Looking for climate changes in Morrowind

Post » Tue May 17, 2011 3:15 am

Hallo guys, long time no see. A short introduction is in order, I guess. Well I keep coming for more advice and news in modding every once in a while. I apply some tweaks to make my Morrowind prettier and/or more playable, get tired rather quickly, abandon my job, then resume it much, much later. And so the circle continues.

So, now, I remember this guy, Vality Seven (Vality, Vality7), who used to release some updates to MGE every once in a while and also made some tasty vids of Morrowind mods in action.
Basically, I'm looking for a way to reproduce the way his Morrowind looked at the time of making http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxnT1eK3OtI video.

No, no, I have got the animated grass (kinda ancient but it works... mostly. It got messed up around the parts in which I added some additional structures that altered the terrain, leaving the animated grass floating in the air), the Balmora mod and the tree mods... Granted, my trees look somehow worse than those in the video but the readmes for Vality's mods are no longer available as his page got closed down with the closure of googlepages.com, and I think he himself ceased to care and left the modding community, or something, but the trees look good enough for now and the leaves spinning wildly relative to the way you're facing (when I look up and start spinning in place, the leaves spin with me as if they were parts of a natural kaleidoscope of some sort) I can get used to. Getting right to the point...

Basically, it's all about that climate: the omnipresent green mist in Balmora as seen in the vid. I have this very specific weather saved somewhere in my Morrowind's files as it randomly kicks in every two in-game days or so. I would like to gain a firmer understanding of its workings in order to make it more prevalent, you know. That's because it looks absolutely lovely. At least on the Bitter Coast and in Balmora-turned-rainforest city. Still, it looks great in combination with my ancient MGE shaders, no matter the location (except for the Red Mountain ofc; the weather there is perfect since the original Morrowind).

Which leads me to the question about the Morrowind Graphics Extender: it is still big and popular, right? I bet it is, since the distant land is an excellent feature, and the shaders are nice to have as well. I'm using the 3.8.0 SVN rev. 116, which is probably kinda old at the moment...

I am using 3 different shaders: "1_Alpha_DoF", "knx_DoF_v10" and "1_Beta_HDR_5". Honestly, I would greatly appreciate it if you could point me towards their more recent versions if there are any, but I guess you can't... In that case, any suggestions of good depth-of-field and HDR/bloom-sorta-thing like effects would be welcome, as well as any softening filter (because I'm pretty sure that in this video I gave you a softening filter of some sort was applied, but no depth-of-field).

And since derailing the thread in the very first post is fun (and partially because I don't want to create thousands of threads to answer all of my many questions): I am looking for a way to enable environmental shadows. You know, like shadows of trees, characters... Of course, the original Morrowind used Shader Model 1.1, but it only casted very poor quality shadows of characters only. I am fairly sure that some progres has been made in this department.

Right now my Morrowind looks almost what I want it to look like (granted, there is a bug or two but I think I'm gonna fix them soon; otherwise I'll be sure to ask you charming chaps for help). The climate, shaders and enhanced handling of shadows are just finishing touches, an icing on the cake if you will. Still I'm sure that if I riffle through this forum for a while I'll find plenty of innovations and new mods that I'd love to see implemented in my game - but those I should be able to handle myself. It's just my ages-old dreams I wanna see made real that I'm talking about.

And, uh, I hope I haven't broken any rules by posting this topic.
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Laura Shipley
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 10:18 am

A new version of MGE, called MGE XE, allows real-time shadows. http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1167736-shelter-from-magnus-blaze-5/
The original MGE is still being upgraded too. http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1174576-morrowind-graphics-extender-mge/

You might want to check out Vurt's mods. Just search for him on PES.
He has made all sorts of great new tree replacers, and new grass.
Vality's mods are still on PES, too.
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Stacey Mason
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 7:49 am

Thanks for your attempt of getting me up-to-date with the newest MW graphics enhancements, mate.

So if I understand correctly, MGE XE's real time shadows conflict with regular MWE's pretty-pretty reflective dynamic water? Huh. I guess it is still in early development stages then.

I see that the newest version of MGE supports sunshafts! Mmm, tasty.

I will definitely give Vurt's mods a shot or at least will look up his works, thanks for your recommendation.

However, my question about the green haze/mist remains unanswered. Any help with recreating the weather effect in a more permament state will be greatly appreciated.

Also, if you know any top-notch MGE shader effects, like really good depth-of-field or HDR, or motion blur or SSAO (whatever it is) or anything real nice, feel free to give them a mention here.
I know about the MGE Shader Library, but it looks like it hasn't been updated for quite a long time...
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Ricky Meehan
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 1:32 am

The green colour was done with the palette feature of ENBSeries, which puts a colour palette of your choice over the whole screen. Vality used to share the palette he used on his site. That means it was not Bitter Coast specific though, so you'd get a green'ish look everywhere.

I'm not sure if any MGE shaders offer a comparable feature yet.
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Lucky Boy
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 5:29 am

Vtastek made a port of ENBSeries to MGE, so you could use that to get the pallete, there are also Peachykeen's palette shaders.
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Flash
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 8:46 am

Vtastek made a port of ENBSeries to MGE

Could you please provide a link?
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Gemma Flanagan
 
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Post » Tue May 17, 2011 8:45 am

Bleh, I'll take a look, but no guarantees. If I can't find it, try PM'ing Vtastek about it.

EDIT: I just took a look through his topics, it looks like the topic got nuked during the forum update, try PM'ing him about it.
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Wane Peters
 
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