Hey all,


I recently have been dabbling with my new art tablet and texturing Morrowind. I discovered that if you leave Morrowind running and "Alt-TAB" out of it, any game textures you alter while the game is running in the background will load into the game when you "Alt-Tab" back to Morrowind.

This saves tons of quality checking time since you can just pop back and forth between your art program of choice (GIMP for me) and Morrowind. And I also imagine, people could check out mutliple textures packs this way if they wanted.

I don't know if this is common knowledge or not so I thought I'd share it just in case it isn't.

Hope someone finds this helpful.

Pinkertonius

You are lucky. Most of the time Morrowind just crashes.

If you run it in windowed mode and don't use mge it won't crash on alt tabbing out, however, if you are running mge or in fullscreen...or both, it does have a high chance of crashing.

That's extremely useful, thanks!

I don't use windowed mode and don't have a problem. But I don't use MGE while doing texture work so that hasn't been an issue. It does occasionally crash (1 in 20 times) but it's worked before for hours on end. For me it works on all three of my computers (high end desktop, performance laptop and even my son's entry model (i.e. lowend w/ intel graphics) laptop. I'm sure stability depends on the computer and the loadout you have for Morrowind too. Ton's of mods probably up your chances immensely.

You are absolutely right, its mainly mge that causes it to crash when alt tabbing, I just mean that it will sometimes crash when running full screen even w/out mge though, i've never experienced a problem when running it in windowed mode w/out mge as far as alt-tab crashes go. That being said, I always run it in full screen because I don't like borders!

To reload textures properly and help avoid crashes, you should use the console command PT (purge textures). That will force the engine to reload all textures. If done while playing in windowed mode, you can then use PT to test textures in-game while editing them in another app.

Great tip tetchy!

About MGE and Alt-Tab, since the latest SVN, Morrowind does not crash any more on my PC when doing alt-tab in full screen mod (latest SVN + MCP + latest Nvidia drivers).