MGE XE
A custom MGE build with shadows and a handful of performance improvements, hopefully with similar or better performance than regular MGE. Have a look at these screenshots.

Galleries
Gnaar Mok (recent)
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Charm of the West
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To the South
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Light of Civilization
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Ascadian Afternoon
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Coastal
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Solar Dipole
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It works by utilising the distant land objects to cast shadows, so it only works outside. It is real-time and speed that Morrowind time passes makes the passage of the sun quite noticeable. There are some limitations, and some optimizations compared to standard MGE. There are several features from MGE that have been cut too; some MGE-specific MWSE commands, texture hooks, and MGE-drawn animated tree statics.


New features since XE 0.8

• Dynamic water from MGE 178+, water simulation adjusted to be more liquid
  
• Less distant object popping
  
• Full install package, doesn't require a previous MGE installed
  
• HDR shader upgraded, opinions please
  
• HUD mods reload properly after alt-tab from fullscreen mode.
  
• Settings GUI improved

New features over standard MGE

• All objects in Morrowind view distance receive shadows.
  
• High quality selection of default shaders included.
  
• Screenshot enable checkbox now works as expected, since the screenshot code is patched. Just use PrintScreen, no macro required.
  
• Object pop-in at the screen edge no longer occurs. Distant land and grass culling is not delayed by a frame any more.
  
• Grass parts when the player is nearby; grass is lit better.
  
• Shaders no longer affect the crosshair, nor spill over the screen during cell loading, nor screw with cutscenes or the main menu.
  
• Windowed mode snaps to the screen edge to act like fullscreen, allowing fast Alt-Tab to work.
  
• Support for using shaders with the UI display quality fix in MCP.
  
• New underwater surface effects, with total internal reflection.
  
• Water shows up in the local map again, previous MGE versions did not allow it to render in the map.
  
• Scattering exponential fog and better sunsets, thanks to phal.
  
• MWSE upgraded to 0.9.4a (includes dll)
  
• Fullscreen alt-tab is functional (still slow to reload).

Requirements
Morrowind GOTY or Bloodmoon fully patched.
Shader Model 3.0+ graphics card; integrated graphics probably won't work.


Install Instructions
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41102

1. Update to http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=35. (This won't conflict with DX10+.)
2. Install MGE XE to the Morrowind directory. If you've never used MGE before, run the Morrowind launcher as admin and set a resolution in the launcher options (to generate Morrowind's first time settings).
3. If you are using HUD mods made for standard MGE, you should deselect them from your load order. MGE XE requires its own HUD mods to fix design problems with older mods.
4. Run the new MGEXEgui. Read the instructions page. If you are upgrading from MGE you should regenerate distant land with 150 minimum static size (or smaller for more shadow casters).
5. If you use Crossfire/SLI, turn off "Responsive menu caching" in the In-game tab, to avoid performance reductions as caching is SLI unfriendly.

Note that Morrowind view distance in-game is set to maximum when you first load a game.

Recommended: set timescale to 10 or 15 in the console to slow down the day cycle (or 1000 to speed up). The movement of the sun is very visible.

Don't expect everything to cast a shadow, it's only objects large enough to appear in distant land. Small objects will cast weaker shadows for their size.

There are some HUD mods for use with MGE XE available from the same download page, mostly upgrades of Yacoby's mods and Vampiric Embrace. HUD mods for previous versions of MGE are unlikely to work.


Reporting problems

All errors while running Morrowind are logged to mgeXE.log in the Morrowind directory. Check there first if it crashes or white screens, it may explain why.
Errors from running MGEXEgui are logged in the mge3 directory.
When reporting errors, always post mgeXE.log (in a spoiler tag to avoid clutter) and OS, video card details, and driver version.
If the distant land generator crashes, please post your mge3/distant-land-crash-dump.txt instead.
Please report rendering errors with detailed information and a screenshot.


Uninstalling

MGE XE and MGE svn 178 are designed to be easily substitutable. To go back to MGE:

Replace d3d8.dll with the one from the the MGE svn 178 package.
(Optionally) Regenerate distant land, setting the distant static size back to its previous value.

Fully uninstalling:

Delete MGEXEgui, mge3, d3d8.dll and dinput.dll from your Morrowind directory.


Known issues

The game may crash on loading, try 'Disable internal MWSE' on the in-game tab. This will of course disable MWSE mods.
Certain mods with added meshes may cause the distant land generator to crash. Mods with known problems: the Neverhalls.
Reducing Morrowind options draw distance slider below maximum causes drawing errors.
Possible problems with Morrowind's actor shadows, turning them on may cause the game to be unstable, save often.


Notes

If you used a previous version, please remove the old HDR.fx shader from the XEshaders directory, it is no longer being updated.

Reflect far statics is disabled. It causes a very large amount of drawing to occur which is not visible for the 95% of the game when you are looking towards land. I tried to detect when they should be visible before, but it hardly ever worked well.

The MGE XE statics override list is included automatically in every distant land build, you don't need to do it manually.

Companion Health Bars has been fixed so you can still ask an NPC to turn off their health bar if they are no longer your companion or following you.
All other HUD mods are fixed to autodetect screen size, so screen config menus are no longer needed.

Source code available at https://github.com/Hrnchamd/MGE-XE/

For http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1331115-shelter-from-magnus-blaze-8/page__view__findpost__p__20172283 users:
Managed to fix bumpmaps and spell projectile lighting for the beta lighting: install http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/download.php?id=88762 over 0.9.8. Spells make a larger, brighter light source than normal, though ground lighting may be hidden by grass.


The light spell isn't going to work for a while. In vanilla it barely makes a difference as to what magnitude the spell is, well I see why now. While checking the code I found at least five bugs with it, whoever coded it just didn't care.

- The first light spell creates a light at the actor's position, but the light spawns with full brightness already. The light effect proceeds to add extra light on top of the standard light, pointlessly. The light should start at zero brightness before adding in spells.
- The light contains both ambient and diffuse lighting, but the two together do nothing but wash out all lighting on objects within range.
- The light range is 22 * spell magnitude unattenuated by magic resist. The light falloff is set so it cuts off where the lighting is still at quarter brightness, which would make obvious popping if it wasn't for the full brightness settings. Everything just pops in at full brightness instead.
- Stacking light spells accumulates both the brightness and range, which would make a nuclear nova if you stacked 50x 1pt light spells vs a single 50pt light spell. That is, if anything worked.
- The light source is placed at the actor's feet, so it creates weird lighting if an actual light source is placed there.

That stuff is probably going to take a while to fix.

Just a few things i noticed while running around with the new light system-

- turning it on lowers framrate significantly and causes stuttering while walking around. much longer stuttering when you are walking and it loads a new cell I go from 38 FPS at night in balmorra to around 23 when turned on, all the lights maybe? Balmorra during the day also looks really washed out.
-windows glow is glitchy/ doesn't work at all
-fireflies etc create way too much green ambient light, to the point of ruining the look of them in the first place

More impressions to come, i am using MGSO mod btw

Hrnchamd does reducing static size increases the number of objects that cast shadow or it just increases the objects you see on distant land?

I can confirm that with the latest patch bump maps are fixed. Great work!

So, I have done quite a bit more testing with the new lighting and it would seem that if I load up the new lighting in a cell that uses a very very low amount of my memory (either RAM or vRAM, no clue, my bet is vRAM) and this way I do not get purple objects initially, even if I move to a new cell; purple objects do start showing up later, though, especially on things like my equipped weapon.

My guess is that if I did not have to swap the lighting out at run time for the new one, I wouldn't be getting these errors.

Lighting looks good in general, but I still suspect there could be better coefficients for this. Maybe when I get some time I will expieriement.

Nvidia Beta driver version 290.53 has cleared up some of my AA flickering (it still exists, but a little harder to notice instead of sticking out like a sore thumb) but it's still a problem.


A few notes, the Comberry plant becomes almost glowing with the new lighting system, Also windows glow is still very glitchy, Cell loading is herky jerky, and FPS loss all around is still an issue. Just something to look at. Oh and turning on the new dynamic lighting system still gets rid of all flickering.

Excellent, testing this as soon as I get back home. On an unrelated note, half of the screenshots from the opening post displays 404.


I still don't know which of the two amazes me more: how some don't care or how you do. Truly, you're a miracle worker. As for the light spell... Large though the Morrowind community is, I doubt anyone'd miss it; I certainly won't.


When I tested it, smaller static size also added shadows to small objects. However, the shadowing algorithm currently implemented draws fainter shadows for smaller objects. Shadows are pretty light for size 150 statics and barely (if at all) visible for size 50.

UPDATE: Played around with the lighting. The more I look at it, the more it fascinates me. The FPS drop is heavy, usually 6-8 FPS less in Vivec, Ebonheart or Suran. At some viewing angles the difference is even more drastic - 32 FPS with the old lighting and 22 with the new one. Another alarming thing was that the FPS dropped below 30 in some interiors (Ebonheart Castle) as opposed to usual 38-45. Still, it is well worth it and I'm not turning it off.

The glitches are gone, the bump maps are back. Comberry bushes are still overly bright, but it's nitpicking. I caught myself in a crossfire of 2 Dremora Lords, 1 Frost Elemental and 1 Daedroth so that several projectiles were flying at once -- everything looked fine. The only bug I've found was in Mournhold where light was never cast on the ground and seldom on walls and stairs.

UPDATE2: No, it's weirder than that. The light in Mournhold can only be cast on some surfaces. There are many street lamps around Mournhold Temple, and several of them don't cast light on the ground. Might be something to do with incorrect Mournhold meshes someone mentioned a while ago.

well, i am missing it
the new lighting is awesome so i realy hope hrnchamd will come up with a solution for this.

do i understand correctly that this will require a additional fix via MCP or will you be able to fix the broken light spell with MGEXE only?


edit: iam so impressed by the emitted light from projectiles, does anybody know a mod that adds this light to the caster as well? for example when you cast a heal spell on yourself, the area around you gets lit.
i imagine this might look very cool!

Hrnchamd, I have a question about how animated grass is generated. I don't want to derail the thread, as my question doesn't have to do with troubleshooting or any other part of MGE XE. Can I send you a PM?

@ Hrnchamd: concerning my repetitive crashes with Nvidia G105M, it always crashes during the chargen process with 0.9.8. The last blue screen showed a new message, never displayed before:

 STOP 0x0000008E (.....)nv4_disp.dll - address BD0A02C6 base at BD012000, DateStamp 4d27C1a6

But today, trying to convert a video using hardware acceleration (CUBA), I got a blue screen related to nv4_disp.dll... It's the first time I have this crash while I was not running Morrowind with MGEXE. Not sure, but I would say there is a problem, not connected with MGE XE, but with my video card or with nvidia drivers. That's weird since windows had never crash before with any 3D/directX application, so I believe there is an issue with my configuration, because others players have never reported the same crash during the chargen. I would suggest to temporary stop investigating about those crashes. I will go on testing MGEXE on another computer.

Small objects cast weak shadows due to the soft shadow method. It's a tradeoff so large but thin objects don't cast ugly shadows. You have to adjust the algorithm to make it work better on objects below 150 size. Look at XE Shadow Settings and XE Shadow shaders.


What's the deal with comberry plants? Mine don't glow - whose mesh replacer is it? I figured out what the deal with Windows Glow is, the meshes use a lighting mode that turns off all lighting, instead of just using 100% emissive material.


I edited that two threads ago.. it didn't commit? Aaaaaagh. Thanks.

Mournhold is at light source saturation because the architectural meshes are huge. There's not much I can do about that without making a mod that splits everything into multiple statics. It's generally messy, it's the same kind of thing that Bethesda did for the High Fane (you can still see the original one piece mesh in the BSA).


It's a bug with the game logic including stacking effects, so it has to go into MCP.


Please go ahead.

I might have missed something really obvious, but do I have to do something to enable to the new lighting? Downloaded latest version and the patch, but haven't noticed any difference to lighting, unless it's so subtle on my setup, my tired eyes missed it

I think you need to use the MGE macro editor, e.g. I set the middle mouse button to call the new "toggle lightning mode" function

The comberry plants are in MGSO.

Thanks abot.

Must be my graphics card, but the new lighting doesn't work outside, but works a charm in interiors (very odd!). Outside, all of the meshes and landscape turns black, so all I see is grass, distant land and sky.
But in interiors, I can see an improvement. What's really noticable to me is that lights at their sources are brighter and accurately light up their surrounding surfaces. Overall all lighting is brighter, perhaps a bit too bright. But it's great to finally see a bright circle of light on ceilings from the candle chandliers, instead of the same lighting across the whole ceiling.

I think the light falloff needs to be increased (if that's the right term ) but maybe that could be turned into a variable in the interface, as everyone has different tastes, but using my lighting mod, there is an overall increase in brightness.



Sounds like the comberry plants might have emissive settings on the mesh, which would be really unusual for a standard plant.

Did you read the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1331115-shelter-from-magnus-blaze-8/page__view__findpost__p__20172283 in the last thread? Use the 'find content' feature to search my post history for info.

Ah, sorry, no. Missed that (my fault, slap wrist)

Changing those settings makes interiors perfect. Just for some reason, I get no lighting at all in exteriors on meshes and landscape. FPS wise in interiors, didn't really notice any drop.
Did also notice that with those settings default, it highlights the green saturation from fires, which the new lighting system doesn't suffer from.

I checked my logs, no errors at all that I could tell. Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT graphics card.

I'll test again tomorrow, as sometimes in my MW, I do lose all lighting on meshes, it's pretty random. Sometimes happens within the construction set too. It might be related and my PC is having a bad night, I haven't tracked down a pattern yet.

Ive noticed that happens when I open MGE. For some reason its resetting all my light settings. I have to reset them everytime. Not sure if thats related to what youre talking about.

Only noticed 1 small issue that comes up. everything was set up.perfectly, no errors at all but I'm getting this flickering black line across the length of my screen. I tried re-running the setup but its still there. unchecked all my mods and no luck. is there any way to fix this thing?

edit: noticed now it only happens on exterior areas except for the boat at the start. thought it might be FantasyMorrowind so took out those textures, no luck.

hrnchamd do you think you could add a option to the underwater effect shader to enable blur?
i found this mod (http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=23440) and thought that you might be able to accomplish this without blurring the HUD.

also is it possible that you make this shader (http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=8147) compatible with MGEXE?

a general question - is it possible that shaders take the height above/below sea level to account? (for example the screen gets darker the deeper you dive)

Just a small question about what is *normal*

I have a laptop with an NVIDIA GT 240M and the most recent beta driver. In MGEXE, I turned off AA and AF completely. However, in the NVIDIA control panel, the default option was "application controlled - ON" for all the AA and AF options. I went ahead and did an override in the MW specific settings. The weird thing is, I got a couple FPS back after doing it. Was some AA and/or AF still going even with it turned off in MGEXE or was the FPS gain simply a coincidence?

Following on, my exterior was http://dl.dropbox.com/u/46396473/MGE%20Screenshot%20078.jpgmeshes BUT, by pure chance, I discovered it's not always the case.
After heading to Red Mountain to check out something else (under normal lighting), I then re-enabled the new lighting during a blight storm. Being in the middle of nowhere, there was naturally no difference in lighting, and I wasn't sure if the toggle responded.
So, I CoC'd to Seyda Neen, so still had blight there. Went into an interior to check what lighting I had on, ensured the new method was on, and so went outside again.
Blight storm was gradually fading out, but I could see the town just fine, then suddenly, wham, all black again.
So I waited around in town for weather to change, and eventually I had fog, and I could see town again (which looked just fine during foggy day and night)

So, it seems, under clear and semi-clear days, everything goes black, under "darker" weather, everything lights correctly. So, I assume there must be something from the ini file that is being read as it's weather related.

I have modified my ini to change nights to be really dark, but haven't changed day settings. Could that be the culprit?

Managed to fix the flickering bar issue. turning real time shadows ingame to full clears it up.

For http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1331115-shelter-from-magnus-blaze-8/page__view__findpost__p__20172283 users:
Fixes for twitchy water (maybe) and Windows Glow: install http://tes.nexusmods.com/downloads/download.php?id=88791 over 0.9.8. Windows Glow uses a property which turns off all lighting for a mesh, instead of using emissive. This is weird and doesn't work with HDR too well, but it turns out okay as they only appear at night.