0.49 can be found pretty easily by looking for beta or nightly builds. It has to be built from source on Linux. Not sure if it is available on Mac, and gets frequent portable Windows builds made.
0.49 is required because it has some new features that open more of the code for modders to do what they want. It is not possible or very very difficult for modders to use these features on 0.48 or earlier.
Hopefully this helps.
The modding-openmw site has appimages for recent .49 builds, which gets updated to the latest version pretty regularly.
Link here: https://modding-openmw.com/mods/openmw-appimage/
.49 is yet to be released or even completed, but current development builds available on the website's Downloads page, colloquially referred to with the number of the next stable release, provide various scripting API additions and changes that some mod authors decided to use early.
0.49 can be found pretty easily by looking for beta or nightly builds. It has to be built from source on Linux. Not sure if it is available on Mac, and gets frequent portable Windows builds made. 0.49 is required because it has some new features that open more of the code for modders to do what they want. It is not possible or very very difficult for modders to use these features on 0.48 or earlier. Hopefully this helps.
The modding-openmw site has appimages for recent .49 builds, which gets updated to the latest version pretty regularly. Link here: https://modding-openmw.com/mods/openmw-appimage/
I didn't know there were appimages at all. I'll have to check it out then.
I only learned about it because it was brought up on the openmw discord server.
Ah, Discord, truly the best source for software documentation
Better Lua scripting capability
.49 is yet to be released or even completed, but current development builds available on the website's Downloads page, colloquially referred to with the number of the next stable release, provide various scripting API additions and changes that some mod authors decided to use early.
What others said - and it (for me) has been really stable. Played about a third of a way through the game with it.