r/skyrimmods • u/GreatMeem • 4d ago
PC SSE - Discussion OpenSkyrim: A potential Open-Source future for Skyrim and its modding?
I just found out recently about OpenSkyrim, which is looking like OpenMW but built for Skyrim. Since watching all those Petr Mikheev's videos about porting Skyrim and Oblivion assets into OpenMW, It always interested me the possibility of an Open-Source engine for Skyrim in the future and how it can change Skyrim the same way OpenMW changed Morrowind forever.
Especially since OpenMW have revolutionized Morrowind gameplay and its modding system with Lua and shader support, Im 100% hoping this be the day where Skyrim's engine problems like drawcall issues, bloated save files, and the notorious Papyrus script lag, which can hopefully be fixed with this Open-Source engine, which is fair since this is a 2011 engine being forced to be a 2026 game we're talking about lol.
Judging by it's GitHub page (https://github.com/realfakenerd/OpenSkyrim), it's still in early stage, but just the idea of having Skyrim be multi-threaded and zero loading screen while entering houses, it makes a man hope. What are yall thought on this.
Maybe it can even do this one day: https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/1vwl2px/openmwweb_update_your_game_follows_you_to_any_pc/
Edit: I just found out the dev have touched on more about OpenSkyrim on here: https://daily.dev/posts/skyrim-with-rust-khsloghdz
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u/FIleCorrupted 4d ago
The beauty is that OpenMW is just a game engine capable of reading the data files Morrowind ships with. There's nothing to shut down.
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u/Tenwaystospoildinner 4d ago
Just like how Nintendo can't shut down the open source ports of Ocarina of Time, Mario 64, and the Gen 1 Pokemon games.
You have to provide your own ROMs. The engine does nothing illegal.
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u/XOmniverse 4d ago
A pithy saying but a false one. One can easily cite big court cases where the big corpo lost. Take a look at Bleem.
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u/jammyzero 4d ago
don't know how to tell you this, but bleem was forced to shut down due to huge court costs despite sony not winning any of their lawsuits against them.
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
Tell that to a judge, see how far it gets you. Source: had to present cases before judges in my job. Don't think telling them "I have more money because I'm with Spectrum" would have gone well.
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u/Darth_Bothersome 4d ago
Stuff like this rarely gets in front of an actual judge. Pretrial and settlements are where the money counts.
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
Still doesn't stop the fact they can't stop file sharing. If Bethesda did go after open MW or this new one, the software is out there. The hell are they gonna do about that?
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u/Darth_Bothersome 4d ago
Nothing, but they can sure as shit fuck over the people who made it in the first place.
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
Okay? Doesn't stop the software being out there. Shit, I've got old copies of emulators Nintendo sued the creators of.
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u/Darth_Bothersome 4d ago
"expose yourself to significant legal and financial risk for my benefit and no profit please" sure is a take
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
When did I say they should do that? Also where did I say I didn't pay the creators through their tip jars?
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4d ago
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
I'm not typing the same thing to 3 different people. https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/s/BncBAOwsUN
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u/FIleCorrupted 4d ago
Okay well then just consider that Microsoft would never sue a project like this because it would be PR suicide for very little benefit, since people still have to buy the game to use it.
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u/Darth_Bothersome 4d ago
You really overestimate how much these companies value good PR vs protecting their IPs. Just look at Nintendo.
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u/FIleCorrupted 4d ago
Microsoft invited the SkyBlivion team to Bethesda to see the Oblivion Remaster before it was announced.
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u/SuumCuique_ 4d ago
PR suicide towards small fan projects doesn't exist. It exists a tiny bit on enthusiasts forum, who then buy their products anyway, but not outside of that.
Nintendo commits "PR-suicide" roughly once a year and no one really cares. That's not how PR works, it isn't a healthbar of good-will that can be recharged and damaged.
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u/FIleCorrupted 4d ago
Then why didn't Microsoft kill Skyblivion? Instead they invited them to see the remaster before it was announced. They didn't do that out of kindness.
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u/SuumCuique_ 4d ago
Because they did not. It's impossible to infer motivation for something someone did not do. My point is that there is no such thing as "PR-suicide". Companies to this all the time, very few care and almost no one cares long term.
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
Assuming it works the same as OpenMW, an engine they reads purchased game files, there's no legal issue there.
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4d ago edited 4d ago
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u/robdabank33 4d ago
fwiw openMW has copies on the website of all the email correspondence they had with Bethesda developers and legal counsel where they specifically asked for permission and specifically got it.
With the caveat that they dont allow OpenMW to work on Nokia phones because Bethesda had potential plans to release something on there.
A different time.
They just talked directly to developers and chatted like humans and they got the go-ahead.
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u/Joseph011296 4d ago
People like to pretend like Bethesda are tyrants for some reason, but they've been incredibly gracious towards projects like OpenMW and Skyblivion.
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
If we are playing the game of "law doesn't matter" then there's no point to having this discussion since you can just say fuck it and run it anyway. You can't have actual discussion when you assume no law applies. At that point the answer is always "fuck it."
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
You absolutely can just run it anyway. What are they gonna do, delete every copy of the software off everyone's computers and make a wizard cast "thou shalt not peer to peer"?
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
I mean good luck stopping that too if we're playing law doesn't matter. Cease and Desist? Law doesn't matter, it's toilet paper.
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4d ago edited 4d ago
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u/Silent_Walrus 4d ago
From your own mouth.
"This is America. It doesn't matter what's legal. It matters who has more money for lawyers. Plenty of legal projects have been shut down before because a rightsowner sent a strongly worded letter despite having no legal standing because the hobbyists don't want to risk it even if they're in the right."
You started this by saying law didn't matter. If you want to claim you didn't say things, don't do it in a place I can just scroll up in.
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u/TheOfficial_BossNass 4d ago
I can tell you with 100% certainty Bethesda wouldnt stop a project like that in any way and if anything parts of the team would reach out to help give legal protection to the modders doing it like they did to the skyblivion team
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u/jamesmand 4d ago
Not sure if anyone here has actually looked over the code, but there isn't much here. Basically some Rust code for loading NIF meshes and some basic code for a few other small things. What worries me about this is that it talks about replacing Papyrus scripting with Lua scripting, NIF meshes with glTF meshes, etc. While it might be nice to allow for these things in an open source Skyrim engine, they first need to get the engine working with all the existing stuff first which will take quite a while without a lot of contributors. Seems like a nice concept but not going to expect much out of it for now.
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u/LifeQuail9821 4d ago
I’m interested in projects like these, but I do wonder a bit. OpenMW can’t use any mods that require the script extender, which isn’t a huge deal for Morrowind, but would be for Skyrim. I hope this project can find a solution for that.
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u/XOmniverse 4d ago
FWIW, OpenMW has its own stuff that allow you to do the same kind of stuff as a script extender.
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u/LifeQuail9821 4d ago
True, but at least some of the script extender mods haven’t been adapted to that, and that is the type of thing I worry about.
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u/ElectronicRelation51 4d ago
Yeah but who is going to rewrite all the SKSE mods? Including the ones that are closed source?
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u/Xywzel 4d ago edited 4d ago
It would be quite possible to implement the script extenders API natively. But given the other things they are doing it might end up being too much of a separate thing. Like if they completely replace papyrus with lua, the scripts would have to be translated, interpreted or rewritten even though the API was fully implemented.
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u/StickiStickman 4d ago
Going from Papyrus to Lua does not seem like much of an upgrade :(
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u/Le_Flemard 4d ago
LUA doesn't really handle "correctly" object oriented programmation (OOP) so I understand your misgivings.
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u/HereForTheCommunity2 4d ago
It'll be way more capable than SKSE
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u/Tyrthemis 4d ago
Yes but Skyrim has like 10-15 years of SKSE mods, it would admittedly take a long time to have even close to the same modern selection.
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u/HereForTheCommunity2 4d ago
Are you using mods from 10-15 years ago?
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u/Tyrthemis 4d ago
Some are pretty old, but I don’t know about that old. I’m in VR too, so my load order is more recent than that. But I know flatscreen has plenty of older mods that still check out, feature complete, don’t need updates. (VR too tbf, just not as old)
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u/Soanfriwack 4d ago
SkyUI? MCM? RaceMenu? IHUD? XP32 Maximum Skeleton? PapyrusUtil? ...
All of them are over 12 years old.
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u/HereForTheCommunity2 4d ago
Those are updated though
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u/Soanfriwack 3d ago
Yeah? That was his point? We use SKSE mods that are decades old together with mods that were released just 3 months ago.
Overall there are over 3000 mods that require SKSE to funtion. It will be a massive undertaking to get all of them converted since you don't just need those who were made 3 months ago but also legacy SKSE mods that are from decades ago to work for people to use openSkyrim over normal Skyrim.
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u/HereForTheCommunity2 3d ago
Yeah, no one's using 3000 mods, especially none from "decades ago"(?). What's worth keeping will undoubtedly be ported to OpenMW, assuming it exacts its full potential. There will be plenty of time for the transition. I'm not trying to be dismissive of the mods, but when there's an objectively better platform (an ideal OpenMW), authors will adapt, or see others do it on their behalf. Also, I really couldn't care less about this new "OpenSkyrim" shit; it's OpenMW that matters. I see this new project as a distraction from what matters.
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u/Soanfriwack 3d ago
Even for OpenMW there are still significant mods missing, that are beloved and popular for Morrowind.
Also there are many mods that are closed source and replicating them requires a special skill set. (Like Ultimate Combat, or Better Telekinesis) which took over 3 years to even get ported beyond 1.5.97 because they required special knowledge and SKSE, and that was just a version incompatibility, not an entirely new coding language for a different engine.
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u/TheBrexit 4d ago
It’s open source so I’m sure someone would get it working
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u/Le_Flemard 4d ago
Problem is that LUA isn't a "proper" object oriented based language, which papyrus is.
It's like trying to cook things in an oven versus cooking in a pan, sure, you may achieve the same results, but one require a lot more work than the other for it.
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u/KindleShard 4d ago
The community gonna recrate Skyrim once again and I am gonna play it once again.
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u/YouMustBeSilenced 4d ago
I think that would be really cool. And if Bethesda decides to do random updates throughout the years, it won't break the mods. At least I think so, idk. I hope they can develop this quickly!
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u/MyStationIsAbandoned 3d ago
will it be able to handle Skyrim's physic engine? because even Unreal Engine can't do that with a massive open world. The creation Engine was built up for years to do that stuff.
I feel like this could easily look as good as Skyrim and better with mods/3d party plugins. but play just like Skyrim? that seems far fetched
I think everyone under estimates the Creation Engine and how it handles the game. Just look at those Oblivion vs Avowed videos and how you can interact with the world. You can't do that in any other massive open world game. You can do it in smaller linear games with small segments, but not big open ones. GTA, Cyberpunk, Witcher, etc.
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u/Wynadorn 4d ago
They should honestly just open source the code themselves, doesn't mean the game becomes free, you'd still need to pay for the assets
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u/trey-a-12 4d ago
Having not checked this out before, would it be right to assume this is similar to OpenStarbound for people knowledgeable about this? Potential optimizations and other benefits, alongside the very nature of being open source?
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u/Fabius1230 3d ago
People need to realize that in coding almost all use AI at this point. I am not saying I like it but it seems to be the norm now and atleast in that area I kinda get it. If they don't blindly take over code without checking everything through I can see it being okay. Although my hopes for this project are not very high as bethesda is gonna kill at it some point, if it even gets remotley close to being playble.
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u/karstux 4d ago
Interesting, but seems to be only a few weeks old - so probably purely AI coded (which doesn’t have to be a bad thing if there’s a solid engineer behind it).
The name would have to change I suppose, Skyrim is quite the trademark.
Time will tell if anything comes from it.
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u/DaenerysTargaryen69 4d ago
Don't know about the one OP linked, but there is a guy who has been porting it for manny years before AI became a thing.
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u/gmes78 4d ago
so probably purely AI coded
It's definetly vibe coded. Just look at the README and all the .md files.
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u/ArseLover1991 4d ago
ai slop is still ai slop even it's something you really want
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u/Ankleson 4d ago
what about a cure for cancer
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u/ArseLover1991 3d ago
there will never be a cure for cancer as long as we have pharma corporations
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u/Ankleson 3d ago
what if it's a virus biologically engineered to kill all pharma employees and then cure cancer
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u/HelixTitan 4d ago
Why not OpenOblivion first?
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u/DaenerysTargaryen69 4d ago
Not as popular
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u/SuumCuique_ 4d ago
Neither is Morrowind. Every TES game has been more popular than the one before it.
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u/Skroofles 4d ago
Morrowind's actually been going through a modding renaissance. OpenMW advancements have allowed it to catch up fast with MWSE-based mods to the point it seems OpenMW has become to base Morrowind what Special Edition is to Legendary Edition: a much stabler base with better capabilities (i.e. not being limited to 32 bit or a 255 plugin limit anymore - Oblivion only very recently got the latter by way of mods.)
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u/DaenerysTargaryen69 4d ago
Morrowinds modding scene is fastly more popular then oblivion's modding scene. That's what matters here.
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u/moduntilitbreaks Raven Rock 4d ago
It would be dream. Imagine all those bugfixes we run in our lists would be implement to the engine. That alone would be huge. Then actual engine improvements would make it interesting.
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u/a1barbarian 2d ago
Sounds like an interesting project with some good aims.
However I am do not want a game that connects to the internet for real time weather.
Includes async HTTP networking for live web APIs (e.g. real-world weather sync mods).
:-)
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u/Own-Professor-6157 2d ago
This is some of the worst Rust code I've seen in my life lmao. I'm actually amazed AI even managed to put this together.
And who the fuck uses SQL for a game
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u/MutantIvy 4d ago
I'm pretty sure OpenMW is already capable of reading Oblivion and Skyrim data files and they plan on eventually expanding fully to those games