Morrowind

[Spastic Hamburger]

Feel free to move this to a more appropriate place! Still a little bit under the weather but I did promise to get it together this morning 🙂

There have been many changes to the Morrowind scene over the last twenty years or so. There’s still the Morrowind Code Patch but my personal preference is OpenMW. It’s a modern version instead of trying to edit the existing code. It runs great and looks great even though the textures and meshes still look ancient. It also has frame rate adjustment so you can run it more easily on modern systems 🙂

In order to install OpenMW you need to install Morrowind first and launch it so that it can generate the INI files as OpenMW needs to copy them during the installation process. In order to get Morrowind to launch, I had to go into the Data Files option in its launcher and deselect the esm files and then check them again. Even though they were checked before I did that, Morrowind refused to launch and complained that there wasn’t an esm present.

We lost MMH and GHF but there’s a reasonably active subreddit. Sadly, the files on MMH are gone save for the Internet Archive.

Since Jac passed a few years back, there’s been an effort to revive the patch efforts in the form of the Patch for Purists

OpenMW has a feature where you can have multiple Data Files/ directories but I have no idea how it interacts with the various mod managers. On that note, I don’t know where the managers stand at this point. There’s Bash with limited Morrowind support in trunk (not sure if it’s in the release), Vortex, Mod Organizer 2, and good old Mash with about 100 forks (I’ll probably ask around and see which fork is recommended at some point).

OpenMW also has multi-threading of the physics engine, which I haven’t tried yet. It defaults to a thread for the main game and a single thread for the physics but you can increase the thread count in the settings.

As for general enhancements, Tamriel Rebuilt has a short list here and there’s a more extensive list on the Nexus’s wiki

rfuzzo has also taken over mlox from Dragon32 and rfuzzo also has a Rust version called plox

Let me know if I missed anything!

• This topic was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Spastic Hamburger.
• This topic was modified 4 months, 3 weeks ago by Spastic Hamburger.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Looks like the directory feature is a built-in mod manager: https://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/modding/mod-install.html

Do note that all of that can be done from the OpenMW launcher 🙂

[Spastic Hamburger]

So Bash does support Morrowind for installing files but doesn’t yet support any of Mash’s other features, such as level list adjusting.

[Spastic Hamburger]

New version of OpenMW was just released with a pretty impressive change log: https://openmw.org/2025/openmw-0-49-0-released/

It also has early support for loading assets from the later games. That’s of intellectual interest to me as I’m curious as to their method. I’m wondering if they’re hard coding things or if they set up a reader with general pattern matching, having the data conversion done by translating external configuration files. Very early support and, from the blurb, it sounds like it’ll be years before it really goes anywhere

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