OpenMW cannot handle This one Horror Mod. The fear Factor is in The FPS.

http://mw.modhistory.com/download-55-5911

So this is a horror mod from 2011, by a "MentalElf" Barney Blankenship, (according to the description), that's to quote:

(a compilation of many, many, modders work, to a large part assembled, interiored, and scripted by LightningFlik... seven months of work or so, and later modded by me... for about three months of work... MentalElf).

It's supposed to be one large dungeon that get's more warped and twisted as you dive further into it, with more warped and twisted scenery, which is fine and dandy and all, but the real horror comes not from the derelict environments with "Gored and Skinned" bodies lying about, but the FPS.

Let me summarize. The issue starts as soon as you enter the first dungeon on top of the hill behind the Suran temple. The first thing you'll notice is the weird FULLBRIGHT the lanterns just give off when you enter the cave. (It's supposed to be dark as crap I'm told,) With only the blue lantern to guide you, you strattle onwards, quickly realizing that the shadows and light load in as if the game was old school runescape 2008, with no subtly or mid-light hue values, just fullbright or completely shadowed, (some right next to each other in obvious patches.)

Where the Lag and everything goes to trash happens soon after you go into the first door past some weird floating frozen red butterfly. As you approach this wooden platform the Enemy snakes become notified of your encounter and quickly start to attack at once. What happens here I can't explain personally, but something about those particular enemies coming at you at once will immediately kill the framerate without question. I can affirm it is these particular enemy types, as in One playthrough, after killing them and disposing all the bodies in a glorious 1 fps per second fight to the death my framerate immediately restored itself back to working order as if there was no problem whatsoever.

And that was just the first part of the dungeon. It goes downhill from here. On said playthrough where I was barely abled to kill all of them, I entered deeper into the dungeon through this trap door, where after moving forward a little bit into the tunnel, I was immediately bombarded by-... Invisible enemies? Yeah I don't know what was attacking me, all I know is that I physically swarmed by a creature/creatures that began to attack me on all sides. I know it was a creature and not some weird scripted event because when I did managed to hit them, I got the same blood splurt animation you usually get when landing a hit on the enemy. So there was something there, and it killed me multiple times as I was immediately swarmed multiple times by the same enemy as soon as I moved forward a little bit in this second dungeon.

Eventually I managed to dash past these invisible foes, and past the decaying demon looking thing to be met yet again by low framerates caused by the horrid snake foe. Luckily this time it must have been one or two of the little cretins as soon as I got a certain distance away from them, dashing past these undead demons, the framerate restored itself, (Partially.) Now running past everything there was a two split corridor, and I went down the rightmost side entering the third dungeon, I'll nickname The Bone Zone, as this mod author thought that spamming a bunch of skeleton mobs everywhere counted for a good fear factor or something. But don't get to many close to you, as the framerate will drop anyway. This will happen inexplicably multiple times, with what I'm blaming the first two instances after snakes, (which apparently OpenMW simply can't handle.) Instances later down the line that caused more framedrops include, The skeleton bombardment, a large "demon troll", and some weird undead giant in a cage followed by more skeletons.

If this sounds more ambiguous towards the end of this explanation, it's because the constant deaths I received from dying to mob spam at low framerates haulted my progress further into the dungeon. Not allowing me to properly experience the true horror, of whatever the mod author was trying to convey, I was instead bombarded instead of a different kind of real game horror of what it's like to game on a framerate more closer to flipbooking with arthritis than actual game, in what feels both jarring and insulting for a device running a gt 1030 and i7cpu.

Even more mind bogglingly I brought this Mod's issues to the general chat of OpenMW's discord and they experienced even worser framedrops whenever they didn't have the lantern equipped, (I consider myself lucky to not experience that particular issue,) but unfortunately not even they could properly make it over to the second dungeon, (or simply gave up after dealing with the snake issue, your guess is good as mine.)

Supposedly the Models for the snakes themselves are just too much for OpenMW to handle and just buckles up as soon as they are triggered to attack. (The models themselves are not complex visually speaking, but seem to be composed of multiple objects as the jaws of the creature actually lag behind the snake's attack animations.) Not to mention for whatever reason these hitboxes on these creatures are absolutely massive. It would appear at least for now that this one enemy would slowdown the game to nothing but barely a framerate per second. I would test more on the latter parts of this mod, but the constant lag deaths on top of mob spamming make it impossible to properly explore the lower depths without save spamming and quick reloads every other second I make it a frame forward.

I don't what is it from this 2011 mod that OpenMW cannot handle and/or stuggle to handle poorly, but this mod hasn't been updated since 2012, so chances are the original mod author may never well fix these sort of issues without someone here doing the legwork for him and just republishing the whole mod.

It's a shame really because I wanted to enjoy a horror mod, not deal with the terror of poor optimization for OpenMW. I'm not even sure how this was even accomplished either? As despite what one or two guys in the discord did to change up the model file, the game would just lag out immediately five seconds afterwards. Which of course lead me here to posting up this ticket.

Should any of you coders be brave enough to combat this horrid plague of un-optimized snakes and other estranged cursed creatures, MODDERS BEWARE, you're in for a bad time.

Attached to this report are just some of the screenshots of what the game was calculating whilst these enemies were attacking, as well as a mod list shown here, just to show you how little I was working with that could have ever conflicted with this mod, (should that be the case.) I just can't say why, but OpenMW cannot handle these snakes and other horrors within for the life of it.

**If you wish to contact me for more information and screenshots feel free to ping me on the OpenMW discord at: Soto#5106

I'll more than likely be able to give you an immediate response from there.**

P.S. The only mod I'm aware of not shown here is the Persuasive speech mod, as it is an Openmwaddon file that the modloader will not natively recognize for the life of it.