The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a true classic for many reasons, and it continues living on with the OpenMW free and open source game engine. It's been a while since the 0.46 release of OpenMW back in June 2020 but plenty of work has been going on since.
In a new blog post they did a round-up of work done during September-October and it all sounds pretty awesome. Here's a quick run over what's been going on:
- A modern 3rd-person camera view is coming, along with optional first-person head bobbing and a smooth movement feature to make animations look better.
- OpenMW is going to get Async Physics, which moved the game's physics from the main thread to one or more other threads, making OpenMW even better at using multiple cores.
- Work has continued on supporting groundcover with better performance, which adds grass and all sorts.
- The LZ4 format is now supported by OpenMW, which is used in later Bethesda games like Skyrim Special Edition. Supporting that game is a long way off, right now it might just help modders.
- Levelled items in untouched containers are now randomly generated from their respective lists when the game is loaded, mimicking the original engine.
- Automatic builds for Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Android on GitLab for every merge request that is opened.
- Work is ongoing to support the COLLADA 3D model format to work in OpenMW's rendering engine (OpenSceneGraph)
Amazing to see how much effort goes into open source game engine reimplementations. It's a very complicated job but one appreciated by thousands of players, as it keeps games alive on modern platforms and enables them to run better.
See more and download OpenMW from the official site. As you do need the Morrowind data files to play it, you do need a copy. You can pick up a copy of Morrowind easily from GOG.com.
If you didn't see it, here's the trailer for the last release of OpenMW:
Direct Link
Quoting: razing32What mods do you recommend ? Have not really gotten into Morrowind that much.
I remember none of the face-fixup mods felt right, I basically kept to a vanlilla "feel", just more. Also some game balance fix mods were used to basically make some of the things that didn't age so well, less troublesome.
Yet Another Guard Diversity - Purist
Patch for Purists (+ Book Typos/Semi-Purist)
Correct_Meshes
Correct_UV_Rocks
Tamriel Rebuilt (the whole lot)
Morrowind Optimization Patch
That set of official mods (UMOPP)
OpenMW Containers Animated
Glow in the Dahrk
Graphic Herbalism MWSE - OpenMW
Project Atlas
HiResUI
Vurts Groundcover v2.3 for OpenMW
Better Balanced Combat
WeaponSheathing1.6-OpenMW
Sufficient Adamantium
Abot's Guars
Abot's Stilt Riders
Graphic Herbalism + TR stuff
Updated Morrowind - (skills/enchanting and blocking)
Some er, obscure names of archives:
shrinetext
MET (A texture pack)
All in one (A texture pack)
Quoting: oldrocker99A lot of people aver Morrowind as the best TES game. The world is weirder, enemies don't scale, and the story is fantastic.
OpenMW just asks where your Morrowind installation folder is, and takes it from there.
IIRC, the enemies do actually scale, via the leveled list/creature system. The catch is that the scaling isn't universal or required.
This allowed the developers to make general tombs and dungeons that would still be challenging to the player at any level while still making specific areas off limits to low level players.
LL we're an awesome tool for the game, but for the original engine were also a bit of a headache for players running multiple mods as LL list entries would conflict and overwrite eachother.
And yes, I think it's the best TES game. It's actually one of my favorite games of all time and had been the first installed game on every new computer I've ever built until my most recent in 2018.
Last edited by denyasis on 30 November 2020 at 4:09 am UTC
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