openmw-shaders VS portmod

This one https://github.com/zesterer/openmw-shaders

I'm using Zesterer's OpenMW Shader Pack, Zesterer's Volumetric Cloud & Mist Mod, and Vtastek's OMWFX Shaders. From what I'm able to tell, the OMWFX pack is not the original but it appears to be more up-to-date.

That gallery is also showing off Zesterer’s shaders

The most recent Official Build (Release 0.47) has distant land, realistic water, and I'm pretty sure it has active shadows too, as well as [limited] Support for some shaders. And the latest OpenMW (Pre-Release 0.48 or a Development Build) most definitely has some high-quality shader capabilities, plus the capability to use Physically-Based Rendering, Realistic Physics-Affected Volumetric Effects, as well as Post-Processing.

I've spent the last few hours tearing my hair out over this. I've been trying to set up OpenMW 0.48 (downloaded from where it says "Windows RC4" here) with shaders, but one of the main shader packs doesn't show up in-game. I've successfully installed Zesterer's volumetric clouds and photorealistic shader packs. However, I can't get this shader pack to work. I've tried extracting to C:\Program Files\OpenMW 0.48.0\resources, as well as extracting it to its own mod folder and adding that as a data directory in the launcher. Either way, none of the included shaders appear as options when I press F2 in-game. What could be going wrong? Am I missing something?

yes, Cody Glassman has a godray shader that works pretty well among other ones, although the readme file is not very helpful. You should get zesterer's shaders as well. If you've got the data source correct in openmw.cfg and postprocessing enabled in settings.cfg then they should all show up in the shader list when you hit F2.

0.48 supports post-processing shaders, there aren't that many out there yet though. You can try them out with the dev build and a shader collection like https://github.com/zesterer/openmw-shaders

I'm looking at portmod but now that I've got it set up finally, it looks like it doesn't actually install that list? It just installs individual mods!? From here is says to check out the basic usage guide, but that guide only shows how to install mods individually

As far as I know, downloading and installing each mod is the main method for the modding-openmw lists.

There is a tool to try to automate game modlist installs called Wabbajack [1]. It was briefly discussed on the openmw forums [2]. I'm not sure if anyone has tried further to get the modding-openmw lists working with it. I have never used Wabbajack, so I don't know too much other than it exists. It still seems to have extra requirements according to the post, including a premium NexusMods account if you don't want to manually download everything.

Just as I typed all the above I saw a mention of portmod [3] in the modding-openmw guide about mod managers. Seems it's like Gentoo's portage, but for game mods. I see it has some meta packages for modding-openmw in their ebuild-like repository [4], but I don't think any of the big lists have been updated in awhile. Also, there again seems to be issues with it auto downloading from NexusMods mentioned in the issue tracker. Nevertheless, it looks to be an interesting project.

[1] https://github.com/wabbajack-tools/wabbajack

[2] https://forum.openmw.org/viewtopic.php?t=7581

[3] https://gitlab.com/portmod/portmod

[4] https://portmod.gitlab.io/openmw-mods/meta-momw/

There's a similar issue which seems to be related to git bash/msys in some way: https://gitlab.com/portmod/portmod/-/issues/386

I use portmod and like it, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you are willing to learn (1) how to write your own Pybuild files or (2) use emerge.

I don't know if it can help your project, but there is a cross-platform CLI package manager for mods called portmod.

portmod - a CLI mod manager

Found this: https://gitlab.com/portmod/portmod/-/issues/209

Portmod[0] is a package manager for game modifications (currently Morrowind and Doom), and it runs sandboxed Python scripts to install individual packages. So I think this is possible, but it's not a built-in feature of the runtime as is the case for deno.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/portmod/portmod