Morrowind game engine OpenMW gearing up for a huge new 0.49 release

Currently in the Release Candidate stage, Morrowind open source game engine OpenMW is getting ready for a huge new release. OpenMW is cross-platform and enables you to play Morrowind nicely on modern systems, with plenty of enhancements.

Their team recently put up an announcement to go over some details noting how it's the "largest release yet, having been in development since August 2022". One of the big changes they noted is to combat mechanics as they said:

0.49.0 makes some large steps towards making melee combat reimplementation accurate to Morrowind. Importantly, it moves melee target evaluation from the point of impact to the moment of weapon release. This is necessary to ensure the correct audiovisual feedback for missed hits.
We do not intend to meaningfully overhaul or redesign the classical experience of Morrowind, and we believe it would best be handled by mods from the community. It is currently planned for combat dehardcoding to be a focus in 0.5X releases, which would allow scripts to overhaul it, and for certain combat AI changes to be introduced to further ensure melee combat remains as (not very) challenging as in Morrowind.
An important detail to note, however: in RC4 and later builds, like in 0.48.0, the target must be within weapon reach upon impact for the hit to be successful. This means that dodging attacks by quickly backing away from the opponent remains possible even if the hit is evaluated as a success upon weapon release. This is consistent with Morrowind.

Other changes can be checked out via the growing changelog on their GitHub page which is really quite long. There's a lot of bug fixes but some exciting new features too. Here's just a few of the new bits coming in OpenMW 0.49:

• Infinite fall failsafe.
• Shader-based water ripples.
• Rain and snow collisions.
• Animation blending - smooth animation transitions with modding support.
• Playing music via Lua scripts and many more Lua modding improvements like a Factions API, Save Game API, Sounds API, NPC AI settings via Lua and more.
• Specular lighting from point light sources.
• Launcher improvements.
• Support high-resolution cursor textures.
• Support for non-adaptive VSync.
• Controller binding for tab for menu navigation.

Pictured - OpenMW on Linux