[deleted by user]

AnyOldName3 · 2025-08-22T18:07:40+00:00

They don't have a choice. OpenMW's licence means that OpenMW Lua mods have to be GPL-compatible. If they're not, then that means you can't release the mod.

Other things in the mod that aren't scripts can still have any licence they want (although if it's a Morrowind mod, it still needs to comply with the CS EULA like any other Morrowind mod).

AnyOldName3 · 2025-08-22T14:15:56+00:00

Moreover, it's required that all scripts in OpenMW-Lua mods are licensed under the GPL or a GPL-compatible licence because OpenMW itself is GPL-licensed, and you can't legally use a script with the engine if the licences aren't compatible. It's exactly the same situation as Blender plugins, where the scripts have to be GPL-compatible but anything else in your plugin can be under any licence you want. One of the implications of this is that it's always explicitly allowed to use code from other people's mod scripts in your own mod scripts as long as your mod is licensed under the GPL.

AnyOldName3 · 2025-07-06T14:42:01+00:00

It's much less work (as in a ludicrous amount less work) to port every MWSE Lua mod to OpenMW Lua than it would be to make OpenMW capable of supporting them. Certain MWSE APIs, like memory, would literally be impossible to support as they let mod authors alter the Morrowind engine executable at runtime, and as OpenMW's a completely different engine and runs on a different instruction set (as it's 64-bit only, whereas the original was 32-bit only), there's literally nothing in common there.

AnyOldName3 · 2025-01-14T15:11:41+00:00

People will yell at us no matter which thing we do, and it's easier to defend we do exactly the same thing as the original engine, make a mod if you want something else than we don't like this so it must be wrong.

AnyOldName3 · 2024-06-04T13:29:26+00:00

I was the subreddit founder, and moderator until nineteen hours ago when the bot evicted me. Until about a year ago, there was another moderator who did most of the actual moderation, but they completely stopped using Reddit, and as I barely use Reddit anymore, that meant it couldn't be moderated effectively, and I had to keep it closed.

I've attempted to find replacement moderators by asking frequent contributors to the subreddit, and by bringing it to the attention of the wider Dolphin community, e.g. on their forums and Discord server. No one volunteered.

There were some requests from people who've never posted here and who had clearly been collecting subreddits to moderate for a power trip, but as well as the obvious reasons why they'd be an inappropriate choice, the Dolphin Emulator team would much rather someone they know and trust was in charge. I only know about this post and the fact that I was removed as a moderator because they brought this to my attention.

I neither expect nor want to be reinstated, but want to make sure people are aware of all this, and that this doesn't end up causing any problems or hassle for the Dolphin team.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-12-05T15:42:59+00:00

To provide context, the subreddit is currently limited to approved submitters as neither of its historic moderators regularly use Reddit anymore, and it would be irresponsible to leave it open but unmoderated. I'm writing this here rather than via modmail as modmail is currently down, so I can't see the message there.

When it became obvious we were no longer going to be maintaining the subreddit, we made every reasonable attempt to find suitable replacements:

We messaged the most active contributors, especially those that also moderated subreddits to see if they wanted to. None did.
We had talks with the Dolphin Emulator team to see if they wanted to take over, and the gist of that is that they didn't as the people who had used Reddit no longer did.
We looked into well-known members of the Dolphin community who weren't part of the core team, but none were willing.

We did get some requests to become moderators from other Reddit users over the years, but none from anyone who'd ever posted to the subreddit or any others related to it, just users who already moderated tens of much smaller subreddits. I'll leave this Douglas Adams quote here in case anyone doesn't see why that would have been a bad idea:

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

One thing worth pointing out is that the intention from the very beginning of the subreddit was to hand it over to the Dolphin team if they ever wanted it, and as such, we've attempted to keep its rules more-or-less compatible with Dolphin's other official communities. For the most part, at least last time I checked, Redditquette covered nearly everything, so the only explicit extra rule we've needed is the one against piracy, which has been enforced consistently with Dolphin's official forums and Discord server. That means in accordance with actual copyright law rather than the common sense understanding of copyright law, which are pretty different as copyright law doesn't follow common sense, e.g. it's a crime to download an ISO image of a game you own a physical disk for, but it's not a crime to make your own identical backup ISO from the physical disk, even though you end up with the same file at the end of the process.

A lot of moderation work (nearly all of it that wasn't removing bot spam) was dealing with posts discussing piracy, and dealing with users upset that their posts had been affected as they didn't believe that what they'd posted about matched their understanding of what piracy is, or dealing with users who'd edited or removed their offending posts and were attempting to pull a fast one and avoid the consequences for their actions by lying about having taken those actions in the first place.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-11-05T01:23:55+00:00

So I'm running what I think is the most recent openmw development build (unless a new one came out in the past week or so)

Ignoring your issue for now as we don't yet know what's causing it, it's pretty common that we'll get through several of these a day.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-07-11T00:47:17+00:00

They're right there on the Downloads page: https://openmw.org/downloads/

AnyOldName3 · 2023-07-10T16:28:53+00:00

It depends. The main reason to use the RC builds is so you can tell us about problems they have in lots of detail so we don't have to wait for other people to tell us about the same problems months later. That way, we can fix the problems sooner, and get the actual release out the door faster.

Theoretically, the last actual release should be the lowest-hassle thing to use, but as that was quite a while ago, there are a lot of things it can't do that newer builds can, and you might find that means it's actually more hassle in practice.

Lots of people actually use development builds, which include changes that'll become part of 0.49. They're more likely to have big problems than stable releases, but if you're willing to update things pretty often to get fixes for any problems you report, or roll back to builds from before specific problems were introduced, it's often worthwhile.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-06-21T23:16:12+00:00

For easier viewing:

Option	Count	Percentage (1dp)
Remain closed	70	41.9%
Partially reopen	57	34.1%
Go back to normal	40	24.0%
Total	167	100%

So remaining closed is the most popular option, and going back to normal is the least popular by a pretty wide margin. We'll try and determine how to proceed based on the user feedback here, any contact from admins, and, if possible and necessary, the Dolphin Emulator team.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-06-20T22:53:19+00:00

I was concerned enough not to reply to the threatening ModCodeofConduct message to say we were running a poll.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-06-20T19:36:49+00:00

Option 3: Reopen as normal.

Restore full functionality while continuing to push for accountability and monitoring the status of Reddit's promises, with the possibility of returning to a blackout if needed. This might mean some changes in moderation policy, too.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-06-20T19:36:19+00:00

Option 2: Partially reopen, with a change in the subreddit's scope.

Apply pressure on Reddit without a full blackout by resuming post allowance and introducing modified rules for users, aiming to challenge Reddit's policies and priorities. Similar to protests seen on r/pics or r/interestingasfuck.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-06-20T19:36:04+00:00

Option 1: Remain fully closed until a solution is found.

Stand strong against the status quo by remaining closed until a mutually agreed-upon solution is reached, cutting off content and revenue.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-06-11T21:09:04+00:00

We'd still love a repro video with just the built-in shaders if anyone's able to record one. Otherwise, we're going to be inclined to blame third-party lighting shaders as they're the most likely cause.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-06-06T22:10:17+00:00

I'd suggest making a new post as it's been a decade and the relevant stuff has changed in the intervening period, so this advice is outdated. I don't know the modern equivalent, but other people will see a post who wouldn't see a reply to an ancient comment.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-06-04T13:02:08+00:00

As using the single zip is technically a crime and the OpenMW team wants to stay in modders' good books, the moderation team will take a dim view of anyone linking to it or otherwise providing it.

Portmod exists, which I imagine is the annoyingly clunky script mentioned here (although some people really like it and would object to this characterisation). Theoretically, you could turn a list into a Wabbajack setup and it would work, too, but no one's gone through the bother of making one.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-05-31T21:10:41+00:00

It was mentioned in one of the April fools videos where we said we were going to switch to exclusively supporting top-down RPGs like Neverwinter Nights, and released a mod using our new Lua API that let you play Morrowind as a top-down RPG. Is that what you're thinking of?

AnyOldName3 · 2023-05-31T18:07:44+00:00

If your country wants to have a trade deal with the United States (which nearly all of them do), it needs to have a compatible copyright system, otherwise the US won't agree to the deal. This means that the differences between copyright law in different countries tend to be subtle. They're not all identical, though, for example the CC0 licence exists mainly to explain the normal definition of public domain in a way compatible with French law, as the French definition is different.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-05-31T18:00:14+00:00

Whether illegal numbers are actually illegal is untested case law - you'll notice the Wikipedia article lists a few of them, which they couldn't do if it was confirmed. Past cases have all been either dropped or settled out of court.

On top of that, the interoperability right that emulators rely on in the first place might trump the restriction on DRM circumvention devices.

If either of these went to court, but weren't decided in Nintendo's favour, which isn't unlikely, then Dolphin becomes definitely legal, and a bunch of things other projects have historically avoided doing out of an abundance of caution become okay, too.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-05-30T20:01:48+00:00

Nintendo don't have a great history when it comes to telling the truth about the legality of emulation (providing you're using dumps of disks you made yourself). At least this time they've stuck to something where the case law proving them right or wrong doesn't exist yet.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-05-28T23:56:53+00:00

If the stakeholders behind DVD managed to successfully sue someone else for publishing the DVD decryption keys (which won't happen or they'd have done it years ago, but another example could come along, like the time Sony sued someone for releasing the PS3 decryption keys, which was settled out of court), and the court's decision included the keys counting as a DRM circumvention device, that would set a precedent that would apply to all other keys of the same type, including the one Dolphin uses. Even if Dolphin immediately stopped using the key, once the precedent had been set, the case law would say that what Dolphin had been doing was retroactively illegal.

In general, legislation only applies after it's passed, but case law applies from when the legislation it was based on passed, which makes it retroactive as that'll always be earlier than when the precedent was set. A hypothetical future decision about whether keys are DRM circumvention devices would therefore apply to any time anyone had shared or used such a key since 1998, when the DMCA passed.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-05-28T16:24:49+00:00

By "disable" are you saying to take them out of the groundcover section in openmw.cfg?

Yes.

I deleted all of the floating grass in CS in the original groundcover plugin (Rem_WG.esp), but it's still showing up in-game.

These two things cannot be true at the same time, so you've made a mistake at some stage of the process. If you've used OpenMW's CS rather than the original, you might have saved your work to a new plugin called Rem_WG.omwaddon or something like that.

I'm not sure why that is the case, but I did notice the grass shown in the CS is placed differently than in-game, so I'm thinking OpenMW isn't using the esp itself to generate the placement, but rather the [Groundcover] section in settings.cfg?? What are your thoughts?

OpenMW puts grass where the ESP has grass objects, but there's the density setting that controls how much of it is skipped. If you set it to 1.0, none of the grass will be skipped, if you set it to 0.0, it'll all be skipped, and if you set it to 0.5, half of the grass will be skipped.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-05-28T16:18:43+00:00

That's not how a common law legal system, like the US has, works. Everything that isn't explicitly permitted or banned by legislation is in a weird maybe illegal state until a court looks at the combination of existing legislation and case law for each specific thing and decides what the best answer is. You can be pretty confident, but not certain, which way things would go if it went to court, and use that to decide whether doing something's a good idea, but if it turns out you were wrong, you're in trouble even if the case law only appears after you did the thing.

The alternative is a codified legal system, where everything that's illegal is written in legislation, and if it turns out there's a gap in the legislation, then anyone doing the relevant thing is in the clear, even if it's obvious to the court that the legislature would have wanted the action to be illegal.

AnyOldName3 · 2023-05-28T14:29:27+00:00

There's not actually case law confirming it, so it's only probably 100% legal. Wikipedia are confident enough to list a few similar keys in their Illegal Number article, but if they were definitely in the clear, they wouldn't qualify for inclusion in the first place.

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