Im not too familiar with what is and what isnt possibly with shaders and im shore many of arnt either, but i have some ideas or more queries on some shader if there possible, first one was a sort of heatwave, you know that wavey effect you get when its hot, you see it a lot in scenery shots Africa, this would look so good in the distance on a hot day or over pools of lava. the second is in most games when selecting something the object gets highlighted, some people my like that morrowind dosnt but i would like it too. the third it a wet look to thing when its raining or if the player/npc was in water, a sorts of dark and shiny overly on everything reflective if possible. the forth is blood on clothes, armor, faces weapons and all over the walls and floors would be awesome. dirt, a grotty dirty overlay on things that arnt cleaned such as homes abandon buildings, but mostly i was thinking the player after a wile of traveling and fighting for clothes to get dirty and need to be changed and washed and for the player to need a bath to get clean as theres already a bath mod out there this would go nicely. and finally cuts and scars after fighting cut could fade after healing but scars would be permanent unless seen by a special healer or something for those that dont want scars and such. thoses are just some ideas if some more knowledgeable of how shaders work and what can be done with them please can you say what is and what isnt, and to anyone with some ideas this is the place for them.

Half can be done. Other half can still be done but requires additional development. All can be done for OpenMW.

I'm trying a heat haze but there are artifacts. Like your weapon's edge wobble with distant wave. <_<

Wet looks is also in my plans. I think it is possible.

Dirt look shaders indeed needs an overall system. PK mentioned working on something.

Shaders aren't that big a problem, it is the lack of framework that runs shaders precisely on certain events, certain objects/layers and with certain properties.(that can be developed if we were using our proprietary engine.)

I just checked out openMW, that's awesome :-O I didn't even know it existed... hopefully it'll get finished!

So your saying nothing is imposable as we will just make it possible with a little time, awesome what do you make of the blood and scars idea or would that fall on the same basis as the wet look and dirt??

Blood, water dust kind of effects are even easier to make. I was having problems with animation parameters(mainly time(tickcounts)). But it is solved. I better get started. (if I can find time from Just Cause 2.)

I would like to see a placeable haze effect, like over lava pools. I think if you made a billboard object and then hooked a shader to it, it could be done. But I'm not sure if a hooked shader can distort the screen. That's the big if. It might be limited to the texture itself, unless you can make some trick with the texture...

well where theres a will theres a way as time tells us lol, just cause 2 is awesome hehe i also thought of a new one were it gets it little misty wile raining nothing too much just a light mist very low to the ground no bigger then a foot from the ground and im not talking graveyard style fog just a light Myst like water clouds theres something similar to what im on about in gta 4 on the roads during rain

Edit - okay heres my hud redesign idea, it is simply my sketched drawing placed on to a screenshot of morrowind

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs208.snc4/38722_142435205782997_100000495566459_353811_1498579_n.jpg

and heres a color version so to understand it better, its not the color seam id actually like though

http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/hs108.ash2/38722_142435202449664_100000495566459_353810_2846195_n.jpg

The top left corner piece is the player stats such as health and magica also the map and compass is in the circle, the color sceam is, green is health, blue is magica, red is fatigue and the yellow is rage witch was used in morrowind combat advanced witch there was a hud piece added already for this. there is also a pirple xp meter and three different shades of blue bars for hunger, tiredness and thirst i was thinking of adding a hygiene bar and possibly a ummm i need the loo meter as there are a bathroom shop mode that adds hygiene and could use a meter and i believe there is a i need the loo one out there too and we all know NOM. Befor you say no im not trying to turn morrowind in to the sims lol.

On the bottom left in the circle part will be the info spot were bits of information is show like the names that appear when you hover over something and weapon stats also a clock will appear if the player owns a pocket watch when a button is pressed, the three squares above will be equipped weapons, i want to change the way the inventory works thay you can only carry items if you have some were to put it so you would need a sword sheath to to well sheath a sword other wise your forced to have it drawn, and you can only really have so many weapons sheathed on you body. this explains the bottom row i squares these are backpack pouch and storage places. i will on day figure out how and get round to having items being sheathed on the character on belts and straps you wear and so forth what iv got to work out is a standard way of doing you can different looking belts but have it all work in the same way

the circular bars around the npc are target stats when you target an npc, i would so like camera lock targeting to be available one day. this would also pop up on the nearest or active enemy as a replacement for the yellow enemy health bar

and finally on the right side are the companion health stats i had an idea to cycle through what companions you have witch alters the stats making the selected companion the larger piece, reason for this is i thought it would be cool to select a companion by cycling through and pressing certain button to get them to preform an action like attack, guard, alternate there weapon style and anything and everything else i can think of, as this would make companion more integrated and easy with out having to go in to dialog for options, the companions buttons might just be one button that comes up with say a ring of icons that each one represents an action to preform and moving up or down will rotate the selection witch would free up button use, this menu would pause gamplay as would be expected and id so love some speech shouted out when an actions selected but that is very high hops lol

anyway thats my ideas out there lets get some opinions...

I will be redoing the design in photoshop in what would be the final detailed hud design, and btw all the parts that arnt in colour are purely cosmetic and can be replaced to different styles maybe even ingame. so wed finaly have hud themes, as i said this design is something for me but might be considered a little too futuristic only i was going for a dewmer gear tech design im doing this in two textures one of the rusted dewmer metal and one of what i suppose the dewmer metal would look like not rusted for me witch will be white/silver similar to how my non colored sketch looks already infarct i might use the dirty scanned paper background as the texture i might also make all the bars colour changeable for a bonus as i want most of the bars in shades of blues and greens

oh and i was wondering if we could get a sort of paperdoll for just heads of the player in the circle part of the character stats and npcs for the companion part of the hud in the circle part, i was thing of having avatar to identify them with there name appearing over the top. i dout this would be possible though at least not right now so as an alternative by default the inner circle section would not appear at first and having the option to turn the avatar on, in witch you would have to make a texture of the avatar using a template and placing it in a specific folder and naming it the same as the characters name were the script or what not would find and place it witch could be good as an extra option anyway for custom avatars. im assuming hood texture would be be capable of animated textures as i plan to have the bits around the circle rotate rather then just sit there in the background
right well im off to start the fully detailed hud and as i like never sleep it most likely be done tomorrow, till then....

That is... wow. I don't think we can get that specific with shaders. The limitation of shaders is to make basic stuff in one go. The parallelism is key in shaders. With a programmable UI system, that could be achieved easily. I will still try to make maybe half of it.

From a creative stand point, we must have something immersive.. I will add enemy health to a crosshair but I won't use it myself for example. Off course the question remains, how are we gonna know about enemies health. I think there are other ways to get that. Like animations, wound textures, sounds...

Player's stats must be shown because this is a game played in first person perspective. We can't see anything and we can't feel anything about ourselves. This is a necessary trade off in immersion. Although, maybe even that is not needed. I am changing my mind playing Metro 2033. It doesn't have any hud(in hard mode). We must find other ways to disable the need for a hud all together.

---

I am working on heat haze effect. I made a texture hook for steam particles. It is actually working for a degree albeit the muddiness. I'm mapping fullscreen frame to the texture. I couldn't make it work with opaque particles. It thinks as it is not there.

http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f386/vtastek/morrowind/morrowindmisc/shaders/heathaze2.jpg
http://i51.photobucket.com/albums/f386/vtastek/morrowind/morrowindmisc/shaders/heathaze1.jpg

If I can make it correctly overlayed as in seamless, then it can be perfect enough to look like a glass-haze effect with little distortions. I know in 3DSMAX it is called screen mapping but I don't know how to make it in shaders.

Peachykeen, phal anyone?

PS. If it can be done for depthframe too, we can have soft particles. That can help that mist effect.

i dont fully understand shaders it but be such a headache at time but then i guess everything is do you think you could add in the same sort of particles that comes of of fires the sort of sparks for the lava haze anyway i always though it missed something like that, other wise im looking forward to the shader i always thought the lava looked so flat and boring to me.

For the hud as i say i dont know what is doable and what isnt what limitation is there like how many pieces you can add at any give time? or do you mean things like the circular map and the info point thing, one thing iv learned about morrowind is that nothing is imposable or UN-doable weather its tomorrow or in a year most likely a year well be able to do what ever we like
to have enemy health bars done in the same why as the enhanced detection mod was done were a mesh was placed at the desired location it was billboarded and made to be seen through everything so nothing clips over it. if we made each bar a separate mesh and have a hook texture that has the right fill level accordingly. as i wanted to get the outer ring to rotate slowly one way and the inner to rotate the other so to simply make the mesh animated to do so wouldn't disturb the texture hook, although this would be the last thing to worry about obviously

adding the enemy stats to the cross hair seems like an easer solution, my sketch looks http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/hs095.ash2/38091_142516775774840_100000495566459_354163_6970142_n.jpg like, i did want to keep those lines only when i used the magic tool in ps to remove the background. it took them too as there so light im thinking of adding in. anyway i look forward to seeing anything you do as always :thumbsup:

you said the blood, dirt, wounds shaders is easy thing to do? i remember the first time i played morrowind i wanted to make a blood bath only the bath wouldn't fill lol i have a good source for blood splatter textures and dirt for that matter and possibly wounds too if there needed

oh do you know if its possible to fix the camera on a target?

I like your ideas, speaker. There are one big aspect of the HUD that need to be... I'm not sure of the word:

The current HUD. As it stands now, there's very little that can be done with it. We can disable it, but only in its entirety and only for a limited circumstance. We cannot alter it besides that. We cannot move it, change its shape, or alter its function. This is the first obstacle, and also the hardest to overcome, it will require digging into the game code. Once there is a way to alter the built-in HUD, things will be a lot simpler. For example, a paper doll image in the circle near the health bar. Morrowind uses one, but only in a certain circumstance, and we need to change that. Or, moving the equipped weapon icon to another part of the screen.

Hrnchamd mentioned that there is a "visible flag" in the Morrowind scene graph that could be altered, but I'm not aware of any ability to at the moment. We would need some system to read the information Morrowind provides to the HUD, so that we can display it how we want it. Weapon and spell icons are what I'm thinking of.

I realize that this all is not helping much, but I hope that someone more knowledgeable about these things than myself will read this and decide to shine their graces upon us. :wink_smile:

While your sketches are very nice they feel too complex for my tastes. But I'm a minimalist, so I prefer anti-complexity. :ninja: They look well suited for something like Mass Effect, though!

well i was thinking of hiding the real hud for now and recreate one using the parts and through scripts i can get the basic bit done like stat meters, as for the paperdoll that would be awesome but im happy to wait till its doable because we will eventually be able to modify the real hud its just a matter of time in another couple of years or so we will have morrowind bending over backwards. as i said for alternate method to the paperdoll it will be a texture that wed have to create for our own character and so forth. im going to look in to any method of getting what functions i can working no matter how stupid and annoying it might be.

and yer it is a little complex, but all the parts that are left white are cosmetic and can be changed to something simple and maybe more morrowind themed, as well as being able to turn of each and every start bar and such so make it as simple as you like, im thinking of doing a round version of morrowinds hud for what would be the default theme

is there a limit on how many hud pieces you can put on to the screen? if there is i could make the hug out of 4 pieces witch would be annoying, but doable i think

heres what i have so far of the more detailed design
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs231.snc4/38901_142570062436178_100000495566459_354626_1256245_n.jpg
iv added two more blue bars for hygiene and toiletry, witch is removable of anyone who dont use these functions

would of had more done if my ghay laptop didnt shutdown and update it self for like 4 hours lol

I had an idea for the map. I can pass the player's coordinates to a shader, and have that shader display a map. We won't be able to use Morrowind's map, but MGE's distant land texture will suffice for now. You could even make your own map! I just need a shader that can show a zoomed-in texture. I stripped down the http://mgeshaderlib.50.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=16 shader to show the map in a good position, but I have no idea how to make a zooming setup, or how to parse the coordinates. <_<

Great ideas.

Hud shader is more fit to that. But it was done with hacks and such. I will work on a more principal version based on an opengl book I found on rotating, scaling, positioning matrices. The hud shader was PS 3.0 at one point. I certainly don't wanna exceed ps 2.0 for hud like shaders. Over PS 2.0 would be overkill.

Look for a line like this:

tex2D(s0,tex);

in hud shader. tex is texture coordinates. Dividing that will create zooming.

tex2D(s0,tex/4);

tex is a float2, holding two numbers between 0-1. it can be stated like this too.

tex2D(s0,float2(tex.x/4,tex.y/4));

Now

tex2D(s0,float2(tex.x/4, -1 * tex.y/4));

will flip the image vertically.

tex2D(s0,float2(tex.x/4, -1 * tex.y/4+0.5));

will flip the image and offset it down.

I can make one shader and send it to you. We can use the same hud framework. We switch the shaders, so health can be the map shader, magic can be the frame on it. And it is a good idea to have our maps. I want to use the original map!

if the custom map is doable then it would amazing and that would be one tick the box of my hud design for things that im not shore that will work,

and i should have the template for the stats part of the hud (the one in the top left corner) witch is for the map, ill do a simple frame as well using the textures of the original hud, so instead of the complex design ill have the simple one as it will take me a wile to to get the complex one finished is its taking longer then i thought it would
i should have a template of the top left corner part of the hud for you to use with the map experiment in atleast 2 or 3 days as im not at home till then

It's terribly inaccurate, hacked together, and it has issues, but it's http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/7868/mgescreenshot017.png http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/3606/mgescreenshot018.png. Eagerly awaiting that custom shader... :blink: Is it possible to show it as a circle, though?

oooo glitch but thats how it starts lol nice work, and if is possible then yay if not then you simply put the circle over the square map giving the appearance of it being a circle assuming you can lay hut pits over the top of one another, the frame will be quite thick anyway.

havnt done much of the hud design as real life calls but i got all this week

Heres an update on the hud iv added a sort of background texture other wise the hud is untextured for the bars and the frame witch is gray
heres a http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs168.snc4/37758_143203165706201_100000495566459_359168_5321856_n.jpg
ignore the black dot in the center of the circle as i forget to remove it
and heres it is one a http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/hs088.ash2/37731_143216385704879_100000495566459_359253_4464977_n.jpg

all i have to do is add some texture to the bars and frame then i will make a more morrowind themed version using the splash screen texture and various effects

Love the design, I just don't really feel like it fits Morrowind though, looks too futuristic, kinda makes me think I'm in the animus and Morrowind is a memory

I got it working. Sort-of. I didn't scale it correctly so it's gigantic on my screen, and the bars are inaccurate, (why does that sound familiar? :unsure: ) but it's working in game.
http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/1295/mgescreenshot024.png http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/9647/mgescreenshot025.png http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/6646/mgescreenshot026.png http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/9380/mgescreenshot027.png http://img838.imageshack.us/img838/7743/mgescreenshot028.png

I'm liking the design, it just needs some Morrowind-y texturing and it might fit nicely. Please post future sketches in PNG format, and if possible, against a transparent background. JPEG causes some nasty color artefacts and makes it hard to separate pieces, but the last picture wasn't bad.

wow nice work you should of said you was doing as it was a ping and had a transparent only the screen i suppled was a facebook representation ill send you the full file if you like, how ever im almost done with the texturing so ill send you the new image i didnt know you could make it transparent too thats awesome are you able to get all the bars to work, ill make a image with labels explaining what each bar is after the texturing is done wich will be in the next 10 minutes

also how did you know witch way i wanted the bars to fill lol

funny you say that it is inspired from assassins creed 2 as iv been playing it recently and this design is mainly for me i will be doing a morrowind style too

okay the textured version nothing to magical just something to break up the bold color
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/hs098.ash2/38237_143257699034081_100000495566459_359439_6547180_n.jpg
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/hs098.ash2/38237_143257702367414_100000495566459_359440_6177970_n.jpg

skaeps - i can send you the psd file with all broken up in to the different layers so its less hassle for you
i cant wait to see what you do with this, ill make the morrowind appropriate version and the other hud elements soon as

There are shaders that distort the screen. WHAT IF we take the output and mask it with a texture. Then animate the texture. BAM!! Water rolling off the screen! But we need good quality textures...

Any texture artists want to make a sequence of textures that look like water rolling off the screen?