OpenMW - Not just a Morrowind engine and a possible Skyrim Together replacement

I'm not a member of the OpenMW team, so this is not official promotion on their behalf.One of the top posts right now touches upon some of the controversy with Skyrim Together. I don't want to rehash that. However I'd like to bring to light a fantastic open source project that has been around for years, and why it is worth another look.OpenMW started out as an open-source engine replacement for Morrowind. In that original goal, it is fairly functional today and nearly complete. It not only allows you to play and beat Morrowind (and its expansions) but greatly expands the core features with distant land, improved physics, improved AI, etc. There is a forked version of OpenMW called TES3MP developed in parallel that allows for multiplayer play, and may get merged back into upstream at some point.The main OpenMW engine is near feature parity with the original Morrowind (though the CS toolkit is lagging a little behind). There has already been some progress on pushing OpenMW further to read and support other Bethesda games. Here are some videos of OpenMW opening up Skyrim data:WhiterunSolitudeBreezehomeBthardamzBleak Falls BarrowIf you look at the other videos from that channel, you'll also see places and assets from Oblivion and Fallout 3 being loaded up similarly.That is the work of cc9cii, a single, very busy programmer in his 30s experimenting with OpenMW in his limited spare time. I want you to imagine how far his work could go if he had some real help and support from people interested in having a free and open source engine that can gradually recreate the gameplay mechanics and visuals of all of Bethesda's open world games.It wouldn't be the first time something like this has happened. ZDoom was originally a recreation of Doom's engine that ended up letting you play Heretic, Hexen and Strife as well. OpenRA started out as a recreation of only Command & Conquer: Red Alert's engine before deciding to expand to cover all the other 2D strategy games by Westwood Studios. ScummVM originally supported only Monkey Island 2 before expanding to over 150 different adventure games.OpenMW itself is fine with gradually including such work in its master branch, having already included cc9cii's code for loading up .bsa files from Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.Any code added to OpenMW will always be included in TES3MP as well. If you were to properly recreate Skyrim's mechanics in OpenMW, well... you'd very quickly have a TES5MP as well.It's also worth keeping in mind the implications of OpenMW and TES3MP using the GPLv3 license. Any time someone makes a change to their code and provides binaries including that change, that person is required by law to share the source code used. That means no development effort can ever get wasted or held hostage by anyone.Why am I posting this here?Some people may just want to take another look at this project to play Morrowind again, or to play it multiplayer. Some aspiring developers may want to help out the team to extend OpenMW further, such as extending support for Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim. Imagine 64-bit versions of those games that are more stable, and more extensible than the current games, also playing on more platforms.You could even improve upon Skyrim SE by adding support for more than 4 light sources, parallax texture support, other platforms, etc.This is a fantastic project that can use some more support and visibility, especially in the light that tens of thousands of players are so eager to play an Elder Scrolls game in multiplayer. via /r/Games https://ift.tt/2NwV2sP