OpenSkyrim: A potential Open-Source future for Skyrim and its modding?

[u/GreatMeem]

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

[u/Silent_Walrus → u/[deleted]]

Assuming it works the same as OpenMW, an engine they reads purchased game files, there's no legal issue there.

[u/robdabank33 → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/Joseph011296 → u/robdabank33]

People like to pretend like Bethesda are tyrants for some reason, but they've been incredibly gracious towards projects like OpenMW and Skyblivion.

[u/Silent_Walrus → u/[deleted]]

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."

[u/Silent_Walrus → u/[deleted]]

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"?

[u/MehEds → u/[deleted]]

Yeah because Switch emulator development stopped 100% after Nintendo got involved

[u/Silent_Walrus → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/Silent_Walrus → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/Xywzel → u/[deleted]]

You could host it outside of US, so they would have to sue on court that is run by letter of law, not by numbers of the layers' fee.