Update: February 1st 2022

We are just one month into the year, and already OpenMW has a lot on its plate! There's been a lot of asking about for post-processing, and hopefully I can deliver within the coming months. I took a long, long break from the original MR and only now came back to it. Since then, however, I've tried to speed up progress on it. It's come a long way.

I've always been in love with MGE-XEs godrays shader, even though it's not "real volumetrics" I think it fits the style of the game perfectly and leads to draw dropping sunsets. Naturally, it's the first thing I ported over for my post-processing branch, and it looks great! Of course it's not complimented by an equally beautiful atmospheric height fog, but that's a task for another time. The plan is to port over most of the MGE-XE core shaders and community packs once I've finished with the backend. A few like the godrays have already been moved over but they need some cleanup and optimization. The shading languages used by both engines are similar (OpenGL-GLSL/DirectX-HLSL) but not drop in replacements for each other, so some degree of care is required.

Once the nitty gritty details are combed over and the backend is more polished, the next steps will be making sure my work can transfer smoothly over to VR, and then setting up a proper path for ambient occlusion. With the current state of affairs, SSAO can be applied as a standard post-effect, but it has the same disadvantages that every game that does this have. Nasty behaviors with blended objects, fog, lighting, etc... One of my goals is to be able to apply the ambient occlusion in the lighting stage. This in of itself solves a large number of problems with standard screen-space AO techniques, but requires some thought as it can be quite expensive if done wrong. I have some ideas and have done some research into the matter, so this may become reality in the first iteration of my work.

On another note Lua development continues stronger then ever, specifically two developers ptmikeev and urm have been on fire with adding important features. The UI API is still not robust enough to show some of the things I want to show, so I'll hold off on that for now...but stay tuned. That being said the initial MR for templates was merged, so naturally when I got my hands on the new skin capabilities I made the only suitable thing I could think of (see below).  Once existing UI elements can be modded, there's a good chance I'll be working on a HUD re-work with a focus on minimalism and sticking to the vanilla Look & Feel.

So here you have it. Godrays, minesweeper, and a sunrise in the Grazelands, what could constitute a more perfect moment? And before you ask, yes this works, though I swear I should have more important things to be working on...