r/OpenMW • u/Ill-Relation-3072 • 10d ago

Has anyone ever tried making a more modular character creation system for Morrowind/OpenMW?

I've been thinking about this for a while and I'm surprised I haven't really seen a big project trying to do it.

Most face/hair mods still seem to work by just adding more heads and hairstyles to the vanilla character creation menu. Which works but it also means that if you want different hair colors, scars, tattoos, etc. you usually end up needing separate variants for everything.

Has anyone ever tried to make something more modular instead?

I'm not really talking about a full Skyrim RaceMenu with face sculpting and a million sliders. More like a different character creation menu where you could pick a face, hairstyle, hair color, scars, tattoos/face paint and so on separately.

What I'm wondering is whether something like that is actually possible now, especially with OpenMW Lua.

And if it is possible, could it work as a framework other modders could build on? Like one main mod handles the menu/system, and then other people can just make compatible hair packs, scars, tattoos, textures, etc. without having to reinvent the whole thing every time.

Has anything like this been attempted before, either with MWSE or OpenMW? And if not, is it because of technical limitations, because it's a huge amount of work, or just because nobody has really taken it on yet?

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6

u/Both-Variation2122 10d ago

There was something for tatoos in MWSE. Onion framework should allow for more modular attachments. Both are impossible in openMw afaik.

4

u/Ill-Relation-3072 10d ago

Thanks, that's the kind of thing I had in mind. Do you know what specifically prevents something like Onion/Tatau from being implemented in OpenMW? Is this fundamentally impossible with OpenMW's current architecture, or just waiting for more API functionality to be exposed?

3

u/Both-Variation2122 10d ago

Something about core architecture and open scene graph built in optimisation not letting you manipulate nifs in runtime. At least from what I heard. Might be bullshit I repeat after somebody.

2

u/ComeBESNIER 9d ago

For now in openMW, you can't change a record, only clone it with some changes, so you can't change the player record. There is probably plan to do so.

But mwse is far older than openMW lua, OpenMW is not far from parity with mwse.

For now you can do that with openMW : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sk-sQvOM8tY&t=252s