Has anyone experienced issues with MSGO, where the sun has a white dot in the center, looking at it from underwater shows it to have a square around it as well, weather effects segment the sky horizontally, hills melt into the landscape and then reverse as you back up, some rocks look weird and 'oily', and there are weird, glittery effects in trees and people at night?

I've been trying to research this for weeks and have found some topics in other places that have the same issue, but not a real solution to the problem. I've read that it can have something to do with a less than 2.0 shader graphic card, but I'm running a pretty sweet system and doubt that is my problem. Someone on another thread suggested it was "alpha rendering" but I haven't discovered anything on this.

I would love some help with this because this is such an extraordinary compilation that makes the game so much better, I just don't want to play without it.

(Also, why is it that I use the search bar on these forums in the upper right hand and search for the term, 'MSGO' and also "Morrowind Sound and Graphic Overhaul" I get literally no hits on the actual topic? What am I missing here? I know this is something that has been discussed here before. Is the feature broken, or am I having an autistic moment and missing something obvious here?)

Try increasing the detail of your world mesh to something higher in MGEXE. If the world was rendered in MGEXE with 100% accuracy to how it is up close it'd kill people's framerate more than it already does.

That's 'On the Rocks!' The mod adds bump maps to the rocks. There's an option in the Morrowind Code Patch that helps with this, but if you still don't like it download 'On the Rocks Optimized' and/or the 'Smoothed Correct UV Rock Meshes' that were posted here a little while ago.

Can you take a screenshot of these? I'm not familiar with this problem.

There is no fix for this AFAIK.

This is probably caused by the fact that the game engine have problems with multiple layers of transparency (i.e. alpha). No fix for this either.

No idea here, I have never encountered any issue with sky. Do you use SWG's Skies IV?

You probably did not regenerate your distant land after you added some mods altering landscape/objects in exterior. You have to do this every time you add/remove such mod.

Exactly as cml33 said.

I'm pretty sure someone mentined this error no more than week ago here and IIRC fixed it in the end. But I do not remember how.

Nah, that is really not the problem. If you would have shader 2.0 graphic card, you would not be able to use Distant land at all.

Because search function on these forums is half-broken. Better use google and search like this: write what you are looking for and then add one space and after it this "inurl:http://www.gamesas.com(without quotation marks).

I wish this forum would let you delete your post when you mess up the quote feature and want to start again!

cmll, can I get more detail on your advice? That is completely new to me.

Reaper, are you sure there is no fix? I've seen a ton of videos and friends who have this and no one has these weird effects. I think they would be mentioned if it was common. I don't have Skies. The only thing I have is Tamriel Rebuilt. I'm not sure if that would create these issues though, especially as they happened before I added it.

Also my older comp had lower than a 2.0 shader and I'm pretty sure I randistant land. Just fyi

http://s76.photobucket.com/user/darklustre/media/MGE%20Screenshot%20001_zps49rcmnwh.png.html?state=copy&sp=false

http://s76.photobucket.com/user/darklustre/media/d9a1cd97-17c6-4841-8e5b-4ddb04db7e80_zps7obheqjp.png.html?state=copy&sp=false

http://s76.photobucket.com/user/darklustre/media/MGE%20Screenshot%20006_zpssco4oeuk.png.html?state=copy&sp=false

http://s76.photobucket.com/user/darklustre/media/MGE%20Screenshot%20003_zpstkbqnzsc.png.html?state=copy&sp=false

If you meant for increasing mesh detail, then open MGEXEgui.exe and click 'Distant land gennerator wizard'. There selct the current load order and any grass mods ( usually with grass in the name ). Then click continue and re-run the setup. There you can change each setting including mesh detail.

About the shimmering trees I think it was because of something to do with the AA the MGEXE uses. It was corrected in the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1507514-shelter-from-magnus-blaze-17-mge-xe/.

I'm not sure if I mean increasing mesh detail? Would that solve all these issues, holla?

It would atleast make the transition from vanilla to distant land smoother. Also, you could try to increase world texture size too. But too high values could kill FPS like no tomorrow, so you have to balance there.

Not 100% for the sun, but the alpha issue is quite well known, although I haven't heard about it in relation to the sun (but hair disappearing underwater is common issue with hair that have texture with alpha channel).

The melting you mentioned will get fixed by regenerating distant land.

Well, then you probably was using MGE, not MGE XE. For MGE XE distant land you need shader 3.0, I'm 100% sure about this one.

Btw. only your first two links lead to actual screenshots, the two others lead to this forum post.

Thanks! That's great to know about the melting. But can you tell me what you mean by 'alpha'? I tried looking that up but came up with too many random hits. Does that mean the problems are glitches from an earlier edition of MGSO?

*facepalms* It's been one of those nights, ya know? LOL. I fixed the links and they should work now. I also added a funny screenshot I made of a glitch where a girl was sitting on the lap of another girl and they looked like they were making out, just to make up for my noobiness ~

If you have a video card without shader 2.0 then you cannot run the distant land wizard at all in both MGE and MGE-XE. So having a shader 2.0 video card will always be sufficient to enable distant land if you want to.

The shader 2.0 vs shader 3.0 setting MGE/MGE-XE is basically for what kind of a video card you have IIRC.

shader 2.0 - legacy video card

shader 3.0 - high-end AMD/Nvidia video card

Alpha is value in image (texture) that denotes partial or complete transparency of given part of texture - for example if you use hair that have a lot of pointy streams (not sure if I used the right word here, but I hope you get what I mean) like Westly's, then these are done so there is actually square or other simple object and on that is texture with the hair streams painted and rest is transparent. MW has problems with rendering more than one tranparent texture if they overlap (water surface + such hair, several branches with leaves on bush with transparency, etc. are common places to see this error).

To the screens - I'm quite sure the moon color can be fixed, I just do not know how But do not despair, someone else will probably help here. The white dot in the middle of sun is normal. For the artifacts, try using SWG's skies IV. It overally improves the sky to absolute perfection and I haven't encountered any issues with artifacts. I'm not sure about the square sun artifact.

And nice picture you have there

No, I tried MGE XE on computer with shader model 2.0 and Distant Land will report that shader model 3.0 is needed. This is also mentioned in MGE XE thread somewhere.

And no, shader model v 2.0 and 3.0 differs mainly in instruction set that given graphics card has available for shader computation.

Have you also tried to do that in MGE?

No, I'm talking only about MGE XE. That's why I said that perhaps OP was using Distant land from MGE with Shader model 2.0, as I do not know DL requirements in MGE.

I think the requirements would be the same, but I could be mistaken.

I do not know. But I'm certain you need Shader model 3.0 for DL in MGE XE and since OP stated that he/she used DL with graphics card with Shader model 2.0, the only possible explanation that I could think ok was that MGE does not require 3.0. But it is also possible that early versions of MGE XE did not require 3.0 either.

Anyway, I think we should get back on topic

I'm not sure about your problem with the moons. Have you installed any other mods since installing MGSO?

The http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1507514-shelter-from-magnus-blaze-17-mge-xe/#entry23768361 clearly states one of the install requirements is "Shader Model 3.0+ graphics card". I also can say from experience that a very, very old version of MGE XE at one time would work with a Shader 2.0 graphics card because I could just barely get it to work on my pc when I first considered moving from MGE to MGE XE many years ago, but the Shader 3 graphics card became a requirement as the code Hrnchamd wrote for MGE XE required features only available in Shader 3 or better cards.

@darklustre, you don't mention if you have or not, but you might want to make sure you're using current version of MGE XE. The MGSO thread has some posts about how to update it and some other mods in there as well. IIRC, MGSO has MGE XE ver 0.8, and MGE XE is now in 0.9.xx I don't know if this will help you or not. Good luck.

Updating MGE XE to the latest (beta) version is highly recommended and could indeed solve some of the problems you are experiencing.

Thanks everyone. I'm reading through installation of the new MGEXE now. I wish there was a glossary of terms, I swear. It's going to take me awhile to understand what 90% of this means and understand if I can just install it directly or have to go through a complicated process. That was one thing I just loved about MSGO. The genius behind it made it almost foolproof.

Thanks Reaper, good explanation.

Ok thanks, holla, I'm trying it on 'very high'. I hope that is right. There are a lot of options and there doesn't seem to be a guide to tell you what best to choose. So fingers crossed this works.

Here is a http://www.theassimilationlab.com/forums/topic/14138-how-to-installreinstalluninstall-mge/ and I know it will work for MGE-XE too at least for the required software. Just replace MGE with MGE-XE and the rest should work.

Thank you so much Leonardo. I was able to install it and I reran the setup. I selected 'very high' meshes. I added in Skies. I'm still getting a glittery effect, but not quite as much as before. The sun also seems better until it starts hitting the horizon and then the dot becomes apparent.

Still I think it's progress and if I could figure out all the ways I should be tweaking this, I have high hopes that I can correct the problem, considering things are already looking better. I have to see if repopulating Distant Land worked to correct the issue with the TR landmass, but I'm pretty sure that advice was sound it worked just fine. So now I just need to keep tweaking it and hope the issues resolves.

Thanks for all the awesome help you guys. You never disappoint!