Morrowind

Additional OpenMW experimentation

August 13, 2022 /

Before I did more playing with Tembriel in my vanilla Morrowind install last night, I took the time to explore the OpenMW build. I’d gotten some useful tips from both Dara and the folks on the Skywind Discord server, which amounted to the following:

  1. Checking my Vsync setting
  2. Capping maximum frame rate
  3. Checking behavior with screen resolution

I also learned from the Discord server that the distortion I was seeing when turning is called “screen tearing”.

So with these suggestions in mind as to things to check, I fired up a fresh game inside OpenMW. This one I set up to be a Dark Elf spellsword, and I named her Luciriel.

I went through the initial character setup, reached the room where I had to pick up the dagger to practice with it, and tried to turn my field of view there since that’s where I’d seen the problem before. And I immediately discovered that it didn’t repro if I left the screen resolution set to 1024×768. Apparently the issue had been caused by my setting the resolution in the launcher to my laptop’s screen resolution!

That said, I also set a cap of 60fps on the launcher settings, just because I didn’t know if that was contributing to the problem. And I’ll be leaving that in place, I think.

I got Luciriel out safely into Seyda Neen and saved at that point, without actually starting a playthrough with her.

But I will come back to her later. I don’t want to try to run two parallel Morrowind playthroughs, I’m already doing Tembriel’s in parallel to two Skyrim playthroughs now, and that’s plenty to keep track of!

Plus, I just kind of want to experience the full game in the vanilla build first. And then compare the experience to playing in OpenMW. Because as y’all may have guessed, I am the exact kind of completist nerd who’ll do this in detail. 😀

I’m not going to create playthrough pages on the site for Luciriel yet, I’ll do that when I’m actually ready to play her. But I wanted to get this bit of experimentation in its own post, so I can refer back to it later.

As Angela Highland, Angela is the writer of the Rebels of Adalonia epic fantasy series with Carina Press. As Angela Korra'ti, she writes the Free Court of Seattle urban fantasy series. She's also an amateur musician and devoted fan of Newfoundland and Quebecois traditional music.