Environment Variables

There are several environment variables that can be used to change the way OpenMW behaves, for debugging or to test experimental functionality. These variables are not officially supported and not intended for end users. Use at your own risk!

= OpenMW =

= OpenScenegraph =

Being an OpenSceneGraph application, OpenMW accepts any environment variable used by OpenSceneGraph.

Incomplete documentation on these may be found on the OSG web site: UserGuides/EnvironmentVariables. The remaining variables can be found by searching for 'getenv' in the OSG source code.

Some variables will have no effect because OpenMW explicitely opts for different values at runtime, or because they affect a feature that OpenMW does not use.

Interesting variables:


 * OSG_THREADING (set to 'SingleThreaded' to rule out threading issues while debugging)
 * OSG_NOTIFY_LEVEL

= Other =

There are some OS-specific environment variables that may affect OpenMW. For example, on Linux, the configuration paths can be changed with XDG_CONFIG_HOME and XDG_DATA_HOME.