About configuring the lighting; the parameters are for the falloff equation
brightness = 1 / (f_quadratic * dist² + f_linear * dist + f_constant)
where dist is the normalized distance from the object surface to the light; dist = 0 is right at the light, dist = 1 is at the light's max range.

The standard lighting caps maximum brightness at 1.0, which is physically incorrect. If you draw a graph of this you will see a peak near the light. At dist = 0, the brightness resolves to 1 / f_constant , which is the peak brightness. Reducing f_constant to 0.2 will increase the peak brightness to 5.0, for example. The other two parameters control the gradient of the falloff, though f_linear is currently ignored by the shader for being slower to calculate.



Per-pixel lights are troublesome, requiring a lot of calculation, it would not perform well with more than 8 lights. Most current games are limited to 4 dynamic lights per pixel. Morrowind itself doesn't activate more than 8 lights, but patching its renderer shouldn't be that hard. I can experiment, but most options tank performance.


The actual bump map calculations aren't very well documented, so anything with non-standard bump matrices won't match correctly yet. Daytime is brighter because the combination of sunlight and ambient is higher than 1.0. If ambient was properly adjusted, instead of relying on saturating to white, it would match better. It's definitely possible to have different categories (there's already classifiers for distance, grass, etc.), but the more categories the slower things get.


Not sure what's wrong with these, they look normal. Could you post another mgeXE.log with the new version?


It may be due to the lower res textures. Find the Data files/distantland/statics/textures directory and move it elsewhere temporarily. See if that fixes it. It's probably a driver bug, as I've tested those meshes a lot without issues.

Yeah i tried moving the distant land textures directory elsewhere temporarily and it didn't help, i also tried forcing AA through nvidia, that lowered framerates and still didn't fix it , this issue has been plaguing me for a year


It seems to be more pronounced on the more recent versions of MGE XE to me. Now starting to affect more edges of other textures besides just trees.

Hey what video card are you using if i may ask?

Testing 0.9.8, so far everything's great. The new lighting is fantastic, but it is also the heaviest shader available, dropping FPS no less than the whole 'high quality' shader chain. In Balmora town square (unmodded but with tons of clutter lying around ) I get 17-18 FPS w/o shaders, 15 with the 'high quality' chain and only 10-11 with both the chain and the new lighting. Much of this may be due to high values of AA forced via NVidia Inspector. I'll test more later.

Ok i think i have tried everything to get rid of this, guess only option is to turn off AA

512mb Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT

Testing results for 0.9.8.

1. The ALT+TAB functionality is restored. I was able to minimize/restore the game about 20 times without any trouble. I've only noticed one minor, non-critical glitch. The image becomes broken http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/1768/alttabinterior.jpg if the game is minimized both in paused state AND in an interior cell. It never happens in exteriors or when not paused. It also returns to normal as soon as the menu is closed.

2. The performance of the new lighting is good, only sagging in (what I believe to be) complex scenes. Here is what I noticed.
2.1. The new shader makes the light from Windows Glow very faint and dull. Also, the original brightly lit windows occasionally flicker through the new shaded ones as the player moves around. Here is the same house in Caldera shot from two different points: http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/2352/angle1x.jpg, http://img821.imageshack.us/img821/4089/angle2b.jpg. It's especially easy to notice with Imperial buildings.
2.2. Artifacts of the new lighting system are very rare (I never saw any kind of complete whiteout, as reported above). The two I did encounter: http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/1554/standard2.jpg, http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/7711/new2ie.jpg. Notice how the small tree at the bottom is unnaturally bright; also, one of the stems of Vurt's giant mushrooms partially lost its texture.
2.3. The new lighting tends to add a somewhat excessive reddish glow to some interiors (like the Lucky Lockup tavern in Balmora).

That's it. Always ready to experiment.

Same as Wayfinder, Windows Glow becomes barely noticable.

Whiteouts on pretty much everything when a spell is cast and goes past the object or terrain.
http://postimage.org/image/oe3zahvx9/

Still getting a performance boost with this version of XE. The lighting does reduce that gain quite significantly when turned on. Good trade off though.

Really looks lovely.

hmm maybe it is a nvidia driver issue? I have been working for days trying to find a solution, still no go, i don't wanna turn AA totally off cause it lowers the quality so much.

I tried converting vtastek's animated menu to bik renaming it to menu_background.bik and it worked amazingly well, theres just a small delay before the video starts (less than a second) but its amazing!

Confirmed, turning off AA stopped the problem. Although, my tired eyes didn't really notice much of a quality difference

Yeah with AA on the Ghostgate flickers as well when you walk. Gonna keep searching for a solution.

I wonder if you guys would still have problems with Vurt's trees using nvidia supersampling in the driver settings.

So set the Anti aliasing mode to override, set AA setting to application controlled, and set AA transparency to super sampling?

Probably. I do not actually own nor have I used in quite awhile an nvidia card with the nvidia control panel. Best guess is that you do not want it set to 'application controlled'.

From what I have read, forcing supersampling in the nvidia control panel is a lot slower than using a game's (or in this case, MGE's) built in multisampling. It would still be good to figure out why the trees are behaving this way for you two, but using supersampling could potentially be a temporary fix until someone figures it out.

This may be due to a limitaion on the number of level-of-detail mipmaps in the textures where you are seeing the flickering. Setting the mipmap LOD bias too high can cause it - try using a setting of -1 or 0. You might also want to try lowering the anisotropic filtering level - try 8x - and make sure it's set to application controlled in your graphics driver.

I have AA set to None in MGE, and in nvidia control panel I have the following setting for Morrowind:
Antialiasing - Gamma Correction: On
Antialiasing - Mode: Override any application setting
Antialiasing - Setting: 4x

Set the Antialiasing - Transparancy: to Multisample or Supersample

I don't notice that much of a difference in performance between multisampling or supersampling using the driver, or letting MGE handle it but my draw distance is low (5 cells) and I have an older system upgraded to use a single Evga GTX 560 SC. I'm using nvidia driver v280.26.

Alright cause i am having a bugger of a time figuring out how to force super sampling AA

Do you get flickering with vurt's trees? and on some other objects at night?

Ok, i tried Tetchy's drivers, still no luck, in fact i see no difference between 8x supersampling and no supersampling, it seems to have no visual affect or performance hit at all. The game still looks by far the best with 4x AA on, but can't use it due to the flicker.

I use http://downloads.guru3d.com/NVIDIA-Inspector-1.9.5.9_d2612.html to set-up specific game profiles. Click on the little button to the right of the driver version text box. Leads to http://blog.orbmu2k.de/wp-content/pics/NVIDIAInspectorTool_DC56/image_11.png. Here's the (I think) http://blog.orbmu2k.de/tools/nvidia-inspector-tool (German).

Yeah the options in Nvidia inspector are exactly the same as the regular nvidia control panel, and either i cant figure out how to force 8x supersampling, or it has no affect on the game.

I'm only noticing it on flora_tree_03.nif

There are some other stock objects where speckling occurs while moving the camera or player - the legs of the bull netch against certain other objects / water, close straight horizontal lines like steps.

Supersampling definitely helps minimize the sparkling for me, I'm using 4x (supersample) with 4x AA. Taking flora_tree_03.nif out almost removes all of it, as does disabling AA. But as you know, the game looks bad without AA - I'd rather put up with a little bit of sparckling on vurt's trees at night than do away with AA.

Isn't there some way to figure out why this sparkling has started to occur? Because it definitely hasnt been a problem before in MGE XE.

Actually i think MW is one of few games that looks decent without AA, but you probably need to run it at a high resolution (1920x1080+)

It's been a problem for me for quite a while with XE. It's especially noticeable around [edit]Vality's[/edit] trees. The issue seems to be XE's AA settings.

Relevant specs:
GTX 570
Win7 x86_64
(workaround) 8xCSAA, 4xTSAA, 16xAF forced in driver
(MGE XE) 0xAA, 0xAF

Resolution is no substitute for this level of AA

Amazing improvement in lighting, the change couldn't be more pronounced! I didn't notice much performance difference, a couple of frames at most.

Some textures have only 6-8 levels of mipmaps, it is really important to reach 1x1 or flickering will occur.
vurt_GLLeaves2.dds -lowest mipmap is 8x8.
vurt_DWPineSnowy.dds - lowest mipmap is 32x32.
and some more...

Also some textures have alpha channels filled with random dots, these cause weird white dots with AA on in game. These are the ones I've found so far:
Vurt_goldenbark.dds
vurt_baobark01.dds
vurt_baobabbark.dds
vurt_oakbark02.dds
vurt_mh_bark01.dds