wazabear

Inching Closer

Some really exciting things have been happening with the OpenMW development. Urm and Ptmikheev have again stolen the spotlight for me with some exciting Lua developments. A MCM style interface for new scripts to plug into, customizable UI, rendering raycasts, and an interface for overriding vanilla UI templates are just a few of many things happening on this front. OpenMW-CS even got some love recently, with VidiAquam getting a grid and angle snapping system merged.  Capostrophic's addition of gloss mapping made it in too, bringing us one step closer to not seeing any more of those dreaded shiny meshes from modded content! Elsid added async screenshots. Now, the game will no longer freeze while it's taking a builtin screenshot.  To top it all off, Ptmikheev added the ability to make OpenMW portable. This means we can finally have multiple settings and configuration directories containing screenshots, saves, etc... Of course, these are just the changes which I followed, there are a ton of smaller features that were added. We even have a few new faces hanging around with the team. The thing to take away from this is that OpenMW development has been healthy lately, so stay tuned to what we have to offer you in upcoming releases. Special thanks to all the developers, doc writers, and QA testers who make all of this possible.

Spring is upon us, in turn I was motivated these last few weeks to get some work done. My post-processing work is wrapping up and is in the final review stages. A guy who goes by Zesterer on Discord (works on Veleron among other projects) has come in with some WIP shaders which give way to some absolutely stunning screenshots. They aren't quite suited for gameplay yet, but they sure will make a nice calendar. Be sure to check out my small album.

Pretty Screenshots

Disclaimer: Most of these are tweaked extensively with the in-game editor, and they don't look nearly as good at a lot of angles and times of day. They look awesome though, so who cares.

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...

Going forward...

Hi everyone, so I made a Patreon! You can expect posts at the beginning of every month, so the first will be February 1st 2022. In these I won't just be discussing what I'm working on, but also other mods and work of other developers that I think is interesting. I do publish mods every now and then, if I start any new ones I've decided I'll post previews here. These likely won't be coming out until I can work on UI related ones with the up and coming Lua API. I'll try and keep the posts light and humorous. If anything really special comes up I'll likely make a post outside of the scheduled monthly ones. 

Anyways, that's all I wanted to say. See you in February!