'll have more to explore and look at soon. Jhooks1 did an awesome job once again.

[/LIST]


Other News

We're shifting to smaller, more frequent releases. Our goal is a 1-2 month release cycle. Zini developed a multi-release roadmap. You can now check out the tentative plans for 0.13.0 through 0.15.0 at http://bugs.openmw.org:81/projects/openmw/roadmap We know people want to try out new features and we need their help to identify bugs. More new code released at one time means more to sort through to find the culprit(s) that are causing problems.
[B]Yacoby[/B] continues work on Terrain Rendering. This feature will be added to 0.14.0 or later. OGRE 1.8 should make adding terrain much easier than is currently possible with OGRE 1.7, but 1.8 is a couple months past their original release date (we understand, our 0.12.0 release is five months overdue).
Jhooks1 is looking at Project Aedra's excellent implementation of the bullet physics library and seeing if we can't port over parts of it to OpenMW. He's already been able to fix the falling through floor bug.
ElderTroll wrote an [URL='http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2012/02/morrowind-open-source-pngines-who-they.html']article[/URL] for freegamer about open source morrowind engines.
BrotherBrick created a wikipage with instructions about testing for novices, I hope that It can be filled with more info soon. Here is the link: http://openmw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Testing
Project History now contains all our old changelogs. http://openmw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Project_History
We picked up a couple new Developers
[LIST]

Mirrcceam94 joined us recently
Scrawl is a developer from the vdrift project where he works on graphics! OpenMW will wait to implement advanced graphics until after the 1.0.0 release, but there are still many rendering tasks that need finishing; like particles, a proper skybox, and weather.

[/LIST]

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We definitely will. We're planning to do a bimonthly development blog.

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Interesting... very interesting indeed. Do keep us posted - I'd like to see where this goes. ;)

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That is up to the developer. We would love to have them on the system but the developers have to want to be there.

Tim Jung
Desura Game Manager

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It's good to know that Voxatron is still pushing forward. However, I'd still like to know what's up with the Desura inclusion... :(

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It was a rather long time before this update. But I'm hoping for something fun soon. Something new and different. We'll see what's up next in later updates :D

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It may seem quiet from time to time, but they are there. The IRC is their main form of communication really - that's how I got in touch with 'em for the interview.
That being said, I am considering making a Desura group dedicated to helping new people get into open-source projects. It's still in the planning faze, some mention was made in [URL='http://www.desura.com/members/alexvsharp/blogs/a-helper-without-a-clue']an old blog of mine[/URL]; thought I'd mention it.

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Great game, difficult community for new artists to join though. The forums seem half dead and IRC seems to be on life support. I wonder where the devs actually talk?

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ohh it is in desura...
guess i have been blind :D

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It has been on Desura for awhile actually.

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according to the first part of this interview it already is on desura, either way i am going to check it out

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nice interview.
hope this game comest to desura soon. so i can have all my stuff in one place.

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Nitronic Rush is already in the process of getting setup on Desura. So they wouldn't necessarily need a publisher. They could get on 3-4 of the digitial stores out there and would have wider coverage than trying to get it in stores.

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In case you guys didn't know already, they won the Gamer's Choice Award!

Quoting: Team NitronicThis award goes out to you guys!
[URL='http://twitter.com/NitronicRush/status/168127461832409089/photo/1/large']

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Accept & Show Accept All & Don't show this again   Direct Link

[/URL]

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They started making a game profile that I authorized on Desura. They have not uploaded anything to it since they first requested to be published.

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DogBomb from YouBigNonce also covered this awesome game:
View video on youtube.com

Don't know why they should need a publisher.
What for?
They could bring it easily out on Steam, Desura, Humble Store & co.

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What can I say: This game looks awesome. ;)

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Much more survival-like than that carpentry stuff, imo. And the new lightning is quite "realistic" if you will.
However that new illumination circle around your character really annoys me... How can a zombie sneak up from the dark when I shine like a candle? :rolleyes:

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am enjoying it, its not what I thought it would be, starts of by you having to find clues in old messages on the ship to the admin password... your reading through truckloads of personal logs though.... which somehow gives you a good view on how things where.... I like it :)

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the bundle is fine.. edge is pretty fun actually(nice music and stuff)
anomaly is quite interesting also but terrible voice acting turns me off somehow.
world of goo is know to everybody, just a perfect game.
and osmos is known to everybody also, really nice relaxing game(alltho not so relaxing sometimes when u get hit by bigger ones :D)

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Well I a still debating if I should buy this bundle or not since I own 2 of the games already, is it worth it?

Ps. Try to keep on topic now and then :P

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All right, I took you up on your offer.

Carry on with your day everyone. :p

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if i remember correct i tryed swapbuffer tweak, with no improvement in minecraft but that was longer time ago than my lastest with open source drivers.
i expected the opensource drivers work out of the box to be honest, like they advertise it (out of the box linux experience)
checking around all kinds of benchmarks seems that gallium drivers are still far far behind from prop in terms of performance.
and according to phoronix, swapbuffer tweak is done in most tests. also i heard that bigger resolution kills the open source drivers since they depend more on a cpu somehow. Also u have to compile the stuff ur own with the s3tc patch if u want to make more games work.
naah im fine that it works for some people. but for me those drivers have allways been 5 years behind. even opengl support is still 2.1? or now lately some 3.x features also, while i enjoy opengl 4.1 and 4.2 features quite a while.

I have nothing against those drivers and against people who using them. But its sad to see that people complain that this and this runs crap and this wont run at all.. good example is all kinds of Oil Rush topics. people complain that it doesnt run on open source drivers and it was waste of money. yet the official requirements say clearly that you need proprietary drivers.
people starting to complain thats what i dont like about it. you are not forced to use those drivers if u have a decent nvidia/amd card.
thats one of the reasons why i think there are not much triple A games on linux(not the main problem tho). cuz the foss drivers arent there yet and probably wont be for the near future.

in the end of all of it. use what u want. but dont limit urself only for foss if you want to use something that doesnt work well with it.

ideed sry for stealing the topic here :)
too bad that my english is not so good to go in for more detailed discussion, but hope you got some point. We can go to private messages if you want to kill some of my thoughts :)

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Well, I only play native games for the most part, so yes my requirments are quite different than yours.

I do use WINE for some things, but mostly for my old Windows games that I still have lying around. The newest title I have played with through WINE is Star Wars: Republic Commando which was released in 2005. With that I was playing it a 1280x1024 with full effects on and everything was working well. There was some trouble with dynamic shadows back when I was using Fedora 13, but that was fixed with the switch to Gallium3D when I installed Fedora 16.

I somehow doubt I am experiencing such a big jump from what you had two months back though. Your results are really incongruous with mine, and that has been true for a while now, even though we are both using a similar sized screen and my card is older than yours. Even on Fedora 13 with the classic Mesa drivers I was getting pretty good performance. Now, on Fedora 16 I do have Colour Tiling and Page Flip enabled through Xorg.conf and I have turned off Swapbuffers Wait, which does help quite a bit, so maybe that has something to do with it?

At any rate, sorry for taking this off topic Liam....

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i didnt want to start long debat here about the drivers here but it happened anyway :D
priorities are different i guess then. for me the MLAA is not the real AA, it just makes stuff blurry and its more of a afterefect than real an AA.
Its good to see that you are getting so good framerate. that means the drivers have been matured (last time i tryed was 2 months ago).
but the games i own or like to play wont run good... i use wine a lot(im not limiting myself only for all the free or native linux stuff). few examples what i play are Minecraft, Oilrush, Dead Island, Warhammer Online, Wrath Of Heroes, Deus Ex Human Revolution, GTA IV, Fallen Earth, Fallout 3 and NV and so on.. with all 128x1024 resolution and maxed graphical settings or nearly maxed without any framerate issues with nvidia proprietary drivers. while with opensource drivers most of them doesnt even run at all.

u probably want to ask why the hell im using Linux if i want to play those games?.
Answer is simple.. Linux is freedom of choice... its higly configurable and stable. Yet i dont limit myself only for opensource/free stuff.
Im still a Gamer and im Dualboot hater.. so i want to play all my games on my prefered destkop.

hope that explains.
people are just different. i want to get max out of my hardware..rather than wait for years to get something to work and by that time my hardware is old allready.

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Quoting: "Xpander, post: 3259, member: 92"its not worth to use them if u dont get the power of ur hardware..not to mention th broken power management of open source drivers no Anti Aliasing support and so on.

Okay, let me stop you there. There are plenty of reasons for someone to use FOSS drivers:
[LIST=1]

First and foremost, the fact that they are Free Software. Maybe I am just old fashioned, but the main reason I jumped ship to Linux was because it was a free (as in freedom) system and drivers are an inherit part of that system. As such, it is not really a truly free system if you have a blob on it.

Just like the new Network card I installed last night, I should just be able to slap my video card into my machine and Fedora should just see it and work. Why does the network card work like that? Because it has free software drivers that are upstream and available to any Linux system out there right now. Graphics cards should be no different, and thanks to efforts from various different groups, they don't have to be.

I like to stay relatively current with my system, which is why I use Fedora, and blobs no matter how much protective packing you place around them will always get in the way of that. Granted, I will admit that this is somewhat motivated by wanting to see the latest advancements in the free graphics drivers themselves, but it is something I had been doing before I was even concerned about such things anyway.

It is kind of fun watching things develop and just by using them you feel like your a part of a massive project, especially if you engage with the developer community.

The free software drivers are genuine Linux drivers that interact genuinely with your Linux system. The AMD and Nvidia blobs are Windows drivers with some Linux compatibly and some features sprinkled on top. This is why the free drivers have features like KMS that the blobs still don't.

Once you are on the free drivers, you do not have to worry about using older hardware. Even my old R200 cards are still getting some love from the radeon developers.

[/LIST]
I will also like to point out that I am not on R600g as a Catalyst refugee. I have used the blob and as far as these things go, it is fine but still not a real Linux driver. Same goes for the Nvidia blob, which I have also used. Both drivers are about the same, and have had the same similar problems.

Here is the state of the free drivers for me today:
[LIST=1]

I get about 40-60 FPS in Doom 3 on Ultra at 1024x768. The same applies to Quake 4, Prey, and the like.

Trine, Shadowgrounds, and Survivor all run fine and are fairly smooth on my system.

The same goes for Penumbra and Amnesia. And Steel Storm. And Postal 2. And Darwinia. And Alien Arena and Xonotic.

In fact, I have yet encountered a game that I own that I could not get to run on my current system.

[/LIST]
As for some of the features you mentioned, well MLAA is available for my card upstream now. Power management is slowly developing, but it is not a real handicap for me as on Catalyst with this card I get about 45-50 degrees Celsius, while on R600g I get about 50-60 Celsius. So yes, a bit warmer, but not a real problem for me. Plus there is all the other stuff that is still waiting to be finished, so there is no shortage of nice surprises for me.

Also keep in mind this is only on a $40 single-core Sempron. Considering at this point the drivers are still fairly CPU reliant, just imagine what I could do with a Quad Core clocking over 3.00 GHz!

Now, you are happy with the blobs and that is fine. That is good. But do not assume that everyone would be as well.

Quoting: "Xpander, post: 3259, member: 92"about screenshots... dunno from where u checked..but it looks pretty damn good for an indie game.
specially the lightning and shadows.

I don't know, it is nice and it is polished, but I am not going to say it is that impressive. For a phone game I guess it is kind of extraordinary but on a computer it still looks like a Shockwave game on steroids. To me at least.

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well i have tryed open source drivers serveral times with my ati 5770 and with gtx560 Ti.... performance is just terrible.
yes the desktop stuff works fine..but games run really really bad and gaming through wine is even more impossible.
i got like 20 fps max with minecraft with opensource drivers 10-15 fps in HoN/Savage2 15 fps in Doom3 and so on (all games at lowest graphical settings).
while with proprietary drivers i get 200+ in minecraft, 75+ in HoN/Savage2 annd 50+ in Doom3 and all games at max graphical settings

its just not worth to use them if u dont get the power of ur hardware..not to mention th broken power management of open source drivers no Anti Aliasing support and so on.

proof is all around the internets also
just one example of it: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa_80_r300r600&num=4

about screenshots... dunno from where u checked..but it looks pretty damn good for an indie game.
specially the lightning and shadows.

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Quoting: "Xpander, post: 3256, member: 92"Well Gamers wont use open source drivers anyway i think, cuz u get 3-4x less performance and missing some features with those drivers.

You rang? Radeon HD 4670, R600g, and quite happily gaming. :p

I don't know, but from the screenshots it does not look THAT impressive. Am I missing something?

EDIT: Okay, after having seen a video, you are referring to all the post effects on top. Not bad, but I doubt it would be that much of a problem to run.

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Anomaly is quite nice yes. graphics are really nice and gameplay is pretty interesting also. it feels a bit like AAA title indeed.
just the voice acting and script are pretty bad imo. but its an indie, so its not bad if u put it that way. runs smooth without problems(at least using with proprietary nvidia drivers. 290.10). probably doesnt run that good with open source drivers. Well Gamers wont use open source drivers anyway i think, cuz u get 3-4x less performance and missing some features with those drivers.

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