When I was 7 years old, I was supposed to sleep over at my friend's place, but we ended up playing Morrowind all night. I quickly fell in love with the best game in the Elder Scrolls series, although it was a bit annoying that one of us always had to watch the other play. Even then I wondered: wouldn't it be amazing if it was possible to play something like this together?



That thought never left me. A decade later, I had joined two different projects aiming to add multiplayer to Oblivion and one aiming to add it to Fallout 3, while also keeping an eye out for any other attempts. None of them ever worked out very well; their names are now forgotten by most.



You can only get so far in adding networking to a game when you do not have access to its source code. That is why, when OpenMW emerged as a fully-featured open source recreation of Morrowind, I took immediate notice.



While having a few beers with friends in December of 2015, I made a bet that I could put together a multiplayer demo of OpenMW within 2 weeks. They laughed and went along with it, but they thought it would take a year to even synchronize animations. In the end, I lost the bet: the demo took 3 weeks instead of 2.



I've been improving that demo ever since. It is now called tes3mp and I first made its source code public on the 8th of July 2016. Shortly afterwards, what had been a solo project became a team project as two other coders joined it.



With your help and theirs, I seek to improve tes3mp as far as it can go, and it can go very far.



Soon we will synchronize world states, NPC AI, quests, ingame scripts, magic, weather and everything else that is not yet multiplayer-ready. Because our project is built on top of OpenMW, whose code we can modify in full, this is the first time in history when fans can and will succeed in adding seamless online play to a previously singleplayer Elder Scrolls game.



Feel free to speed our progress along. Your kind contributions will be well-spent, primarily on maintaining a master server list, a website, a test server, hardware upgrades and lots and lots of pizza.

