development_environment_setup

Third-Party Libraries and Tools

OpenMW currently uses the following libraries:

OpenSceneGraph - OpenGL rendering toolkit
SDL2 - input and windowing
MyGUI - GUI toolkit
Bullet - physics engine
OpenAL or OpenAL soft - sound playback
FFmpeg - sound decoding and BINK video playback.

OpenMW additionally uses the following tools:

CMake - used to manage the build process
Git - used as the source control management system

For those unfamiliar with Git, the Sphere RPG Engine group has a fairly useful short wiki page entitled "Git for the lazy". Make sure to also check out the GitLab FAQ.

General notes on dependencies

MyGUI

By default, MyGUI will build with the Ogre3D platform enabled, but Ogre3D is not a hard dependency. If you do not want to have Ogre installed, then configure MyGUI with the dummy platform, and disable tools & demos:

cmake .. -DMYGUI_RENDERSYSTEM=1 -DMYGUI_BUILD_DEMOS=OFF -DMYGUI_BUILD_TOOLS=OFF -DMYGUI_BUILD_PLUGINS=OFF

OpenSceneGraph

It is recommended to use the OpenMW/osg fork of OpenSceneGraph. OpenMW still works with "vanilla" OpenSceneGraph, but may run at slightly lower frame rate.

Keep in mind the official OpenSceneGraph 3.6.3 release has a critical regression which causes major instabilities in OpenMW. It appears that 3.6.4 release may have severe issues as well. Even if you don't want to use our fork, make sure to use a build linked against an older or a newer stable release (e.g. 3.4.1 or 3.6.5).

OSG plugins

OSG comes with numerous plugins, most of which are not required by OpenMW. If you install OSG from a package manager, then you will have tons of bloat on your system that OpenMW does not need (another reason to build your own).

Only the following plugins are required for OpenMW to function properly:

Texture formats:

osgdb_dds
osgdb_tga
osgdb_bmp
osgdb_jpeg
osgdb_png

TrueType fonts support (used for profiler):

osgdb_freetype

.osg format support:

osgdb_osg
osgdb_serializers_osg

Note, the jpeg/png plugins will not be built unless you have 'libpng' and 'libjpeg' headers installed on your system.

If you are creating a release package, the library files for the plugins need to go in <library path>/osgPlugins-<OSG_VERSION>.

When using the OSG git master (to be 3.6), or the OpenMW OSG fork, you can use the following cmake arguments to avoid unneeded plugins from being built:

-DBUILD_OSG_PLUGINS_BY_DEFAULT=0 -DBUILD_OSG_PLUGIN_OSG=1 -DBUILD_OSG_PLUGIN_DDS=1 -DBUILD_OSG_PLUGIN_TGA=1 -DBUILD_OSG_PLUGIN_BMP=1 -DBUILD_OSG_PLUGIN_JPEG=1 -DBUILD_OSG_PLUGIN_PNG=1 -DBUILD_OSG_PLUGIN_FREETYPE=1 -DBUILD_OSG_DEPRECATED_SERIALIZERS=0

S3TC texture compression support

OpenMW requires S3TC texture compression support. If you are using a proprietary video driver, you will usually have S3TC support out of the box. With open-source drivers on Linux, you may need to install S3TC support separately. An indicator for missing S3TC support are completely white or pink textures.

If you're using Ubuntu, you can install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 to fix the issue.