This release brings greatly-improved player movement thanks to the addition of Jolt Physics. The player can now climb out of chasms, jump, and swim. Other baseline gameplay features such as hit registering, killable enemies (w/o AI), item pickup, and using keys on doors allow the starting dungeon to now be considered minimum-playable. Rendering performance is still below average and more optimizations are planned.
Release video is here.
New features and changes
- Jolt Physics integration
- Minimum-playable starting dungeon
- Key can be obtained and used on cell door
- Enemies can be killed (no AI or combat calculation yet)
- Corpses and treasure can be looted (equipping not implemented yet)
- Click to attack with right mouse button in modern interface mode
- Citizen name generation
- Citizens can be killed (crime not implemented yet)
- Baseline support for original item definitions
- Locked treasure chests can be bashed open
- Locked doors can be bashed open (magically-locked doors not implemented)
- Attribute allocation and stats in character creation (values not gameplay-functional yet) (@libertus21)
- Player gold
- Player can now die from lava and drowning
- Player can now fall to the ground from exhaustion and may die depending on the location
- Indoor walking sound and swimming sound
- Swimming music
- Fanfare now plays when picking up quest items (quests not implemented yet)
- Player camera can now look straight up and down without breaking math (@libertus21)
- VOC sound file repairing feature (data/audio/VocRepair.txt). Removes several pops/clicks in original audio, eventually to be replaced by mods
- Modern interface reticle
- Gameplay clock modding (data/Clocks.txt)
- Convenient Windows batch file in windows/setup_OpenTESArena.bat for installing Visual Studio toolchain and building from source (@libertus21)
Fixes
- Fixed building interior variants not matching original game
- Revised light strength to match original game. Some areas like the second level of Mines of Khuras define a light radius override in the original data but it was never used in Arena. This has been fixed.
- Fixed diagonal wall collision
- Weapon swinging is now frame-rate independent and should no longer be difficult to successfully swing above 100 fps
- Fixed voxel visibility quadtree internal node calculation (press F4)
- macOS build .dylibs are handled better now resulting in less chance of a crash at application start
Known issues
- Player movement may feel bumpy due to how physics resolves ground collision with several small box shapes. Combining shapes is planned in a future release.
- Walking onto raised platforms like stairsteps is an unsolved problem and should be fixed in a future release
- Item stacking is not implemented, bags of gold can only hold 1 gold
- NPC interactions not implemented
- Bow weapons don't fire projectiles yet
- Puddles cause a significant slowdown due to current design for screen-space reflections
- Puddles might not reflect entities in an adjacent chunk
- Outside textures and sky don't update to match weather after entering and exiting an interior
- Screen-space fog is not finished and appears as a low-res cube around the player
- Building names for wilderness temples and in Imperial City don't match original game
For details on how to get OpenTESArena running, follow these instructions. To see what's next, check out the roadmap.