OpenMW 0.37 Released, Switches To OpenSceneGraph

[RavFX]

They switched to OpenSceneGraph a couples month ago and yes, now it's totally playable. Some bug but it's getting better and better.

You can also convert your real old saved games from 10 years ago

[yzsolt]

It was strange when I first read that they switched to OpenSceneGraph and it caused a performance boost, because I thought OSS is used mainly for various simulation projects since it's generally slow for demanding 3D rendering. Besides, I had to use OSS for a project in university and it wasn't a pleasant experience... All in all, congrats to the guys!

[MoonMoon]

The new version is already in Arch, and I went from high texture / shader water giving me like 5 fps on a 290 on radeonsi to 200+ fps all the time. Super playable now, I'm wondering whats still missing from 1.0 because its gorgeous now.

In that case I recommend to edit $HOME/.config/openmw/settings.cfg and set exterior cell load distance to 3 and viewing distance to 21900, this seriously improve the looks of the game by getting rid of the damn fog that is limiting the view in the distance. Works fine for me on a GTX760 (2GB), with your 290 you might want to to try to even set exterior cell load distance to 4 or 5 and adapt viewing distance accordingly (viewing distance should always be below (8192 * exterior cell load distance -1024) * 0.93 to avoid ugly popups and problem with FOV.

[W.Irrkopf]

The new version is already in Arch, and I went from high texture / shader water giving me like 5 fps on a 290 on radeonsi to 200+ fps all the time. Super playable now, I'm wondering whats still missing from 1.0 because its gorgeous now.

Nothing ciritical it seems. One of the things that will like reduce the frame rate a bit eventually is when the missing shadows added back (see the release announcement at http://openmw.org/). The remaining work can be seen by looking at the bugtrackers roadmap page.

[dEnigma]

This is the first time I've read about that project. How far is the engine regarding Morrowind features? Can one already play the game? Is critical functionality missing?

I personally played through the main quest of the base game as well as the Tribunal expansion main quest line, plus a good part of the Bloodmoon extension and haven't found a game-breaking bug (except for one, which has been fixed months ago; almost all the smaller ones I found were also fixed). All of the side quests I tried worked fine too. Since there have been quite a number of bug-fixes since I last played it, it should work even better now

[stiiixy]

Nothing ciritical it seems. One of the things that will like reduce the frame rate a bit eventually is when the missing shadows added back (see the release announcement at http://openmw.org/). The remaining work can be seen by looking at the bugtrackers roadmap page.

The latest news post mentioned this so should be interesting to see the performance after they re-enable this AND what the game looks like when they do. They also did a pledge for 250 bucks and they got over by anotehr 250. Kudo's. Pity they didn't advertise to linux sites like this to get more funding. I dont like the efforts of the OSS games being ignored simply because Steam is releasing quite a few.

Mmm, and I can't wait to start flying across the map with my glass-armoured orc-mage again.

[madjr]

I hope bethesda starts supporting linux at some point..

[Luke_Wolf]

I hope bethesda starts supporting linux at some point..

They won't need to if this engine continues to develop, because all modern bethesda games use a derivative of the Morrowind engine, so in the long run with some extension to support the new versions of the scripting languages and such it's entirely possible that OpenMW may support Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 in the future, and any other future game that continues to use it.