OpenMW no longer working

[Daniel]

When I try to open OpenMW the launcher will come up, but after clicking "play" I get a "filesystem::recursive_directory_iterator increment error: Bad message" error. The error already started in 21.10 but is still present in 22.04. I have no idea what is causing the error, as OpenMW was working perfectly before. The error is present in the versions installed from Discover and from the OpenMW PPA (including the nightly build).

[rab0171610]

OpenMW user Detritus opened a thread on the openMW support board. If that is not you, there is another user with the same issue. I assume the devs over there are aware of the issue and looking into it. I would suggest looking for a log file to see if there is further debug info about the error. I know Windows versions of openMW have an openmw.log file. I do not know about Linux. You can look for it by using mlocate. If it is not installed already:

sudo apt install mlocate

then update its database:

sudo updatedb

then search for the file:

locate openmw | grep log

to locate other files related to openmw:

locate openmw

See what comes up and see if you can find any log files. This is assuming the files on Linux are all lowercase. Linux is case specific. The files could be named Openmw or OpenMW for all I know. You would then have to search for those cases using the above commands if you get no results.

It is possible that there are file permission problems with some of the game folders or files. Maybe the game is not able to access a particular image file or a folder for write permissions. Check the permissions of all the folders that might have log files, images etc. They may need read, write or execute permissions on some folders. This would be just a hunting and fishing expedition. Make sure you keep track of permissions before you change them at will so that you can change them back in case of problems. If you can find a log file, it might be able to tell you which file or directory the game is trying to access before the error appears.
Otherwise, you may have to wait until the devs at OpenMW do something to fix the error.
Also, if you are able to start the game from the command line, it may give you more info.

Good Luck!