Using OpenMW

Using OpenMW

Although OpenMW, an open-source game engine intended to replace Morrowind.exe (the game content still has to be installed from the Morrowind game CD, ditto for its expansions) has been around since 2011 and was included in the openSUSE 13.2 distro, I didn't give it a try until the end of 2015, when it was at version 0.36.1 and considered close to version 1, ie. officially playable. It was already playable, though buggy, a few years ago, but shortly after a big update in which, OpenMW's site stated, the graphics part of the game engine had been replaced by a superior rendering system, the moment had come to see for myself. I copied the game files, including a few mods, from the Windows partition to the Linux directory "/home/shared", giving that directory and its contents the owner "root", the group "games" and the permissions "drwxrwx---", meaning that as a member of group "games", I would be able to create, alter and delete savegames from inside the game. This page will serve to record my experiences with OpenMW 0.36.1 and higher.

The game launcher
Where are the savegames
Errors and improvements in 0.36
Getting 0.38 to work
Testing 0.39

The permissions were evidently correct, as I could start a game, go though the intro and tutorial and make a savegame, all without hitches. There was a tiny hitch with the game launcher, though, and I should start there. Searching for "openmw" in openSUSE's start menu, I get four options:

The first one I should ignore, the second starts the game launcher, the third is the game editor, and the fourth is a link to a website. As part of recreating the game engine in an open-source, multiplatform way, the makers of OpenMW have also written their own launcher and game editor. I'll ignore the editor for now, and start the launcher. As this is the game's first launch, it asks me where the game files are. I browse to "/home/shared", choose "Morrowind.esm", am asked to import the ini settings (which I'm told I can do again later in the Launcher settings) and get a disordered list of gamefiles and mods with warnings that the needed ESM is not found. These warnings are even attached to Tribunal.esm and Bloodmoon.esm. Apparently, I should have chosen the ESM of the latest expension pack, so I hit the back button and browsed to Bloodmoon.esm this time. The result was the same disordered list of mods, but at least the basic ESM files were okay.

The first menu button, Play, would just let me select a Content List and start playing. The second menu button, Data Files, is more like the Morrowind Launcher I'm used to, but the mods seem arranged in alphabetical order, meaning that mods starting with "A" and depending on Bloodmoon get an exclamation mark in a yellow triangle and, when moused over, will state what ESM they need to be loaded after. So I dragged all mods in the right order, ticked the ones I wanted, since some are mutually incompatible, and clicked the little "Play" button at the bottom of the screen. The title screens played just fine, so I exited the game before making a character. Returning to the launcher, I saw that the mods were jumbled again! It turns out that the order of ticked mods is remembered, but unticked mods are listed alphabetically between the ticked ones in a slightly inconsistent way. It doesn't really matter, but it looks chaotic. This launcher does do something I don't remember from the Windows game: it allows me to create more than one "ticked mods" list by creating a new list from the available data files (click the page button with the little green plus) or delete the list I'm currently viewing (click on the red cross). Changing a content list's name is as easy as viewing the list, typing something different in the name field and pressing Enter. Then, if the sight of disordered mods offends me, I can choose Play in the menu, select only the content list that goes with my game, and start playing. In this way, a modder can switch between "vanilla" and "modtest" or test different mod combinations without having to tick and untick stuff in the launcher all the time.

Finally, the Graphics button lets me choose how and at which resolution to display the game, while Settings will let me reimport the Morrowind ini file. OpenMW itself needs neither Morrowind.ini nor a bunch of registry keys. Starting the game again, I created a character, which - whoa, was the mouse supposed to do that? - had some trouble following the ship's guard, as the camera somersaulted every time I tried to make a move. This was fixed by going to Options inside the game, and, under the tab "Controls", decreasing the "Camera sensitivity" even further. I'd chosen the resolution 1024x768, without window border but not fullscreen (in case the game hung) so, to accommodate the panel at the bottom of the KDE Desktop, OpenMW automatically used the custom resolution of 1024x741. The game looked fine, apart from the Cyrodiil NPCs being too narrow, which I thought had been resolved in the newest version, and my character appearing to hover above the ground. After the intro & tutorial, I made a save, then loaded it, no problem. The only gamestopper was when I somehow got stuck at the base of a tree and couldn't free myself even by jumping. I could have teleported myself with a GetPos/SetPos in the console (it works, press "~") but didn't think of that and quit instead, wondering: where are the savefiles?

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The Windows savefiles, copied with the game files, were not shown in the load menu. Understandable, sometimes savefiles are platform- and even processor-dependent. But my new savegame was not in the Saves subdirectory. The usual savefile location, "/var/games", yielded nothing, although "/usr/share/openmw" had a number of files dealing with the game engine and launcher.

In "/etc/openmw" I found "openmw.cfg", which reads as follows:

# This is the global openmw.cfg file. Do not modify!
# Modifications should be done on the user openmw.cfg file instead
# (see: https://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=Paths)

data="?mw?Data Files"
data=/usr/share/openmw/data
data-local="?userdata?data"
resources=/usr/share/openmw/resources
script-blacklist=Museum
script-blacklist=MockChangeScript
script-blacklist=doortestwarp

Good tip about the webwiki, otherwise not helpful. Time to look in my home directory.

Nothing OpenMW-related was visible, so I ticked "view hidden files" and found "openmw" subdirectories under ".cache" and ".config". The first was clearly only for temporary files.

The file "openmw.cfg" contains the class choice questions and level-up messages from the Morrowind.ini file. Opening the file "launcher.cfg" confirmed that the launcher does only remember ticked mods. Editing the latter in a text editor didn't work, and so is clearly not a good way to create a second Content List by hand. Pity! And still nothing about saves.

Even a "find" command hasn't turned up any save files. So I consulted the webwiki which told me to look in "$HOME/.local/share/openmw", where screenshots go (good to know!), under "saves", where, to my delight, savefiles are stored per user. Also delightful is that when I want to load a savefile in the game, all savefiles are presented in historical rather that alphabetical order. Given that they are not "ess" files, I doubt I could open them in the TESCS, or even OpenMW-CS. But since OpenMW aims to prevent bugs like doubling after loading a savefile, that should not be necessary.

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To get the full 1024x768 resolution, I tried to play fullscreen at said resolution on my 1366x768 monitor. Don't do this! The game was stretched over the whole monitor, so I quit back to desktop, and a band down the right of the desktop was suddenly unusable junk. Unwilling to log out and back in again, I ran the Display Configuration to change the screen resolution until the garbage cleared up. Then I moved the panel to the right side of the screen and ran the game again. That's how I got the highest resolution feasible on this laptop.

So, continuing the game at the new resolution, now with my character's feet properly on the ground, I found myself stuck again, this time on a corner of the Temple in Vivec. An unwise SetPos X landed me in the water under the Temple, but I swam out and used the console to conjure a potion of levitation (Rising Force, for the purists) into my inventory to get back on dry land quickly. The console is not quite as in the Windows version: what I type goes into a bar at the bottom of the console, and appears in the console screen, plus error message if applicable, after pressing Enter. Different colours are used to make the output more readable. Scrolling through previous commands with cursor-up and cursor-down keys works as in Windows, but what works better than in Windows: "coc [cellname]" will not leave me trapped in water under a building (Molag Mar), or stuck in a pier (Ebonheart). Looking at the OpenMW bugtracker brings up many bugs regarding death drops and being stuck in landscape after using "coc", not all of them resolved, so maybe I was lucky. Touch wood.

A little mod I made for merchants who unintentionally equip their own armour doesn't work, however. Did it also not work under Windows, or does the syntax in its script offend OpenMW?

As versions 0.37 and 0.38 were announced on the OpenMW site, the openSUSE directories kept updating my installation to higher versions of 0.36, up to 0.36.1-1.25 at the end of 2015. Which meant that I kept getting the following errors, noted under version 0.36.1-1.23:

Collision doesn't work well with NPCs. I've seen slaughterfish at various heights on the lighthouse of Seyda Neen, as if they came swimming in but didn't realize they are now out of the water and on top of a structure. The guards who came running at them, became stuck in the lighthouse wall buildings. On the other hands, I've seen rats walking underwater in Vivec canton underworks.

Heck, collision doesn't work well with the PC. If I walk into a tree or a clump of mushrooms, I can no longer jump (which is how Morrowind solved this problem), and no amount of walking will let me break free. Since the console command FixMe hasn't been implemented yet, I had to use SetPos or coc in the console. There is a bug report for this.

The console sometimes seems buggy, probably as a result of querying something that returns an unknown value, like GetPos with the name of a NPC I haven't met yet. After using GetPos on a guard stuck in a wall, I typed in a command to add a soulgem to my inventory at the bottom of the console, but got a line that repeated the GetPos command. After repeating this 10 times, I found 10 soulgems in my inventory, so the command did work, it just didn't show up right.

Not that the slaughterfish on the lighthouse are a problem, as their attack doesn't kick in unless I stand right in front of them and hit them. There is a bug report for this too.

Creatures and NPCs walk too fast and too soon, straying from where the player expects them. This may be connected with the bug report that NPCs break quests by disappearing. I've seen mudcrabs in Fort Pelagiad, while an Imperial Archer from Fort Pelagiad had strayed far to the south. In Fargoth's scripted sneak sequence, instead of standing still between sneaks (anyone who has seen his script will know what I mean) he starts to busily walk around. In The Rat In The Pot, Aengoth seemed to have disappeared, although a GetPos showed he was located at the same height as me - had he walked into a wall? SetPos placed him next to me. I also used SetPos on Sirilonwe in the Mages Guild at Vivec because she ran around so much, but she returned nicely to her original position. NPCs seem to move much faster than they should, and once I came down from levitating after making a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Daring, I was suddenly walking very fast, too.

The console command "ShowMap [place]" does not work. When a character says "I'll mark it on your map" or the name comes up in dialogue, that does work.

A silly niggle: it looks as if I can use a Power more than once a day, because the bar under the Power's icon doesn't become empty after using it. If I try to use it again, though, I get an error message.

An unreproducible message: on the quest where I must put a dwarven bone in Jeanne's room, I sneak past her and stand before the locked chest. I hear a droning, chugging sound, like a soundbyte loop. I unlock the chest with the Tower Key power, now the sound stops but the screen is frozen. Using Esc, or "~" to open the console, or right-clicking don't do what they're supposed to, although they seem to be advancing the PC animation by a frame. I had to tab out of the game window, close it, and start a new character. Repeating the quest, I placed the bone with no problem, but heard a sound almost like it, only the game didn't hang, when returning to Jeanne's to kill the spawned dwarven spectre. Had the spectre been making the sound by appearing too soon?

Quests don't seem to advance: Glathel doesn't turn up in Gadayn's shop, Maurrie and Nelos don't elope together. This may be because their scripts use a local variable DaysPassed, while, as of Tribunal, the game has a global variable DaysPassed. In the Windows game, any script using this name as a local variable can't access the global variable, which for those scripts is just fine. In OpenMW, the confusion between the two may lead to the local variable not being updated.
Soulgem values and the values of souls are highly variable. A diseased rat suddenly needs a lesser (not petty) soulgem to hold its soul, and the value is 800. Or a petty soulgem and a lesser soulgem, each containing the cheap mudcrab soul, are both worth 50 gold, although value should increase with the type of soulgem. And this doesn't happen consistently.
Inventory problems: sellers often have two piles of one ingredient, for instance, 4 resins and 1 resin, as if they were wielding one ingredient, although the second stack may number more than one. This also happens with miscellaneous items. It would happen to armour and clothes that the merchant equips, but the pieces of armour separated in Ra'Virr's inventory below, are items that he isn't wearing. Even more mysteriously, in the PC's inventory, there may be a space for an empty item, and at one time I had 2 units of this mystery item.
Journal problems: I join the Tribunal Temple, am given the book of the seven pilgrimages, and the new journal entry reads " gave me [etc.]", there is a space instead of a name at the beginning of that line.
Arrow ambiguities: I have to equip both bow and arrows, but when I sell some of the equipped arrows, they are suddenly all unequipped. There was a discussion about this on the OpenMW forum. It's not really a mistake, it means I have to remember to re-equip arrows after bartering.
Testing my mods showed a problem with scripts: TakeOffPutOn doesn't work, and OddsAndEnds doesn't dress NPCs like the pantsless orc woman at Ghorak Manor. Maybe the problem lies with Equip.
There are dialogue problems with these mods, too: after Ra'zahr is transported to Ebonheart, I ask him about Therana and he says "The mistress is right here." When I have a writ on Toris Saren, he is supposed to start conversing with me, but attacks. The Morag Tong member who has the Black Jinx should say that Dratha should join the Morag Tong if she wants it, but doesn't. The Poor Fargoth mod works except for one thing: if, just after plundering his stash, I encounter Fargoth and say "What rotten luck" the first time, instead of returning the ring or offering to help, then I should only get the option "What rotten luck" in subsequent conversations. Instead, I get "Is there anything I can do to help?" to which Fargoth gives the correct reply: "Ah well, thanks for caring." It seems dialogue conditions are not being evaluated correctly.

Errors (or not) that were already in the original game itself:

When raising "friendship" with merchants by bartering, if I quit the conversation and restart it, the raise in friendship is gone. A bug report was filed for this, but frankly, I think it's okay as otherwise it would be childishly easy to raise Disposition with merchants, and that without any gain in Personality (it raises Mercantile instead).
On liberating Khajiit slaves, they will start to walk around, as they should. Liberated Argonians stay in place. Maybe a difference in animations?
The first time I meet Baladas Demnevanni, long before I've been to Caldera or Tel Vos or any Propylon Chamber, he offers me chores and lets me take the Propylon index (I used AddTopic to make that topic show up). It's not wrong, just a bit spoilerish.

Things that were improved on the original game:

When I liberate slaves, they drop bracers at THEIR location and not the player's. In the old game, if a NPC dropped something, it appeared at the PC's feet.
SetChameleon properly makes a character transparent and unnoticeable. The old game didn't make the character transparent.
From the console, "SetHealth 1" does not kill the targeted actor, as it did in the old game. "SetHealth 0" does, and it augments the deadcount, which the old game would only do in a combat situation, so now GetDeadCount will work.
Torches burn properly - even the dud from the Adammasartus smuggler's cave - and disappear when used up. No more useless torches cluttering my pack! That means I can't sell them either, but frankly, I don't care.
In the old game, it was not possible to make a potion that fortifies more than one attribute, even if the ingredients allowed it. OpenMW does allow Fortify for at least two attributes. Afterthought: since I have the Unofficial Morrowind Patch which fixes this problem, is that due to OPenMW or the patch? Moot point really, as I'm not playing without that patch, and OpenMW is about to get a big update.
Alchemy is generally less of a pain in the butt: if I enter a name for a potion, it stays while I mix new potions of the same kind, instead of reverting to a default name (which I then have to change in the text box) after every brewing action.
The console has tab completion, so I type the start of a NPC name, press Tab, and get either the whole name, properly capitalized, or, if more names start that way, a list of possible names in the screen above the command line. This also works for locations, and is great for long place names that I don't want to type out in full.

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When, on January 29 2016, OpenMW for openSUSE suddenly updated itself to 0.38.0-1.1, I eagerly started it to see if these errors had been solved (apparently there are no more "flying rats", implying improved collision). The opening sequence was played, then I saw a violet screen as the game files were being loaded, then another sequence ending on the screen where I start the game, then a violet screen with game music playing, and no key works. The game doesn't like my graphics card, it seems, and is now unplayable. On 25 February, the game updated itself to 0.38.0-1.3; still the same violet screen. Waiting for the next update!

Updates came and went - both of OpenMW 0.38 and OpenSceneGraph, its new graphics provider (previously, graphics had been taken care of by Ogre) and the violet screen remained. I checked on OPenMW's forum in February and yes, someone else had the same problem. One reply referred to a post of which I'll cite the relevant part:

OpenMW requires S3TC texture compression support. If you are using a proprietary video driver, you will usually have S3TC support out of the box. With open-source drivers on Linux, you may need to install S3TC support separately. An indicator for missing S3TC support are white textures.

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0

Packages

You will need g++ in order to compile OpenMW.

To setup a build environment and install all dependencies type:

 sudo apt-get install git libopenal-dev libopenscenegraph-dev \
 libsdl2-dev libqt4-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-thread-dev \
 libboost-program-options-dev libboost-system-dev libav-tools \
 libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libavresample-dev \
 libbullet-dev libmygui-dev libunshield-dev libtinyxml-dev cmake build-essential \
 libqt4-opengl-dev

Well, I tried this and it didn't work. I didn't use apt-get, because I have a nice graphical installer that lets me search for stuff and tick it in a list, so I ticked everything that I thought would be related. So I tried something related to Fedora Workstation, even though I have a different distro:

Because some dependencies of OpenMW are not in the Fedora Workstation repositories, you need to enable RPMFusion free and non-free repositories which provide packages for the missing dependencies. Packages

You will need g++ in order to compile OpenMW.

To setup a build environment and install all dependencies type:

sudo dnf groupinstall development-tools;
sudo dnf install openal-devel OpenSceneGraph-qt-devel SDL2-devel qt4-devel \
boost-filesystem git boost-thread boost-program-options boost-system ffmpeg-devel \
ffmpeg-libs bullet-devel gcc-c++ mygui-devel unshield-devel tinyxml-devel cmake

Again, I just searched for these files and ticked whatever wasn't installed yet, and probably should have been. Still no luck. So I compared the versions of the main programs needed to run OpenMW, to the versions I had installed:

OpenSceneGraph 3.2.0 - OpenGL rendering toolkit: I have version 3.4.0.
SDL2 - input and windowing: I have version 2.2, should be good enough.
MyGUI 3.2.1 - GUI toolkit: 3.2.2 is out but I didn't have MyGUI installed yet, just the shared library. But it's for Ogre, which OpenMW 0.37 and onwards doesn't use, so I shouldn't need it. I did update the library, but that didn't help.
Bullet 2.83 - the physics engine: my version is 2.82, maybe this is where the problem lies?
OpenAL or OpenAL soft - for sound playback: sound works fine, no need to check.
FFmpeg For sound decoding and BINK video playback: the opening sequence plays without problems, so that should be fine too.

Closer examination of what lay behind these programs revealed that I had a low "libboost" version (searching for libboost turns up many files, all parts of the libboost package) and libgif6 as opposed to the current libgif7. But openSUSE 3.12 simply had no higher versions in its repository. Repository configuration time! First, I added the Factory graphics repo, which should have all the latest packages:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/graphics/openSUSE_Factory/

Still no libgif7, so I changed it to the Tumbleweed OSS repo:

http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss/

And got that delightful charming "you agree not to use this software if you are on America's naughty list" message, which, to highlight its absurdity in this situation, I'll quote in full:

As required by US law, you represent and warrant that you: (a)
understand that openSUSE Tumbleweed is subject to export controls under
the Export Administration Regulations ("EAR") which are implemented
and enforced by the US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and
Security; (b) are not located in a prohibited destination country or are
specifically prohibited under the EAR or US sanctions regulations; (c) will not export,
re-export, or transfer openSUSE Tumbleweed to any prohibited destination,
entity, or individual without the necessary export license(s)
or authorizations(s) from the US Government; (d) will not use or
transfer openSUSE Tumbleweed for use in any sensitive nuclear, chemical,
or biological weapons or missile technology end-uses unless
authorized by the US Government by regulation or specific license;
(e) understand that countries other than the US may restrict the
import, use, or export of encryption products and that you will be
solely responsible for compliance with any such import, use, or export
restrictions.

And this for an open-source OS first developed in Finland and then refined into SuSE in Germany, before Novell got its grubby paws on it and enforced the rule that people in Iraq may not even use openSUSE, let alone update it to run OpenMW, because those filthy Ay-rabs are not allowed to have nice things, and because fantasy RPGs are very terrorist and anti-American, which for Morrowind is half true, as in-game criticism of the Empire's control of Morrowind vaguely echoes real-world criticism of American control over oil countries. Well, the openSUSE repo that comes with this asshat clause did have libgif7, though not the Bullet version I apparently needed. And the Factory repo upset the automatic updater:

- File '/repodata/repomd.xml' not found on medium 'http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/openSUSE_Factory/'

So I replaced it with:

http://ftp.fau.de/packman/suse/openSUSE_Factory/

And changed Tumbleweed to Leap42, for which I again had to agree with the asshat clause:

http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/leap/42.1/repo/oss/

And the game still didn't run, but the automatic updater suddenly did announce 429 updates. Of which some had broken dependencies (especially libboost_60, the highest versions of the libboost files that was available for install was libboost_58) and others insisted there was an update, yet there was no higher version to update to. So I disabled both the Factory and the Asshat repos, and automatic updates worked properly again. But I still got nothing more from OpenMW than a violet screen.

The problem resolved itself unexpectedly in mid-March. After yet another OpenSceneGraph update that didn't help the violet screen problem, I opened the installer program, searched for OpenSceneGraph to see what the new version was, and noticed that "OpenSceneGraph-plugins" were not installed, and "osgcal" (an adapter to use the cal3d character animation library inside OpenSceneGraph) was the wrong version, due to all this repo-adding. So I ticked those and, for completeness' sake, also "OpenSceneGraph1-plugins" and "libosgCal0". Which of the four updates did the trick, I can't say; but the game ran.

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Now that OpenMW is playable again, I wanted to see what bugs from 0.36 had been resolved, but real life intervened and before I knew it, April ran into May, and in the first week of May, openMW updated itself to 0.39. What better time for a test?

Problems solved:

The niggle of the once-a-day power still having a full bar after being used for the day, has been corrected.

As has the niggle of Imperials being rendered in the skinnier default proportion. They now look short and squat, as they should.

The console: while I haven't made the effort to reproduce the spat resulting in ten soulgems, "showmap" now works.

I get a proper diary entry after joining the Tribunal Temple and asking for my first duties.

Wildlife, like slaughterfish, is no longer pacifist. I don't have to walk right into them any more, they go after me again as per normal.

Brief testing with low-level lifeforms (mudcrabs, rats, kwama foragers), none of whom were diseased, suggests that soul gems are being filled and valued consistently again. Since the irregularities in 0.36 (see above) started happening after soul-capturing a diseased animal, though, I'm not 100% sure this bug has been ironed out. And maybe it's a feature?
There was no glitching or hanging when putting the dwarven bone in Jeanne's chest.

Problems partly solved:

Collision: I didn't get stuck in anything, nor did I spot NPCs standing on tables, or mudcrabs and slaughterfish on lighthouses. But I did have to use GetPos and SetPos again to conjure Aengoth out of whatever wall he was apparently hiding in.
NPCs still walk fast, but not as uncomfortably fast as before. Mudcrabs don't stray all the way into Pelagiad. Eraldil doesn't walk by too fast to be addressed; Fargoth doesn't walk around between sneaks when I watch him from the lighthouse, but pauses. Levitating after making the pilgrimage to the Shrine to Stop the Moon still speeds me up absurdly, though.
Dialogue is evaluated better now (see above): the problem with Fargoth remains, but Toris Saren and Alven Salas (Morag Tong quests) give the right responses. Ra'Zahr has a new problem: where first he insisted that Therana was in the room with him even after teleporting out, he now gives me the "thank you for freeing me" greeting the very first time I address him, although he still accepts the skirt and the Almsivi/Divine Intervention scroll. Oddly, the topic "kill me", used for a Fighters Guild quest and, in the OddsAndEnds mod, to let Feruren Oran get away, shows up for Tongue-Toad when I'm not even member of the Fighters Guild. This is the fault of the game itself, as it doesn't check if the player has been given the quest to silence Tongue-Toad yet.

Problems not solved:

The TakeoffPuton mod to make merchants remove any newly-acquired stuff they just donned, continues NOT to work. Caldera's pantsless she-orc is still pantsless. Merchants don't put on items of clothing or armour sold to them, but they do put on armour added to their inventory when the game is loaded, eg. Sirollus Saccus who wears lady's armour because a plugin added it to his wares. A new look through the bugs shows that using "equip" may produce error messages like "item to equip not found".
Merchants still have the inventory problem where they have two piles of the same item (see above). This is listed in the OpenMW Issues database as Bug #2842, "Merchants can have few stocks of the same item", and the explanation is that the auto-restocking (there's -1 of them in a container owned by the vendor) and non-auto-restocking items are merged into a single pile by vanilla Morrowind, but not by OpenMW. That doesn't explain how the player character can end up with empty items, but I haven't seen empty items in my inventory during this brief retest. Partly solved after all?
The coexistence of daysPassed (local variable) with daysPassed (global variable) continues to frustrate lovers: neither Gadayn Andarys nor Nelos Onmar are united with their sweethearts.

New problem:

In the OddsAndEnds mod, I had Dratha teleport herself and the PC using PositionCell while the dialogue window was open. OpenMW did not like that, and crashed, reproducibly. Bug #3329 reads: "teleportation spells cause crash to desktop after build update from 0.37 to 0.38.0" (this still happens in 0.39), so it's likely the teleporting itself, whether through PositionCell or a spell. However, "coc" works fine, as does the scripted teleport moving Ra'Zahr from Tel Branora to Molag Mar.

The console command "coc" still doesn't lodge the player character inside structures, but "coc Arena" put me on the Arena's roof, whereas "coc Vivec" placed me on a giant toadstool near the entrance to Vivec's Foreign Quarter; on jumping down, I died. I'll chalk that up to the programmers' sense of humour.

To be continued as I discover more stuff.