The OpenMW project is a community of fans who are creating a new open source engine for running Morrowind, the recipient of IGN's 2002 “RPG Game of the Year”. It is open source (GPL V3), cross platform (currently supporting OS X, Linux, and Windows), and written in pure C++. We are designing an engine that runs faster and is vastly more modifiable than the original game engine. We want to preserve Morrowind while also providing modders a better engine and tool kit for creating their works with. While Bethesda will not release the Morrowind's formulas to us, they encourage our project and we in turn actively encourage our users to purchase Morrowind on Steam.

Primary Goal: To create a fully functioning engine for playing Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon, and all user created mods that is also open source and endlessly modifiable. Version 1.0 will meet those criteria.

Future Goals (post 1.0):
-Allow much greater modability: change game rules, create new spell effects, etc through advanced scripting.
-Fix system design bugs, like the “dirty” GMST entries in mods, and the savegame “doubling” problem.
-Continue improving performance
-Improve the interface and journal systems.
-(Possibly) Improve game mechanics, physics, combat and AI.
-(Possibly) Improve graphics to use more modern hardware.

Development Status
OpenMW is in an intermediate stage of development. There is terrain, cell, and water render as well as collision and animations. Some work have been done on playable elements. Currently character creation requires some manual console input and you can’t load saved games. We are at the point where we can now begin implementing many skills, attributes, and abilities.

What Technologies Does OpenMW Use?
OpenMW is built with these open source tools and libraries:

Programming language: C++
Graphics: OGRE3d
Physics: Bullet
Sound: OpenAL and Audiere
GUI: MyGUI
Input: OIS
Scripting: Homebrew implementation of morrowind scripts.

The ESM/ESP and BSA loading code was written from scratch, but with much help from available community-generated documentation.

Likewise, the NIF (proprietary 3D mesh) loading code was written with the help of available online information. Special thanks to the NIFLA / NifTools gang!
(For an additional list of the technologies in use, see Development Environment Setup: Third-Party Libraries and Tools.)

How to Help
We are currently recruiting for a developer to work on our game editor. The editor will be a program capable of controlling almost all aspects of the game, to create mods, adding user-made game content, and viewing game data. It is very important to our project.

Qualities we desire:
Knowledge of Qt and C++
Committing code early and often
Willingness to work with an established design

Qt Editor Developer
– Experience with C++
– Experience with Qt Framework

Below are the desired skills for other positions. We always need more coders, bug testers, and people to reverse engineer formulas. You can always come and write a patch for a bug, or just report a bug.

C++ Software Developer
– Experience with C++
– Experience with Ogre3d would be useful
– Experience with Bullet physics would be useful
– Experience with Qt Framework would be useful

Bug Tester
– Identify software bugs while playing the game
– Replicating the bugs and submitting them to the bug tracker
– Ability to write clear bug reports

Where to Find Us:
OpenMW Homepage: http://openmw.org/
For New Developers: http://openmw.org/wiki/index.php?title=Contribution_Wanted
Official Youtube Channel http://www.youtube.com/user/MrOpenMW
Chat @freenode http://freenode.net/ #openmw

The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.21.0! Release packages for Ubuntu are now available via our https://launchpad.net/~openmw/+archive/openmw. Release packages for other platforms are available on our https://code.google.com/p/openmw/downloads/list. This release introduces video playback, improvements to cell load time, and parsing for escape sequences in dialogue and message boxes.

Check out Weirdsixy's http://youtu.be/7FtIcIPogpQ.

Known Issues:

• No sound when playing videos on OS X
  
• Extreme shaking may occur during cell transitions for some users (enable anti-aliasing as a possible workaround)
  
• Launcher crash on OS X < 10.8

Changelog:

• Various dialogue, trading, and disposition fixes and improvements
  
• Torch flickering improved to better match vanilla Morrowind
  
• Fix for attribute fluctuation when infected with Ash Woe Blight
  
• Adjusted activation range to better match vanilla Morrowind
  
• Fixes for the Journal UI
  
• Fixed crash caused by Golden Saint models
  
• Fix for beast races being able to wear shoes
  
• Fix for background music not playing
  
• Fix for meshes without certain node names not being loaded
  
• Fix for incorrect terrain shape on inital cell load
  
• Fix for MWGui::InventoryWindow creating a duplicate player actor at the origin
  
• Added video playback
  
• Added support for escape sequences in message box and dialogue text
  
• Added AI related script functions, note that AI is not functional yet
  
• Implemented fallbacks for necessary ini values in the importer, unused in OpenMW as of yet
  
• Implemented execution of scripts of objects in containers/inventories in active cells
  
• Cell loading performance improvements
  
• Removed broken GMST contamination fixing mechanism