News archive

Thanks to the bug reports from brave souls testing our alpha release of NMM 0.50 yesterday we have released an update today for people testing the alpha. You can find this latest version by clicking here. Here's the fix list:

1. Bugfix: NMM failing to create file links when the program wasn’t run as administrator with some Windows’ UAC settings.
2. Bugfix: File link overwrite prompt not showing the file owner.
3. Bugfix: Rare crash while migrating the install log.
4. Bugfix: Fixed a missing file link issue with some fomod mods for fallout games.
5. Bugfix: Fixed an issue with Category and Readme Manager setup windows.

Please remember, only install this version of NMM if you're willing to accept the presence of potentially game stopping bugs (until we fix them). Please also remember that the news comments aren't the best place for bug reports! The best place to report bugs is using our Bug Tracker. It's tied to the forums and allows us to converse with you, and others experiencing the issue, so we can fix the issue as soon as possible. Please remember to provide as much information as possible including the steps you took that caused the bug to occur and what operating system you're using! Thanks again guys. As you can see, your help is helping us to make NMM better.

Ok, it’s ready for testing. I mentioned a couple of months back that we were putting the finishing touches on the next build of NMM that will become 0.50.0. This latest build features a new feature, mod profiling.

Profiling is the ability to create and manage multiple different playlists for each game we support so you can switch between your playlists before running the game.

What’s the point? Well, if you’re the type of person who likes to do multiple different playthroughs of your game then it should make managing your specific mod lists for each playthrough that much easier. If you like to roll a warrior, a mage and a thief, for instance, you can create different profiles for each of your characters with mods specific to that character’s playthrough, as well as mods used by all the playthroughs.

Because this new functionality has required an extensive rework of how your mods are stored both within NMM and within your respective game folders we are releasing this build as an alpha of our beta. That means that, unlike our normal release method, we are not going to be instantly sending out an update notice to all users of NMM and we aren’t updating the download links on the NMM download page. Instead the direct download link is in this news thread.

It’s our hope that we can get a small group of brave and willing individuals to install this alpha build and let us know if they run in to any errors or glaring mistakes, and what those errors are, so we can get them fixed before making a general release. We’ve extensively tested this update ourselves on our own systems but we just cannot test for every single eventuality possible across all the thousands of mods available and across all the thousands of possible hardware and software combinations there are in the PC world. We need your help for this, because if we don’t get some help then we’ll release it as part of the beta and THEN people will be sorry if there’s major bugs we couldn’t find that break things! If some users are particularly helpful then I will chuck some Premium Membership time their way to say thank you.

If you’re ready and willing to test this build there’s a few things you should know. First of all you should hope for the best but plan for the worst and be accepting of this possible fate. The worst case scenario would be losing your ability to use NMM at all in the short term (hopefully a maximum of a few days before a hotfix can be sent to you). Next, because we’ve completely reworked the mod installing method NMM needs to completely deactivate all your current mod list and attempt to reactivate them one at a time. That should be fine for unscripted mods but any scripted mods you have will have to be reinstalled again (i.e. go through all the scripted installers as they pop up and choose all the available settings again). NMM will prompt you for each scripted mod you have. Everyone is going to have to do this anyway once we finalise this release and send it to the masses so this isn’t a special step for the alpha alone ergo the choice is really whether you want to do it now or do it later (or never update NMM again).

We’re hoping that this profiling system is pretty intuitive for the average user of NMM and that isn’t not going to need too much explaining. We’ll assess user feedback on this matter and work on documentation if necessary.

But without further ado and with ample amounts of warnings and gratitude the direct download for this alpha build can be found here.

I last gave an update on the current situation back in September. 5 weeks on I thought I’d let you know what’s happened and where we are.

On the site front we think we’ve finally resolved our database cluster and it’s now working smoothly. Any errors you might see or have seen on the site over the past few days will not be related to our database cluster any longer. As it happens it turns out troubleshooting the problems with the site is a bit like pulling up the carpet to sort out some dampness only to find the floorboards need replacing, only to find your electronics underneath the floorboards need replacing, only to find your house has termites, only to find...you get my point. The good news is that the next step of our infrastructure work is now ready to be moved in to as our Cloud system is now operational. We just need to move the sites over and tweak a few lines of code.

In the not too distant future we’ll also be releasing our new Nexus Mods site that I’ve been going on for yonks now that will support mods for any and all games. It would be prudent to wait until this work is ready before transitioning everything over to the new Cloud setup. However we’re aware that things can get pretty bad at times on the sites (namely Skyrim Nexus) so we’ll be using Skyrim Nexus as our guinea pig. If the cloud setup can handle Skyrim Nexus comfortably then it’s going to be able to handle all the other games being on it as well. We’re already busy transferring the files over to the Cloud and at some point this week we’ll be doing a full switch from our current dedicated server setup to the Cloud setup. You’ll see the usual maintenance page during this work. From there we can tweak our Cloud setup and go on from there. Once ready we’ll move all the sites over. It might mean in the short-term things are a bit turbulent on Skyrim Nexus but it’ll be some short term pain for some long term gain. We’re hoping that a database cluster with 80 CPU cores and 480GB of RAM plus a 48 CPU cores, 192GB RAM cloud environment equals a fully functional and fast site 24/7.

On the NMM front I know I mentioned that an alpha for 0.50, with mod profiling, was “just around the corner”. However after writing that article a few important changes needed to be made. A few people have gone a bit bat-shit crazy at the fact we haven’t released the alpha yet after saying it was near. To you guys I shall simply say; calm the hell down. I’m sure you’d have been raging a lot more if we’d given you an update to NMM that had broken all your mods so have a little faith that any delay has occurred in your best interests. And don’t be stupid. Please. We’ll get it out to you as soon as we’re happy with the results.

The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.26.0! Grab it from our Downloads Page for all operating systems. This is the most violent release of OpenMW to date, with the implementation of Melee combat, Lyncanthropy, and Drowning. See below for the full changelog.

Known Issues:

• Extreme shaking may occur during cell transitions for some users (enable anti-aliasing as a possible workaround)
• Polish version of Morrowind.esm makes OpenMW crash

Do not miss the release video by the mighty WeirdSexy.

Changelog:

• Implemented Melee Combat
• Implemented Lycanthropy
• Implemented auto-initialization of AI Packages
• Implemented Drowning
• Implemented Data File installation in the Launcher (Mac and Linux only)
• Implemented mouse wheel transitions between first/third person
• Improvements to UI window sizing and input
• Improvements to sliders in the enchanting window
• Fixed already-dead NPCs not equipping clothing/items
• Fixed missing terrain in Tamriel Rebuilt, South of Tel Oren
• Fixed health calculation of NPCs, fixing Heart of Lorkhan acting like a dead body
• Fixed strange behavior when leaving water
• Fixed terrain rendering to more accurately emulate vanilla Morrowind
• Fixed no clip players causing NPCs to leviate
• Fixed door open/close sound not cutting itself
• Fixed no clip player preventing doors from opening
• Fixed keypress during startup freezing the game
• Fixed combat magic stances being available prematurely during character creation
• Fixed naked Dark Brotherhood assassins
• Fixed Rest dialog showing "Until Healed" option when player has full stats
• Fixed invisible equipped torches
• Fixed sheath weapon sound playing when leaving magic stance
• Fixed some boots not producing footstep sounds
• Fixed FPS bar alignment
• Fixed printscreen not working
• Fixed being able to jump while sneaking
• Fixed blank movie variables in Morrowind.ini crashing the game
• Fixed dancing girls in "Suran, Desele's House of Earthly Delights" so they dance
• Fixed repeating idle animations
• Fixed sticking to certain surfaces, improves movement when swimming close to collidable objects
• Fixed animation problem while swimming at the surface of water and looking up
• Fixed capitalization of names in inventory
• Fixed an issue with the spell effect area layout not updating properly
• Fixed a Tamriel Rebuilt crash on load
• Fixed rain sound persisting into new games
• Various compilation fixes

Don’t you hate it when you pay for something and then the next day it goes on sale? Don’t you equally hate it when you’re thinking about buying something but continue to put it off and then the price goes up? That’s why I’m here to give you a friendly heads-up that from October we’re going to be raising our Premium Membership prices in-line with, drum-roll please, inflation. Fact is money isn’t worth as much as it used to be (does that make sense?) and money is exactly what we need right now.

We launched our Premium Membership back in 2006 and since then it’s become an extremely important stream of revenue for the Nexus. Without it this network simply wouldn’t exist. We’ve spent over £120,000 ($187,000) in the past few months on trying to sort out the stability of the network for the future. We’re still not done and we’ll continue to invest in the infrastructure until we’ve got it right. It’s been an expensive year as we’re currently running (and paying for) our new system in parallel with our old one until the new one is ready, which means we’re essentially paying double right now. If you ever wondered what your Premium Membership goes towards, that’s what it goes towards. And the 4 dedicated programmers working on the site. And the 37 servers we have running the network (that number goes up every time I write about this sort of stuff!). And the 3 GBits of bandwidth we use every second. And so on.

From the start of October our prices for Premium Membership will be rising as follows:

• Life time of Supporter membership (not the same as Premium). Originally £1. Now £1.29.
• 1 month of Premium Membership. Originally £2.49. Now £2.99.
• 3 months of Premium Membership. Originally £6.99. Now £8.49.
• 6 months of Premium Membership. Originally £11.99. Now £14.49.
• 12 months of Premium Membership. Originally £19.99. Now £24.49.
• Life time of Premium Membership. Originally £39.99. Now £49.99.

Remember Premium Membership at any level gives you an ad free experience on any and all Nexus sites, current or future (yet to be made sites), for life irrespective of whether you buy 1 month or a lifetime. You also get unrestricted download speeds on all the servers and multi-threading enabled file downloads to a maximum of 4 threads per file. For a full list of benefits you can take a look at our Premium Membership info page.

With the worst of the fallout from the recent site changes now behind us and things improving in the long run we’re back to working on improving the site functionality and expanding the network. While I’m trying to hold back on releasing new Nexus sites until our centralisation is done when I’ll never have to worry about launching a Nexus site in the same conventional way again, I’ve delayed the launch of these sites for quite some time so I can no longer wait.

Towards the beginning of July I was contacted by the folks over at Torn Banner Studios to see if I might be willing to provide a centralised location to host mods for Chivalry Medieval Warfare which is always an honour. I’ve obviously delayed the release of the site until I’m confident that things are stable again since our server moves and now that they are I’m happy to announce the release of Chivalry Medieval Warfare Nexus.

Torn Banner released their SDK for the game not too long ago which has opened up the potential for lots of new custom content and maps. Lots of stuff is already released and being worked on via their forums. The previous month I’d bought Chivalry and had a good playthrough of it so I was more than interested in helping out. For those who don’t know Chivalry Medieval Warfare is a popular first-person multiplayer game that pits two teams of knights, archers, men-at-arms and vanguards against each other in various map locations with various different objectives to complete. The teams are red and blue, hence the red and blue colour scheme to the site! If you like your combat up close and personal with swords and polearms then Chivalry will be for you.

There’s already several maps available to download for the game and I hope to see a lot more in the coming months.

Not wanting to stop there I’ve received an unprecedented number of requests to release a site to help support the Shadowrun Returns community. Shadowrun Returns was one of the first high-profile video game success stories to come from Kickstarter when it received over 400% of the funding that was initially requested and the game was launched towards the end of July to much fanfare.

While I’ve yet to play the game I’m very much aware that it’s a game that is going to rely on and thrive upon custom content and indeed most of the game has been built to revolve around the custom content that the user base is working on. It launched with a fully functioning editor that most people have commented is very easy to use along with Steam Workshop support. Initially I wasn’t too bothered in releasing a Nexus site for the game considering the direct integration with Steam Workshop right from the start but unfortunately the integration has had a number of teething issues that are yet to be resolved making things tough for some mod authors. So why not release a Nexus site to help spread the teething issue load? We can teeth together.

Shadowrun Returns Nexus is now up, launched and already being populated with work from the community.

The OpenMW team is proud to announce the release of version 0.25.0! Grab it from our Downloads Page for all operating systems. With the implementation of SoundGen records and the Wander AI Package, this release introduces stomping NPCs. Note that AI Wander must still be called from the console. SoundGen implementation also means that Creatures make noises. Prepare for squealing scrib nostalgia. SDL2 has also been implemented, which stomps out a lot of mouse focus and other UI bugs. Check over the changelog for the rest of the changes in this release.

Known Issues:

• Extreme shaking may occur during cell transitions for some users (enable anti-aliasing as a possible workaround)
• Polish version of Morrowind.esm makes OpenMW crash
• Pressing 'j' key during startup freezes the game

Check out the release video by the spectacular WeirdSexy.

Changelog:

• Implemented SoundGen for NPCs and creatures
• Implemented AI Package: Wander
• Implemented 64-bit compatibility for OS X
• Implemented Hardware mouse cursors
• Implemented first person animations
• Implemented mouse wheel zoom in third person mode
• Implemented Autorepeat for slider buttons
• Launcher will not start OpenMW when no esm/esp files are selected
• Fixed launcher crash on OS X < 10.8
• Fixed a performance drop in the Census and Excise Office
• Fixed SSCR records not starting correctly
• Fixed handling script names with hyphen characters
• Fixed handling the repeat parameter for AIWander
• Fixed enchanting window to include weapons
• Fixed character being able to move while over-encumbered
• Fixed dead keys
• Fixed mouse not being confined to window when the game is un-tabbed, and other mouse focus issues
• Fixed ini Importer aborting when there is no existing cfg file
• Fixed Dead NPC and Creature collision boxes
• Fixed incorrect sorting of answers in dialogue
• Fixed ini Importrt core dump when given an unknown parameter
• Fixed getting stuck in some doors
• Fix for journal/book rendering
• Fix for draw weapon sound playing when weapon is readied and cell border is crossed

see also:
Official Youtube Channel
For New Developers
OpenMW Homepage
Chat @freenode

We successfully completed the move of our databases over to a new centralised cluster yesterday with the final site, Fallout 3 Nexus, moved in the afternoon. Moving the databases off the same servers that actually serve the site’s pages has freed up resources on the servers that can go towards handling more concurrent connections and as such I’m hoping you’re finding the browsing experience on the sites this weekend, especially on Skyrim Nexus, are much more satisfactory.

There are currently a few known bugs on the sites that we’ll be working on sorting over the next week. You do not need to report these errors to us as we already know about them:

• Problems with people either being unable to login or being unable to stay logged in through page loads. Generally what happens is you enter your username and password, click the submit button, the main page loads but you’re still not logged in. No error messages are shown. We’re not sure why this isn’t working for some people while it’s working for the majority but we’ll look in to fixing that first.
• People have reported the file servers sometimes report themselves as being overloaded or “struggling” despite other people downloading the same file perfectly fine. Assumed that any NMM downloading errors are of a similar ilk for the same people (e.g. if manually downloading fails so does downloading through NMM).
• Issues with the Image Share not posting images and linking to the correct forum topics.

If you’re experiencing a problem that’s not on that list then by all means report it.

While I’m very pleased that the cluster has worked out well I’m still not happy. I want to be in a position where there’s not one single point of failure for the sites so if a server goes down the sites still run perfectly. I also want to be in a position where increasing capacity is as simple as buying new servers. The old system wasn’t that simple, and I want a system that is that simple. Right now we’re serving about 700 concurrent connections/second to the sites (not the file servers, they do loads more than that) and we’re hitting that limit regularly. I want to be able to serve twice that much. We’ve spent over £33,000 ($50,000) on the database cluster and I’ve now outlayed a further £18,000 ($28,000) on several static content servers that will serve all the images and static pages and a further £40,000 ($61,000) on moving all our page serving in to a specially developed cloud server system utilising 48 CPU cores and 192GB or RAM across 6 virtual servers, load balanced by two extra virtual servers to ensure redundancy. On top of that we’ve got to continue paying the billls on the old servers until everything is moved over, so we’re essentially paying double the amount it normally costs to keep things going from a hardware standpoint. Don’t get me started on bandwidth or the file servers where we’ve got another 3 file servers on order at the moment. When you wonder where the Premium Membership money goes; this is where it goes.

I’m happy with how things have gone so far and I’m looking forward to a point where we can stop dealing with making the sites run properly and get on with making the sites better and expanding the network. Frankly, if I were to have another year like this current one I’d seriously consider throwing in the towel. So fingers very much crossed.

There is going to be some down-time on all Nexus sites and the forums this week as we work to move our databases over to our new cluster setup. Each site needs to be taken offline while a “dump” of the database can be created, transferred to the cluster and then imported in to the cluster database setup. The sites obviously have to go offline during this process so no new content is lost between the time when we make the dump and the time until the import process is fully completed.

The total down time will depend entirely on the site being transferred at the time. The forums, Skyrim, both Fallout sites and Oblivion are going to take longer than the other sites as they have a lot more content to transfer over. The forums and Skyrim should take 4 hours each while the other sites might take less time. Either way you’ll know when the transfer is happening as the site will be taken offline, with a message to that effect, during the process.

It’s my utmost hope (and no doubt yours too) that, through this transfer to our cluster, the reliability issues with the servers is going to be a thing of the past. For good. If all goes to plan this weekend should be the last weekend of stability issues for the Nexus and we can move on to doing what we actually want to do; making the service better for everyone and expanding our reach to all games so anyone can use the Nexus for modding if they so wish. We’ll also be far more DDoS proof due to the distributed nature of our own server setup that will mean we can shift load between many different servers ensuring any attack will have to split the botnet being used considerably in order to cause any down time.

I’ll hold off on thanking you for your patience during this trying time until we can confirm that this is going to be the solution to all our problems but our initial testing has been very positive, so now it’s time to take the plunge and hope for the best.

Down time starts tomorrow (Monday) morning, starting with the forums.

We've been no strangers to bog-standard DoS attacks and thousands-strong botnet DDoS attacks over the past 12 years. Any given week we'll be DoS'd, just most of the time you won't notice it because systems are in place to prevent such attacks. Every once in a while, though, someone with a rather large botnet or someone using more sophisticated techniques comes along that either requires us to adapt or just to weather it out. All I know is, it's been 12 years, we've survived countless DDoS attacks, and the sites aren't going anywhere.

Going hand-in-hand with that is the fact school holidays have begun which means kids have more time to waste. I used to enjoy playing football, cricket, skating and trampolining in my summer holidays but I guess some kids like to run bot nets instead. The why isn't really important (and I have no idea as to the why). All I know is that it's happening right now on the servers and we're doing what we can to alleviate the problem as best we can.

There's not much you can do on your end to fix this exact problem. There is, however, something you can do to help the general DDoS plague and that's to not be one of the millions of dolts out there browsing the internet without an anti-virus and firewall running as a bare minimum. Botnets form because "hackers" have gained access to insecure systems. The more insecure systems they control, the more powerful their botnet becomes. Typically gamers are more clued in than most in this regard, but still, I know some of you will be reading this without any anti-virus installed on your PC and to you I'll simply say this; you are a part of the problem. You're not the problem, but you're a part of it in the same way you're a part of the problem during an epidemic if you sneeze without covering your mouth with your hand or don't wash your hands after going to the toilet. You're in that group of people. You aren't the virus but you help to spread it through your lack of action. So get on to fixing it if you haven't already, or at least please don't complain to me about the sites being down if you're in that group.

A blunt news post, I know, but in all truth I treat DDoS attacks with utter emotional disregard. Not that we're not trying our hardest to solve the issue, but frankly, there's no point getting upset about it. Some idiot is DDoS'ing us and cowering behind the internet's anonymity, we've had no contact from said individual(s), it'll end when it ends or when we find a way to block it and there's no point getting upset about it.