Last year we caught wind of a project called OpenMW — an effort to build a new, open source client for Bethesda’s open world RPG Morrowind, with the potential for co-operative play. Unfortunately, while the project is still going, multiplayer is still on the “would be nice, but really hard” list.
Here’s the relevant bit from the site:
Will OpenMW support multiplayer?
The OpenMW team currently has no plans for developing this feature. There are probably some technical factors about OpenMW that would make it extremely complicated, messy, and painful to implement. However, sometime in the future, some sort of co-op feature for OpenMW could be a possibility. OpenMW will probably never support MMO style gameplay.
On the bright side, the most recent update to the project has revamped the graphics engine. Previously the game used OGRE, but as of 0.37.0, the switch has officially been made to OpenSceneGraph.
The main benefit, going from the changelog, is “a massive performance speedup”, but it does mean the team has to reimplement several visual features, including shadows.
Still, it’s good to see the project hasn’t been abandoned. If you want to check it out, both binaries and the source code are freely available — though you’ll need to own a copy of the game to play it.
OpenMW 0.37.0 Released! [OpenMW, via RPS]
Comments
4 responses to “Yes, That Open Source Rewrite Of Morrowind Is Still Going”
so then what’s the point?
Game works well on its ageing engine and mods give it extra sexiness.
Availability for Windows, Linux, OSX and more, providing a more stable experience, adding enhancements (both graphically and functionally) without having to hack the binary and worrying that something becomes unstable, fixing bugs, improving modding support. Those are some of the big ones, but there are more reasons. For example, implementing the oh so coveted multiplayer that Kotaku wants would be much easier when you have source code to modify rather than a binary blob to hack.
Not wanting to knock the developers – but sounds like they need to get a hold of the Just Cause 2 multi-player dev’s. Sometimes a fresh “look at the issue” can do wonders.
I share the previously mentioned sentiment… “what’s the point” if multi-player was the real kicker for this project.
Multiplayer was never the impetus. Where did you get that impression?
The project was born out of a desire to make the game even more modifiable than it already is, to fix many long standing errors with the original engine and to improve performance and guarantee usability on all future systems.
Protip: this project is more about linux/mac support than getting multiplayer. The team is very tight and very talented. Complaining about a feature beyond the project scope is useless. These guys have official blessing from Bethesda as long as they keep the game. In its original form. Eg it can load mods but no mmo and no skyrim/oblivion support. Bethesda have stated that Oblivion/skyrim can be done by a fork, but there cannot be skyrim content in Morrowind etc. It’s great that these guys are pouring to Linux and bringing the modding tools over. Mad respect to these guys, they’ve earned it.
Protip: this project is more about linux/mac support than getting multiplayer. The team is very tight and very talented. Complaining about a feature beyond the project scope is useless. These guys have official blessing from Bethesda as long as they keep the game. In its original form. Eg it can load mods but no mmo and no skyrim/oblivion support. Bethesda have stated that Oblivion/skyrim can be done by a fork, but there cannot be skyrim content in Morrowind etc. It’s great that these guys are porting to Linux and bringing the modding tools over. Mad respect to these guys, they’ve earned it.
Developer chiming in here, please, if you want to help… no one is stopping you. 🙂 We’ve yet to turn away any developers, and those that did want multi-player but haven’t delivered anything.
Multi-player Morrowind was never the motivation for OpenMW, just a post-1.0 ‘would be nice’ feature.
The original goal of OpenMW was to see Morrowind playable on Linux, OSX and Windows natively while taking advantage of what modern hardware has to offer. So far, we’ve been nailing that one pretty well. 🙂 The best part is that thanks to OpenMW, many mod authors are getting back into the game and fixing and continuing their work. OpenMW-CS is the hidden jewel here, as it is so much more capable than the original CS.
You can even make your own game, free of Bethesda’s IP and sell it if you want. That is the kind of freedom you get with OpenMW.
We’ve put a lot of time and effort to make sure it would run everywhere, have a look here:
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=openmw
I personally have it running on the RPi2 for example. 😉
If you have any questions, please ask them! 🙂