OpenMW: Open-source reimplementation of TES3 Morrowind

by agluszak • 5 years ago

258 116 5 years ago

livionion• 5 years ago

My understanding is its at the point where its complete enough there is work underway extending the engine to also support Oblivion/Fallout as they use similar asset formats. Very exciting stuff in my opinion.

qwerty4561274• 5 years ago

I feel curious if this is going to let me play Fallout 3 on my TV-attached Raspberry Pi 4 using a BlueTooth gamepad.

Johnnynator2• 5 years ago

I don't think a Pi 4 would be fast enough to provide a enjoyable experience. I just tested OpenMW on a Pinebook Pro (RK3399 SOC, should be slightly faster than a PI 4) and I do get like ~30-40 fps with lowest draw distance in Morrowind. Fallout 3 should be even slower due to far more and more detailed objects.

edit: Rendered at a meager 800x600 px

Causality1• 5 years ago

Which is great because both those games are hobbled on modern platforms. For example, if you want to play Oblivion with analog sticks you'd have an easier time emulating the 360 version than adding them to the PC version.

revolvingocelot2• 5 years ago

This! I'm all the more frustrated by the claim (seemingly validated by the grandparent about Oblivion/Fallout compatibility) that Bethesda just kinda gives the old engine a new coat of paint then merrily releases a new generation of videogame. You'd think that there'd be fan-spearheaded attempts to tear out and replace some of the wonkier components. And, after reading about all of this, I guess there are.

refracture• 5 years ago

Wow, that would be amazing.

I haven't tried OpenMW in a year or more but I was really impressed with what they had managed, it was the first time I had ever played MW with a decent frame rate.. that original engine seemed to run poorly on any configuration of hardware I had over the years.

evh• 5 years ago

There's also a fork with multiplayer support (to an extent): https://github.com/TES3MP/openmw-tes3mp

OpenMW is great, played it a lot a couple of years ago. I love when games get future-proofed like this. See also the various Quake and DOOM source ports, although those started from id Software releasing their engines under the GPL so had an easier start.

krageon6• 5 years ago

The fork is great, but the main developer is incredibly hostile to contributions (i.e. very, very rude and combative for absolutely no reason). If you are thinking of contributing, keep that in mind - it's not you.

izietto8• 5 years ago

Any public examples?

roenxi3• 5 years ago

In defence of the maintainer. With this sort of project there is a real possibility that there is 1 person in the whole world who will keep the thing alive. If that person happens to have particular standards for what code looks like then good luck to them.

Perfect is the enemy - the active and vigorous enemy - of good when it comes to OSS maintenance.

tauin2• 5 years ago

example? I cant think of anyone especially combative working on openmw

phraseologist10• 5 years ago

If you are thinking of contributing, you should at least read what it says in the readme instead of pretending that not reading the readme was unfairly held against you:

"For code contributions, it's best to start out with modestly sized fixes and features and work your way up. There are so many different possible implementations of more major features – many of which would cause undesirable code or vision conflicts with OpenMW – that those should be talked over in advance with the existing developers before effort is spent on them."

odysseyfox2• 5 years ago

Yep, agreed. I decided to make a private branch on gitlab, update it to the latest OpenMW .47 build and since then fix quite a number of breaking bugs as well. I originally was motivated to do this for my own players but unfortunately don’t feel welcome to bubble the contributions back up. Pity really, but this is now a hard fork from tes3mp (although I plan to open the fork at some point with a new project name).

disambiguation• 5 years ago

i can highly recommend tes3mp! i did a playthrough with some friends early in the pandemic and it was a lot of fun, a really great way to re-experience an amazing game.

granted there are some limitations you have to be willing to overlook to enjoy the game .. mainly around questing and syncing since all players share the same quest ledger. for example (SPOILER) when curing myself of corpus my character received the cure and attribute buffs but my teammates did not. in the main story line these sync issues are infrequent and were manageable, but at times got especially bad in the DLC -- be prepared to hop in to the command line a lot to revive quest givers, update the journal, acquire items, alter stats.

LukeB425• 5 years ago

How is this open source Marrowind if I need a copy of Marrowind to play it?

IanSanders• 5 years ago

That's how most opensource game revivals work, one is not legally allowed to distribute original in-game assets. If you come up with free textures and sounds, you'll get the 100% free alternative

LukeB425• 5 years ago

Thanks for your explanation.

Traubenfuchs• 5 years ago

The title is misleading, the creators don't even claim this themselves:

"OpenMW is an open-source game engine that supports playing Morrowind by Bethesda Softworks. You need to own the game for OpenMW to play Morrowind."

Scarblac• 5 years ago

Presumably the code is open source, the art isn't?

LukeB425• 5 years ago

Thanks for your explanation.

computerex• 5 years ago

I believe they have rewritten the underlying game engine, but you still need the game for the assets like character and world models, audio, etc.

LukeB425• 5 years ago

Thanks for your explanation.

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

Fun fact: Morrowind used the Gamebryo engine, which is apparently still in active development in 2021! (Or at least the website is still up)

Bayart• 5 years ago

The assets are still under copyright. On paper you could "re-implement" assets as well, ie. remake all the models, textures, music, voices and rewrite all the quests.

have_faith• 5 years ago

This is what the Skywind project is doing.

LukeB425• 5 years ago

Thanks for your explanation.

kmeisthax2• 5 years ago

Because software copyright was and is a bad idea, and courts (especially the 9th Circuit) have generally carved out exceptions for compatibility-related copying in the software domain that absolutely would not apply to other copyrightable work that ships with the software. You absolutely can legally reimplement a computer program such as a game engine, but doing so to the story, assets, level design, or what have you would just be ordinary copyright infringement. As a result most game reimplementations either do not ship with any art, or ship with an entirely separate custom-made campaign to demonstrate the capabilities of the reimplemented game engine.

HolidayguyNOR5• 5 years ago

Ducking it wasn't very helpful, what's the 9th circuit? Is it a court of appeals of some kind?

kalev• 5 years ago

Bummer, I thought it would be an OpenModernWarfare (cod mw2) reimplementation.

skocznymroczny• 5 years ago

I remember this project. Their first implementation was actually in D. Later on they transitioned to C++ because it was easier to find C++ devs and the D ecosystem was less mature than it is now.

WithinReason• 5 years ago

I just replayed Morrowind and tried both OpenMW and also the original with Morrowind Code Patch and Morrowind Graphics Extender, and ended up playing with the latter (mainly because of the much nicer graphics, due to longer render distances and also some features OpenMW doesn't have which now I forget...)

crashcoot2• 5 years ago

OpenMW mods can duplicate this experience for the most part, if you're on Linux where the graphics extender doesn't work.

Additionally one can tweak settings like draw distance [1] in the settings.cfg file, as well as lots of other settings [2].

https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?t=3398

https://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/modding/se...

crashcoot2• 5 years ago

Oh here's the link to a site which is convenient for browsing mods

https://modding-openmw.com/lists/

roenxi3• 5 years ago

Best enjoyed with something like https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/ installed as a mod.

0des• 5 years ago

I'd love to try it, but the install is pretty involved, and the instructions are hard to find and haven't found any that are linux specific and provide paths for content locations.

poser-boy2• 5 years ago

I don't think it was very difficult when I tried it. Just grab the textures and main mod, put them somewhere (e.g. .local/share), and then append the following to your openmw.cfg config AFTER the base game:

data="/home/user/.local/share/mw/Tamriel Data (HD)"

data="/home/user/.local/share/mw/Tamriel Rebuilt"

roenxi3• 5 years ago

Ah yeah, I remember that being pretty hard. It has been a long time since I set up TR.

I think the tricky file to find was ~/.config/openmw/openmw.cfg and it needed to che changed to include:

    fallback-archive=PT_Data.bsa
    fallback-archive=TR_Data.bsa

and

    content=Tamriel_Data.esm

Then everything else was managed with the openmw-launcher UI. The game ended up installed in ~/.local/share/openmw/ with some funky setup to deal with mods.

lgeorget• 5 years ago

It's funny that I see that popping in HN, I've just reinstalled OpenMW the other day and am currently on my way to reveal myself to be the Nerevarine very soon.

The project is making excellent progress in my opinion. I remember a few years ago when they were actually many little things lacking (don't ask me for specific examples but I remember some game mechanics being broken) and now it's the opposite, their additions to the UI are very good (in the alchemy menu for instance) and some game mechanics have been rebalanced somewhat.

handrous• 5 years ago

I'd been waiting for OpenMW to fix shadows before trying it, and IIRC late last year or early this year they fixed them, so I tried it. I played the whole main quest, finished several major side-quest story trees, finished Tribunal, and got started on Solstheim before getting distracted and dropping it.

20-30 mods, mostly texture-related but a couple additions and gameplay mods—there's an obscure and untouched-for-many-years library mod I adore that adds a nearly-empty library just outside Vivec, which you can fill up by giving them books to copy, for instance, and of course modding plant harvesting is a must, plus I think I had some of the Morrowind Comes Alive stuff enabled—all managed through Mod Manager 2. Draw distance set very high, 4k resolution.

It ran great. Zero bugs, zero quest glitches, zero crashes, the entire time, even with mods. Vanilla Morrowind has always been pretty crashy, so that's a damn good achievement.

dEnigma• 5 years ago

A few years back I was playing OpenMW quite extensively, always on the lookout for potential bugs. I remember it getting harder and harder to find new issues, and for most of the ones I found in the last few months of that period I had to double- or triple-check with the original version to make sure it was an OpenMW-specific bug (often times it turned out it was a bug with the original game as well). I contributed some 100-150 bug reports, most of which I think are fixed by now (a bit hard to tell because they switched bug tracker in the meantime).

Funnily enough sometimes OpenMW worked too well. E.g. there is a script that damages the final boss for each of his "captains" that you kill, which never worked in the original version because IIRC the engine couldn't modify the health of an unloaded mob. In OpenMW it worked perfectly, with the side effect of subtracting exactly 100% of his health if you killed all underlings, resulting in you encountering a corpse as a final boss.

dancemethis• 5 years ago

Once in the times where ICQ was king, I somehow got a pal from Denmark.

Once he sent me a letter with a CD of a game called Morrowind. But it never ran on my old, old even for that time's reckoning computer.

But I was pretty sure it was about jet fighters. With a multiplayer component.

The CD is long, long gone, and so is the contact. But I still remember it and my distraught over the years to see this company with an ugly name - Bethesda, really? - STEAL this game's name and make any and all references of the original, true Morrowind in my mind, disappear from the web.

To this day I bear a grudge against the ES series and won't play it. Name stealers.

...Fuzzy memories are a hell of a beast.

emteycz• 5 years ago

Could you be more specific, e. g. approx year? Perhaps the collective mind knows...

aasasd3• 5 years ago

Perhaps this was an instance of “Don't mind the case, I lost the original one so the case is from MW”.

rkagerer• 5 years ago

I liked ICQ (before it was bastardized) a lot better than chat clients that came after. You could control your visibility by person or group. You could actually search your history and carry it with you over the eons. It was lightweight, fairly unobtrusive and ad-free.

JackGreyhat• 5 years ago

And it had a sort of "live chat" function. You could see your conversation partner's keystrokes in real-time, including typos and corrections. This has, as far as I know, never been introduced in other chat clients...

boogies2• 5 years ago

You could actually search your history and carry it with you over the eons. It was lightweight, fairly unobtrusive and ad-free.

All of that is still true of the chat protocol that came before and still exists, IRC.

syntheticnature• 5 years ago

I know this won't matter to your fuzzy memories, having a few similar ones myself. That said, Morrowind is a province in the game, that was named in TES: Arena, released in 1994. ICQ was released in 1996. In-game maps in Arena show it: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Maps (topmost one is a fan map, note)

I did some searching for something similar, but the only thing I came upon even vaguely related would be The Morrow Project, a tabletop RPG.

testman42• 5 years ago

Just for everyone's edification, the main development hub for OpenMW is located here:

https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw

Including the issue tracker and CI.

If anyone is interested, they can join the forums:

https://forum.openmw.org/

or Discord:

https://discord.gg/bWuqq2e

fractal618• 5 years ago

Love this!

aasasd3• 5 years ago

And other open-source game clones: https://osgameclones.com

Also, the list says there's this project TES3MP, which adds multiplayer to OpenMW, but development is ‘halted’: https://tes3mp.com

“This branch is 2536 commits ahead, 2724 commits behind OpenMW:master” whoa daddy.

skymt• 5 years ago

TES3MP is being merged into OpenMW.

https://openmw.org/2019/time-to-make-stuff-official/

phraseologist10• 5 years ago

Development isn't halted, it was just slowed down by all the problems caused by the pandemic.

aasasd3• 5 years ago

Strange: you'd think that nerds shut in their rooms is the perfect circumstance for coding.

neartheplain• 5 years ago

OpenMW can also be used to play Morrowind in VR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUrvAAn9hFo

supperburg• 5 years ago

The update videos published by the openMW team were my beloved companion through a decade of my life.

HolidayguyNOR5• 5 years ago

Same with me and Black Mesa: Source.

revolvingocelot2• 5 years ago

Hey, at least that one's out, now.

bloqs• 5 years ago

this runs great on my modern gaming PC. The polygon count will always be lower than a current game, but it plays very well. Additionally, from a gameplay perspective, this got the scaling and scale right, it stands alone as a fantastic RPG I will definitely replay again.

NovaS1X• 5 years ago

There's also a great VR implementation of OpenMW: https://gitlab.com/madsbuvi/openmw

VR is such a great twist for replaying an old classic, but you have to mod a few things unless you enjoy swinging your arms at cliff racers 300 times early on!

Morrowind was a very important game to me growing up and still my favourite Elder Scrolls release. I remember contributing to the Tamriel Rebuilt project when I was in my early teens and represents my first contribution to a community project. I like to give it a replay every couple years.

Da-V-Man• 5 years ago

I recently re-installed Morrowind and played it through OpenMW. It was a great experience. It was certainly more stable than I remember the original being, having never crashed once in my play-through. I think the main thing that might hold some back still is the ability to support Morrowind Script Extender mods.

If you're interested in modding it, there are some good guides on compatible mods and curated mod lists at https://modding-openmw.com

chrysoprace• 5 years ago

I hope to see a complete implementation one day. My main issue with OpenMW is that the modding community is fractured somewhat between mods that are compatible with the base game and those that are compatible with OpenMW. I'm optimistic that there may be some more compatibility in the future.

poser-boy2• 5 years ago

I agree modding OpenMW is painful because of the fracture. Though I must say, out of all the Elder Scrolls games, Morrowind has always been the one I've felt like modding the least. Maybe it's just perfect?

TranquilMarmot• 5 years ago

This has also been ported to Android!

https://github.com/xyzz/openmw-android

I made pretty significant progress on my phone with a Razer Kishi. Pretty fun.

OpenMW: Open-source reimplementation of TES3 Morrowind

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