OpenMW progresses towards supporting Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout plus shadows are back

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.