Suggestions or observations? It would seem strange to me for people to be posting suggestions on the thread of their own mod, since they've got all the ideas anyways.

Xs that I will take into consideration for further testing. X is suggestion. It fits. But English is not my mother tongue, how would I know?

I doubt it, but doing this would be simple. I wonder how many other meshes could get improved lighting by adding a few polys.


His comments are directed at people using the patch.

I agree, just a simple subdivide+smooth can really make meshes a lot better. Most of the Architecture meshes in Morrowind are pretty good for their purposes, but still...

Ah, now I understand, I was just a little confused with that post.

A lot. A ? lot. A ??? ???? lot.


They need it for beauty's sake. Lightning would be a second reason for upgrading them.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f386/vtastek/morrowind/Morrowind2009/shadows/Morrowind-MGE-teaser.jpg

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=26348

Surveillance: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-1-1249846453.jpg http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-1-1249846943.jpg http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-1-1249847324.jpg

Info:
- Shadow casters now receive shadows. Shadows look a whole lot better now, check the spiral stairs at Telvanni places. It was actually programmed to stop casters receiving shadows, probably because of the npc mesh quality.
- Statics in all nine visible exterior cells now cast shadows. Shadows are a whole lot slower now. But there's more of them.
- Shadow cutoff distance increased.
- Shadows should be more stable. Added a critical section over all of the shadow code.
- Particle arrows should work while moving. May or may not cause issues with other particles, please test everything. Spell effects / particle clothes / bubbling potions / everything.

Testers:
- Report fps hit with shadows, use the slider in options to turn on/off.
- Shadows seem to cast aligned with object centres, rather then per vertex. Shadows do not cast upwards.
- Test particle arrows.

I'm on it. Will test asap.

EDIT1: Quick, preliminary test, same environment as last time.
EDIT2: I just had to say... I love the whole secret like naming of stuff! It get's me laughing =) Like a mission impossble.

Shadows:
*Look better
*They did not kill FPS much more then they did before on my laptop
*FPS differance is around 2fps on avarage, however I do not trust my FPS because of the next statement:
*My FPS is pretty irrelevant, they are nowhere near playable on a laptop if that helps. I have a range of 3-7 FPS everywhere on 640x480 with this enabled.
*I crashed when coming close to Vos. I don't know what caused this, I was just looking at how the rocks threw beautiful shadows on each others and turned around towards Vos and crashed.
*Did not have time to try particles of any kind :/

Shadows test for warning forever:

Pentium D 2.8. 8800 GTS 512. 2 GB RAM.

Vanilla Morrowind-Seyda Neen,
800x600 res,
minimum view distance:
No Shadows: 60 fps.
With Shadows: 7 fps.

Vanilla Morrowind-Seyda Neen but with MGE,
1440x900 res,
minimum view distance-no distant land,
No shadows 60 fps,
with shadows: surprising 12 fps, but after a while dropped to 6 fps.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Statics cast shadows on each-other,
even to themselves, :shocking:
50% shadows have gaps, it is ugly,
and gaps move with player's movement, with movement the other 50% show gaps too, it wasn't that bad in previous patch.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The other %50 look amazing. Well, after seeing it, I don't want to lose it. But FPSs don't think so.

PS. I search on the matter and found that:
Stencil shadows are CPU intensive.
There is something called Carmack's reverse which praised a lot.
Soft stencil shadows are possible. Even area light shadows.
Stencil shadowing can be done in GPU for better performance.
Rendering depth buffer for sun and combining it to camera depth-buffer is the trick. We have depth buffer for camera in MGE. And a good deal of shader authors.(Not me!)


PPS. I was testing bump maps too. (I had some meshes from Darknut.) No night glows anymore. :thumbsup: But what I know for highlights with bump maps, they change with direction of light. But I could only see intensity changes. Was their position supposed to be fixed like that? (I loosely remember Morrowind has an environment map almost realtime, and you can assign it to meshes as environment map. Can it help the situation? Maybe it has sun's position too.)

Hrnchamd, I was wondering if you could add a note to the first post about the work that is being done in regards to soulgems, with a link http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1009853&st=0 in case anyone else wants to contribute.

Voice squeak while jumping by Lord Udedenkz
(confirmed by tetchy)

Jump While Someone is Talking, Their Voices Squeak While You Are In the Air. Not sure if present in software accelerated mode, but something triggers this during the jump. That also happens near creatures - basically any sound generator will increase in pitch and speed when you jump. I think it has to do with being positioned above the sound source.

This also happens a lot for me when I have high speed; with high speed just running past a sound will cause its pitch to increase. I thought I'd mention it, as it might mean being above the sound source isn't the only cause.

So Hrmchamd, not meant to sound rude, but you'll make dynamic shadows possible, even with FPS hit, but not rain/weather particle collision detection? I'd love that just as much as dynamic shadows where seen.

I think mainly dynamic shadows are a much simpler task, and secondly the fps hit would be much more substantial. Come to think of it, are there ANY games which have collision for every rain drop?

Edit: Btw GTAIV is able to cull rain for certain areas, would that be possible for Morro? However this would still require every shelter in the game world to be modified.

P.S. I hope you don't feel this is turning into a request thread, but have you considered a true no-glow instead of the various work arounds? I imagine that wouldn't be something too hard for a man of your position

World of Warcraft :hehe:

It's not a hard task, Hrmchamd already did it, but didn't want to release it with the patch because of the FPS hit, yet with the FPS hit on shadows, I think that the FPS argument could be ditched.

Culling rain is a good idea though, perhaps a script function to attach to objects that would cull weather particles based on direction? Reculling is worth it too, since you wouldn't want to cull some ashstorm dust behind a wall but have it not recull after a little ways.

Well, here's a potential way to do it with shaders, I'm kind of doubting that it has anything to do with the patch tho but here's my brief brainstorm:

Not promising anything, this shader is far beyond me but it might be possible to:
*render->depthmap
*get normals of models as surface approximation.
*Use normals to discern where to not place rain/kill rain.
*place alpha maps along depth + trig to make it move.

Who? Oh, you must mean Hrnchamd.

Scripts can't be attached to statics. A shader solution on the other hand might be possible, but that would require MGE.

Yes, I stated that in the post.

Scripts can't be attached to statics I know, but they can be attached to activators, which work the same way as statics in most aspects, just with advantages. But if we're talking rain and weather here, they aren't statics, the meshes are hardcoded into the game, really limiting the options for weather customization.

On the weather topic, Hrmchamd, how hard would it be to make an http://i25.tinypic.com/2l8dx1g.jpg possible?

Another suggestion, make it so that plugins/master files can be dependant on plugin files the same way they can be dependant on masters, it would be really useful, and solve a lot of mod issues out there.

I think we should have a separate topic about the rain, tbh. Sure, hrnchamd might be able to do something on the code side about it, but I just don't feel like it's the appropriate place to talk shader, so I will post in the MGE thread about rain.

Guess I'll have to be less subtle - you keep mispelling his name Hrmchamd; it's Hrnchamd. :slap:


Certainly activators have advantages over statics, but the issue with rain is that it continues to appear thru covered areas which are usually statics. Your suggestion to attach a script to objects to cull weather particles would need to be attached to those covered areas - only way to do that would be to replace every affected static with an activator version so that the script could be attached. Not a very good solution, whereas the shader solution would not require object replacement.

Argh, his name is certainly not easy to remember, thanks for pointing that out.

Anyways, I think with the code patch, it should be easy to make attaching scripts to statics possible.

EDIT: A mod taking place using this function would probably rely on activator collision walls placed around appropriate areas, that was my original idea, didn't post it until now though.

That would be redundant - that's why activators exist in the game.

See my edit.

Back on the topic of testing...

My computer would blow up trying to test the shadows probably, so I tested the particles. With my particle arrow replacer, preliminary tests show the particles no longer become displaced from the arrow in 3rd-person when performing actions (crouch, jump, run/walk).

Yes, I saw it. My statement still stands.



Preliminary testing results for particle arrows:
Noticed a loss of fps (~15%) with this test build over the previous without the shadows patch installed (just lighting group and particle fix).


[edit] Did a more controlled test for fps loss and the drop I was seeing was due to other factors. No discernible difference in fps between unpatched exe and patched with this test build using lighting group and particle fix. -_-

EDIT: Rain Collision is a waste of time.