ModOrganizer-to-OpenMW

A Mod Organizer plugin to export your VFS, plugin selection and load order to OpenMW

Why you'd want this:

• OpenMW has no GUI for mod directory installation and management. Mod Organizer does.

• If you use OpenMW's VFS system to manage your mods, tools like MLOX can't see all your content files, so aren't much use. If you start these tools through Mod Organizer, it will inject its VFS into them and they'll be able to do their jobs properly.

• Starting your game through Mod Organizer every time might be a bit of a hassle, but that's the only way to make a program see its VFS. OpenMW has its own VFS, so if you use it, you can just start OpenMW normally.

• Mod Organizer (more specifically its VFS implementation, USVFS) has some issues that mean it doesn't always work as intended stemming from the complexity of injecting a VFS into a process only designed to load things from one directory. OpenMW's VFS is far more reliable because it's 'supposed to be there' and was therefore much simpler to write without bugs.

Installation:

Put OpenMWExport.py and (optionally) openmw.ico in your Mod Organizer plugins directory. If you don't want to use this plugin in English and a translation .qm file exists for this plugin in your desired language, put it in your Mod Organizer translations directory.

Usage:

You'll find an 'Export to OpenMW' option under the tools menu. Clicking it will make the plugin do its thing. If you need to do anything else, you'll get a message box explaining it.

Note:

As of version 4.0.0, ModOrganizer-to-OpenMW must use PyQt6 to work with MO2 2.5.x, forcing a breaking change and allowing old cruft to be stripped out. You can still use older versions of this plugin in older Mod Organizer builds (although MO2 2.1.2 is the minimum which will work, and MO2 2.1.6 is required for version 2.0.0+ of this plugin).

Translating this plugin:

As of version 1.1, this plugin has a .ts file. This allows people who know multiple languages to create translations of it. You can contribute your own translations at https://www.transifex.com/anyoldname3/modorganizer-to-openmw and I'll try to include them in the next release. If you want to translate to a language that isn't listed there, there should be a Request Language button somewhere.

Building this plugin

As this plugin is pure Python, it doesn't need building - you can just copy the files into place by hand. However, obviously that won't update the translation files, and can become annoying when working on the plugin, as you'll need to do it repeatedly. Because of that, some automation is provided:

install.ps1 will regenerate the .ts file and copy the plugin files to the location specified by its first argument or given via stdin. If the -Release flag is passed, it'll also copy the licence and readme, making it easier to do a release. To use it, you'll need a Python interpreter with some version of the PyQt6 package and its pylupdate6 command installed to be available in the current shell. If you've got a Mod Organizer 2 development environment on your machine, you can add its Python interpreter to the current shell's path, otherwise pip install PyQt6 will get you what you need.

Stubs for MO2's plugin API are available in the mobase-stubs pypi package. This package depends on the specific Python point release that the corresponding MO2 version uses as its interpreter. If you see this error message

ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement mobase-stubs
ERROR: No matching distribution found for mobase-stubs

you are most likely trying to install the package into a too-old or too-new Python environment. Multiple Python installs can be present on the same machine, so you can have the required version in parallel.

By far the easiest way to get linting and pylupdate working is just to create a venv and install the packages in requirements.txt:

# Note: use Python version that matches MO2's embedded interpreter
# You can use py -310 to launch Python 3.10, for example
python -m venv env
.\env\scripts\activate
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Once this venv exists, editors like VS Code should pick it up and use it automatically (although they might need restarting first).

Also, a VS Code tasks.json file is provided that will call the install script as a build task. To specify the install destination, create a file in the .vscode directory called InstallDestination.txt containing the path to the MO2 plugins directory. It also includes another build task for calling the release script which uses .vscode/ReleaseDestination.txt. Linting won't work with its default pylint linter as native packages with stubs are used, and in mid-2020, pylint doesn't support stubs. However, mypy works just fine once it's aware of the stubs. Battles were waged to try and make mypy see the stubs when they weren't in a venv and it was too complicated to document and reliably reproduce. Just use the venv.

You'll probably want to create a .vscode/settings.json resembling:

{
    "python.linting.pylintEnabled": false,
    "python.linting.mypyEnabled": true,
    "python.pythonPath": "env\\Scripts\\python.exe"
}

This isn't checked in as you'll likely end up with local changes. It would be nice if JSON had include directives like YAML.

Future possibilities

• As the Mod Organizer Morrowind plugin matures, this tool will gradually become more useful.
• This plugin could be adapted to use callbacks so it runs automatically whenever you make any changes in Mod Organizer
• If Mod Organizer ever re-implements archive management, this plugin could copy Mod Organizer's list to OpenMW's fallback-archive list.