>What does the MGE option of disable MGE in game

Are you sure you aren't thinking of MWSE (morrowind script extender) feature?

BTW you can keep MGE / MGE XE enabled but disable shaders and distant land to help speed things up. Also, in MGE XE you can bind a hotkey to toggle distant land and it actually shuts off the projected shadows, I believe.

>Yeah I'm shocked at how unoptimized the game is.

It's probably poor algorithms in the renderer for traversing and culling the game world.

Impact on fps is really an important consideration when installing some of these mods, I had to pull vivec open cantons or something because it was too brutal.

Enter the console, click on the reference in question. The ID of the reference should now be displayed at the top of the console window. Enter "ori" (without the quotes) in the console. The console should then display the last mod in the load order that affected the reference in question.

Note that this doesn't work for items that have been manipulated. Example: If you take a plate and then drop it again, then the dropped plate isn't really the same item as the original plate. Instead, the game marks the original plate as "deleted" (so it isn't displayed any more) and creates a _new_ plate which goes into your inventory, and then gets dropped. this new plate will have an ori value of zero since it has been created by the game in progress, not by one of the esp/esm files. This makes it difficult to determine the origin of items in containers (though if you use the Morrowind Code Patch, it should be possible to match them to their plugins by checking the upper byte of their ID, if I recall correctly).


Doubling shouldn't happen under these conditions. Is it possible that you installed two mutually exclusive alternatives of the same mod?


Morrowind is in no way efficient. In many ways, Morrowind was the prototype for technologies that Oblivion and Fallout are still using. As a prototype, it's _much_ less optimized.

That said, MGE could be the bottleneck in your system (though Morrowind is often CPU-limited, but it's hard to tell without knowing your mod setup and your MGE settings). In any case, you'll have to make compromises. And you may have to fiddle around a little to find out where the limiting factor in your system/setup is.

It might be possible to turn off MGE by temporarily moving its dlls out of the Morrowind folder. MGE works because Morrowind calls certain DirectX dlls, and MGE puts dlls of the same name into the Morrowind folder, which get called instead of the regular DirectX dlls because the files in the local folder get priority. Removing the dlls from the local folder should make Morrowind call the regular DirectX dlls instead. It did work this way two years ago, but things may have changed in the meantime ... still, it's worth a shot, and you can always copy the files back if it doesn't work.


Tribunal has no exterior cells, so you can't COE ("center on exterior") to it. COC ("center on cell") should work, but I can't test it at the moment ... and you'd need the name of one of the Tribunal cells. "coc Mournhold" won't work, it'll take you to an empty dummy cell that only exists as a container for local dialogue.

I can't seem to access the http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/morrgraphext/index.php?title=TOC to look up what Disable MGE in game does exactly, but it seems to shut it off.

Just playing with the view range in vanilla results in a 20 fps drop range. wow.

Found the macro key settings, but not apparent which function turns off distant land.

Thanks for the ORI command - very helpful.

How about commands for toggling trees on and off. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Console doesn't seem to have anything like that. Oblivion does but perhaps because it is speedtree trees.

Some areas like Bittercoast would be better to spot landscape tearing and architecture collisions with less foliage.


Yep that was it - spotted immediately thanks to ORI command.

thanks again.

Sorry for multi posting - but it is my thread, so not that sorry.

Well my initial impressions are this:

The major conflicts with all the settlements is with landscape mods - so grass is almost always a conflict and then the region overhauls of Vailty and Vurt are just gonna cause havok with any expanded settlements.

This is unfortunate. I'd think variants of these region mods with the areas in towns and such left untouched would be ideal and very popular. Same with grass. I think this would be a minor detail that grass does not cover the outskirts of towns and that trees don't grow 30 feet tall in the town square.

Deleting grass is probably easy, but all the stuff done by region mods - I'd think not as easy.

So I take the region mods have remained more popular than the town mods?

Next windows - with Windows glow I've not seen free floating windows yet - just that added windows don't glow.

The speedtrees of Oblivion can be toggled rather easily. The trees in Morrowind can't, for Morrowind the trees are regular statics like rocks, bridges, houses etc.

Actually Morrowind wasn't meant to display trees (or grass). The engine and the hardware couldn't handle it back in 2002. There is very little foliage in the original Morrowind, actually the whole game didn't have a single forest until Bloodmoon was released. Personally, I think that the scarcity of trees contributes to the atmosphere of the game. Vvardenfell is not a forest, it's a volcanic island with rather alien plants and animals. I like how the designers solved the problem by using giant mushrooms instead of trees; it creates an exotic atmosphere and costs less performance at the same time. So, personally I've never used any tree mods at all, in my eyes I'd sacrifice performance and get nothing in return but generically beautiful surroundings that don't fit to the harsh alien atmosphere of Vvardenfell - it's lose/lose situation. However, the foliage mods are very popular (they are even selected by default in MGSO), so perhaps I'm just a bit odd in that regard. Everyone has to set his own priorities, and I tend to take view distance and scripting mods (which are also both heavy on the FPS) over foliage.

Edit:
Not really practical. People are using different mods or town expansions, you'd have to make hundreds of different mods to cater to all of them. And then you'd still have trees growing out of houses if someone uses a rare mod that happens to place a tree at the same position where Vality or Vurt placed a tree. Usually, people just accept that the grass sometimes grows at places where it shouldn't (it's a bonus to have grass at all in Morrowind), and remove any offending trees in-game with the console (click on them and type "delete").

Well the excellent modders Arthmoor and Vorians have spoiled me with Oblivion. They both are the caretakers of city overhaul mods (including two open city variants) and they are also the caretakers of making patches for landscape mods (UL) - the result is that they (the workhorses they are) work to get both settlement and landscapes to play nice together.

So there it is not a matter of choices - only patches.

This is lacking here.

Well, what I'm trying to say is that it's largely pointless for Vality or Vurt to provide such patches. Should they provide a patch for "GS Seyda Neen Expanded"? That wouldn't work for the people who only use "Seyda neen Village Expansion" by Beardo. Should they provide a patch for that expansion as well? Then the question arises whether or not they should plant trees at the area of "Lonnie's docks", which can be combined with it. In any case, people who use the Seyda neen expansion by JamesW would still have problems. They could, of course, issue a patch for that one too ... but then what about the people who use "More Seyda Neen" by -J? And if they offer a patch for that one too, what about the people who use trancemaster's "New Seyda Neen"? And even if they offered a patch for all these options, what about the people who use mods that add large additional buildings to the outskirts of the city and beyond (like Abigail's Pet Shop or Knights of Tamriel), or that change parts of the landscape (like "Children of the Night"? And even if they offered patches for all that - then the problem repeats itself in Balmora, where some people use Balmora Expanded, others use Walled Balmora, and about 500 different house mods use space in and around the city? If you think that it's only a matter of patches, feel free to provide them - but I don't think it'd be the best way to spend one's time ...

The Oblivion modders can provide such patches because they:
- deal with much less mods
- can reasonably assume that most of the players use the same town expansions
- have the majority of their cities in extra cells worldspaces anyway (hence less sprawling buildings in all directions around them)

Morrowind offers much more variety in mods - about 15,000 in total. That has the advantage that you can simply switch to a similar, but slightly different mod if one mod doesn't suit your tastes. It also has the disadvantage that compatibility patches are only viable for very popular mods. That's independent of the excellency of the modders in question, which - as far as I can tell - is definitely present in all of the modders we're talking about. But _if_ a players deems it very important to not have a tree sticking out of a mod-added house, he can always adjust the mod by himself.

Agreed the separate world spaces do indeed make for easier compatibility for Oblivion cities, but there are many many Oblivion village mods both to expand the existing villages as well as add villages. And they do conflict with mods that themselves drastically alter the landscape as in raise land heights, add rocks, custom resources -- the whole nine yards.

I'd think an easy way to address this would be to release versions of the grass and region mods that leave the cities and a buffer of space around the settlements alone. It may not make 100% compatibility but it would make using most settlement mods possible without the need to crack open the CS. As it is now none appear to be (that overlap that is). Would it rob some of the atmosphere - yeah probably, but it would make combining mods much easier.

I'm not attacking modders either - I'm trying to find answers. It is just a fact that with Oblivion there is http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13834 to work toward compatibility. BTW Nexus reports 23,054 Oblivion mods. The BOSS program for Oblivion recognizes 11500 mods.

Look - I understand the dictum that if you want something done your way you best do it yourself. I'm not going roll my sleeves up and create 100 patches - or attempt to get permission to release Vurt and Vality mods with settlement cells removed. I'm just bringing up this issue and airing it. As I reviewed the mods for Morrowind this is the area I saw very little information about as compared to Oblivion.

In short I don't know what the answer is for everyone, but that is my suggestion for increasing compatibility.

=================

I'm going to experiment with this and so I just opened the CS to start removing grass around Seyda Neen -- there is a lot of grass. Is there a way I can use enchanted editor or something to remove cells of grass at a time?

Your reasoning is sound - however, you'd still require a modder to spend a lot of time on things he'll never use himself, and compromise his vision of the mod. The tree mods would need to be modularized even further, and/or they will look even worse on many occasions. Compatibility patches between mods do happen, but as I said above, they usually deal with popular mods, like Balmora Expansion, Indybank, Children of Morrowind, Necessities of Morrowind, etc.


I stand corrected on one of my statements then. Wow. Last time I checked, Oblivion had less than 8,000 mods on Nexus - it's been a while though.

=================


I'm not sure how the grass is added in the recent versions of MGE. If there's an esp somewhere that specifies its placement (and nothing else), then you should be able to load that esp in the Enchanted Editor and simply delete a cell you want to be grass-free.

I also remember a program by Yacoby that could read the landscape data, and then tried to place grass somewhat intelligently, based on ground textures I think. I'm not sure though. It _could_ be useful if someone has so many grass conflicts that he'd rather start from scratch with the placement, but if it's only a couple of cells that you want to clean, then it's probably easier to modify the placement data that's already there.

Goody - I wasn't trying to offend. My point being though that by making compatibility then other mods have a chance to become popular. I'm surprised that infrastructure mods aren't more popular and that this hasn't been asked for before.


Oblivion modding as still going strong. I suspect after Skyrim it will die down some. As Morrowind has the GHF site - now Oblivion has http://tesalliance.org/ - great site for modders - if you are interested.


from what I can tell from looking at Vurts groundcover mod the grass is items (statics?) placed in the world ... each patch individually - and there are lots of them. I guess then when they are set as active in MGE they are read and placed, but that you don' have them active when playing. I'm hoping that just deleting these placed objects is enough.

I don't know how to remove a cell at a time worth of info with Enchanted Editor (I know how with tes4edit for Oblivion, but not EE). Anyone have clues on that? Is it as simple as loading the ground cover mod up and for instance for Seyda Neen finding the Cell Bitter Coast Region Then right clicking and choosing delete? According to the MMGUM xls file Seyda Neen occupies a few cells (-2,-8; -2,-10 as well) but I don't see those in the ground cover mod. I guess I should ask in that thread.

Yes test for LGNPC and Living Cities, a lot of people consider them essential. Afaik the only real problem people have with LC is applying door locks (without reading the readme that clearly states door locks isn't recommended) and then removing them.

Don't worry so much about the grass mods. You learn pretty quick that if you're going to put any external buildings in your game you can't also have a grass mod. You'd be better off writing a section "how to create compatibility with grass mods" and explaining how to edit the mods to work with a person's customized game. That would allow the modders free reign on creating their visions and yet make these beautiful but highly incompatible mods more accessible to more people.

I don't worry about tree conflicts either. It's usually only one or two errant plants, easily disabled with the console when you find them. If there's a major forest growing up through an expansion however, you can always mention that specific large conflict as a warning to those interested in both mods.

While this did start as a request then agreement to test some infrastructure mods for compatibility, the complete lack of being able to use environment and grass mods with then is a major hitch in the get along with this. So that most mod users are pretty much left with a decision: Use either environment mods or settlements mods, but not both.

I don't like that.

So mod makers can have their vision - I have mine (my load order). First I will try my hand at this fix (compromise) I'm thinking of then if it is tenable and not too drastic - I will think about what others might want for their load order.

As for:
Care to take a crack at it? Or answer the questions about enchanted editor above?

Yes, this will remove the respective cell from the mod, which means that the mod now won't do any changes to that cell. Which is what you want. It only gets more complicated when the mod also adds things to the cell that you want to keep (then you'll have to sort through the references), but that doesn't seem likely in this case.

You may or may not have to regenerate distant land afterwards; I don't know how recent MGE version implement the grass. It could be rendered as statics from the mod (in that case, removing the references from the mod would be sufficient), or MGE could read the grass positions from the mod during distant land creation, ignore the grass statics in game, and render them through the distant land rendering algorithm, which would be faster (in that case, you'd have to regenerate distant land after removing the grass from the mod).

Yeah you'd have to regenerate distant land - and would probably want to.

Not a big deal - just like with Oblivion I'd think that regenerating distant land would be an essential step to any load order changing - especially with these kinds of mods.

With grass mods I'm certain the deleting is enough - haven't checked the region overhauls yet.

Thanks!

What I would love to see is a mega-mod that combines the best things about Seyda Neen from all the best mods. That would be great!

OK here you go: http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8183 ... It is huge.

For Oblivion users used to mods like Better Cities the pickings are rather slim. Again what I find here is a preference toward the environment mods.

I wish for more like this myself. http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1012014-wip-pelagiad-expanded/ looks promising and along the same lines.

I've tested out most of the mods on my list and can start adding basic entries to infrastructure mods - maybe this weekend put up some kind of list.

I've tested most of the infrastructure mods against landscape mods by Vality and Vurt (and a few others) and especially grass by Vurt. Went so far as to document what cells to remove from these mods to make them work with the majority of town extensions.

I've documented what town mods work with what other town extensions (like Morrowind add-on pack or MDP - curious for more like those).

I've not tested things like LGNPC mods - that may be more involved and can be done easily later and with ... Ohh I dunno - help.

I've explored infrastructure mods for Bloodmoon too. Some cool ones for certain (landscape as well).

But there are a few things occurring that are not in my vocabulary to fix and I need to ask help with. The warnings text is not something I'm used to managing. Like this:

Object reference "in_c_door_arched"missing in master file.Current file "New Better Caldera (Trancemaster Edit).esp"Cell "Caldera, Surane Leoriane's House"

... what is meant by missing?

or this:

Dialogue "" type "Journal" tried to become type "Topic".

Did it now? ... err so what?

and then there is this which does crash the game:

Matching IDs: furn_drum_01Clean Suran Extended.esp: type ActivatorBitter Coast Compilation(NOM Compatible).ESP: type Static

Here it seems that both mods have this FormID but one has it as a static and the other as an activator.

How does one fix these things? Especially the last one.

thanks for any help.

It has, in fact, been asked around before. I had a thread in the past that collected as many of the city expansion mods as we could find at the time. However, being about 2 years, that thread is no longer on this forum. I'm sure the issue has come up before that too. This is a much more in depth attempt from what mine was though. We wanted to find city expansion mods, we weren't entirely focused on compatibility (though there were some patches offered on that thread). By the way, I'm very much interested in seeing where this goes, as of right now, I have pushed back the city expansions from my mod list until I could find time for to check how compatible everything was with my mod list.

EDIT: also, isn't http://www.moddb.com/mods/morrowind-rebirth Similar to Better Cities? It changes a lot of the cities and adds more detail. I haven't tried it out yet though (again, compatibility...)

AFAIK, this means that a mod that is loading earlier than Trancemaster's in your load order has removed that particular reference. Trancemaster's mod tries to change the door's location and finds that it's not there any more: Panic!

Objects are defined on, for example, the Door tab of the Construction Set and then references are what is actually placed in the cell. So, altering the object changes all the references in the same way. A reference can have its coordinates changed without affecting other references to the same object.

I think this error is more prevalent without the Morrowind Code Patch... Not sure.

According to http://lovkullen.net/Emma/Dialogue%20Problem%20-%20Bethesda%20Game%20Studios%20Forums.htm:Unfortunately I'm not sure how to identify which mod...
I've fixed that in the past with the Enchanted Editor, open up the mod. Find the offending object and rename it (e.g. to "CSE_furn_drum_01" and "BCC_furn_drum_01") if you have Safe Editing on then the Enchanted Editor will search and replace all references of that object with the new name. Although I'm not sure if it'll look in scripts...

Actually, I seem to remember someone posting that you can do that in the regular CS. You're given an option to create a new object or rename the one you're editing and you want the latter.

For problem 1-
Is there anyway I can load up all the mods in EE or TESPCD and then search out that cell to find out what other mod affects it? I tried with both those programs, but not learned enough to know how to snoop that out.

I can't seem to think of what other mod alters that town. Perhaps windows glow.

For Problem 2-
Same I guess.

For those two it seems as though I'm going to have to deactivate groups of mods till I find the offending plugins.

For Problem 3-
That seemed to work - thanks. I went with renaming the static in BBC as it likely has no script attached while an activator might. Actually no renaming in BBC did not work at all:
Yes safe editing on and yes I let it run search on references. I double checked it is named different than the other mod???

=============================================

Then also why what does it mean when TESTool crashes on merging lists:
It does that now that I altered the Bitter Coast Compilation. errr

It also crashes when I have the mod http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=1793 active:
Is this a conflict with the Patch? Is that fixable?

For problem 1: The object IDs appear in the esp/esm files as plain text. So, if some ID is causing problems, you can search the content of your plugin files for that specific ID, this often narrows down the selection of potential troublemakers. Personally I use Notepad++ and its "Find in Files" function for this. You can use Windows search as well, but may have to toggle some Windows setting to allow the search to actually look inside esp/esm files.

Alternatively, you can create a mod that only manipulates the offending object or reference, and test that plugin for conflicts with all others in your load order; TESPCD allows that.

For problem 2: Will be much harder to find because you can't search for an empty topic. It's either the problem noted by Emma, or two mods which both introduce empty dialogue entries (one as topic, one as journal entry), or some odd memory screw-up. Currently "binary search" is the best manner of proceeding I can come up with.

For problem 3: Did you really change the ID of the object and all its references in the plugin in question, or only the ID of the object? (Also, I assume you tested your change with a new character; otherwise information from the savegame could interfere, but I'm sure you know this already.)

For problem 4: No idea, never encountered such an error with TEStool (I did have errors and crashes with it, but never saw that message).

IIRC I think you can search for an error message in TESPCD, but I could be wrong about this so don't take this to serious.

Good morning all. BUMP

OK I have the start of the list up. I reformatted the first post to describe aims of the list and the key to reading it. The second post is the list.

Please keep in mind this is the start. I put up most of the mods that I deemed worthy to include. If you think I made an oversight - the sooner you tell me the better as I will likely only do further and more indepth testing with mods I will actually use in my load order.

By further and more in-depth testing - that means mods that aren't so blatant about making changes to areas. As it is the list mostly concerns testing infrastructure mods against environment overhauls and other infrastructure mods.

I will likely be testing things like:
LGNPC (would these be likely to conflict - do any add or move buildings?)
Either windows glow or Illuminated windows (probably WG)
MCA
COM (so far I did not see any real issues - all mods so far were tested with it active)
NOM (but then I don't know what to look for here)

... but what else??? I need some suggestions other than quest mods.

Is there any mods that are often problematic that I'm not thinking of?

What about herbalism mods ... I was thinking of using Graphic Herbalism - is that known to be problematic with these kinds of mods?

And again - if you see errors in the list or want to add information - please post it up and I will update the thread accordingly.