Sigh - thanks Tetchy - I blew away the ini and set up MGE XE again - when I restarted Morrowind Vurt's grass looked awful - so rechecked my settings and realized I had to rest the AA and anistropic filtering - by the way what setting should I set anistropic to? In the Instructions it says I should set this to at least 4x yet when I mouse over the setting it says this will only have an effect if I use anistropic filtering or scale filters for mip maps?

Anyway I went back to Morrowind set the weather to fog and had a look at the hills - the fog looked much better around the hills they were more grey than white and the fog blended much better - however just to make sure I had the right settings I checked again and saw that it was now set to pixel instead of vertex - when I changed to vertex the hills looked much whiter - I have an ATI 5770 card - I hope that wasn't the problem in the beginning

it would be useful if someone else posted a pic of hills in fog so I can compare what I have - so any readers if possible would you please post a foggy screenshot of distant hills - thanks

In any case thanks for your help it is always much appreciated

I set mine to 8x, but you could try 16x to see if that causes an FPS hit and if you can notice the difference.

Sorry to be a pain - but I have lost my mouse pointer at the opening menus.

I've done 2 different things and so am unsure what might be the cause - went into my catalyst and changed the settings from allowing the application to decide what to do to some basic AA and AF settings - I've since changed them back to just accept the application

I also updated my MCP to the latest version - now when I start the game the cursor is missing so I have to blindly move the mouse around until eventually an option is highlighted or bring up task manager and end Morrowind

I checked another instance of Morrowind I have which is set up with MGE and the cursor appears no problem at the menu screens - so at least I know it is not a mouse issue

Is there anything I can do to get my mouse back? - I'm doing a lot of testing with this build and am constantly in and out of Morrowind while I test - fix and then test again

Do I need to reset my catalyst settings? My MGE XE is set to not autohide the crosshair.

EDIT: After searching Google I found a number of people have had this problem with MGE - someone said they fixed it by turning off AA - so I tried that - once I turned off AA in MGE - XE and the mouse cursor reappears in the menu - what I don't understand is why this happening - I never used to have a problem with it and it doesn't happen in all my instances of Morrowind - in Vanilla not problem with my MGE version no problem just in this one?

Investigating nv4_disp.dll crash and other crashes reported:
I've updated to the newest beta Nvidia drivers for laptop (290.53) to compare... the game still crashes (vn4_disp.dll). Reverted to the old Nvidia provided by the manufacturer. The game crashes and the rendering is worse (shadows are always clipping). So I reinstalled the latest official release of Nvidia drivers. Next, I've played with different resolutions: it appears that the game crashes less, or doesn't crash at all with lowest resolution, and the 1st cell (prison-boat) load faster (normally) when I lower the resolution. Thus, my conclusion would be that my Nvidia G105M is too weak to run MGE XE + Morrowind + distant statics with my laptop native resolution (1366x768). In fact, I can play without too many problems or lags in most cells, but starting a new game in Seyda Nyhin or paying in Balmora will easily lead to a crash and a very long loading time when starting a new game.

While playing in lower resolution, and although graphics are ugly I noticed that it's much convenient to play with large windows and in-game menu... Now that we have high res fonts and resizeable windows thanks to MCP, I wonder if it would be possible to enlarge a bit font size and windows size? (i.e. the enableracemenu Windows could show larger head, sign&race menu larger fonts, magical & status icons could be larger, etc.)

Resolution & Windows: I reported that playing Morrowind with lower resolution (i.e. 720 x 480, windowed or full screen) does not allow to display OK/Cancel button during chargen process. I noticed that this is not happening each time... but sometimes!

Question: BTW, is there any recommendation for CGU with MGE XE and/or Morrowind on newer computers? Nvidia or Ati, or it does not matter at all?

I've a problem similar to Illuminiel one. When the weather is foggy the hills turn to a white or reddish color. http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/1453/ss27u.jpg http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/8210/ss28.jpg http://img855.imageshack.us/img855/737/ss30w.jpg. Also notice how the bump maps of the rocks look very bright, while they're different in other weather conditions (http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/1486/ss26.jpg, http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/5692/ss29.jpg).
I tried everything already suggested (weather settings, MGE.ini, pixel/vertex fog) but to no avail.

I've the latest MGE XE and MCP versions. My graphic card is an ATI Radeon HD 4870.

I've narrowed it down to the Neverhalls. Whenever it's checked in the distantland generation it crashes. I mean its not really an issue since i just uncheck that one esp, but it's weird nontheless.

I made some notes about statics MGE fails to process, from Tetchy I think:There should be a list of which meshes were causing problems. Been a while since I've had to do that so I'm not sure where that text file is or what it's called...

It's a log file generated after the creation of the Distant Land, it's in the folder 'mge3' and it's named 'DistantLand.log'

well when it crashes there's no error txt saved, nor a Distantland.log

It is most likely due to using the 'Adaptive AA' setting in Radeon drivers. Try using normal AA but disabling adaptive. I'm not sure if that's it, just that most driver options have undocumented side effects. The cursor has a very high alpha test value that is unusual enough to cause problems.


Crashes should not kill the driver so often, I am worried it may be a problem with your video card. Please check MGE svn 178 (just copy the d3d8.dll on top and run) and run the same tests as before.


If you're using MCP, bump maps are supposed to be brighter when the lighting is bright. Strange behaviour may indicate problems with the weather lighting. MGE XE recalculates fog colour based on the weather if you are using high quality atmosphere. Try turning that off, does the problem go away?


Thanks for reporting back on which one crashed; now I've got something to test with.

Hello, thanks for your hard work with MGE XE.
My problem is only the fact the Ebonheart Castle doesn′t show at distant land. It′s only with me or anyone has the same issue? I can see Vivec from the east bridge on Bitter Coast to Ascadian Island, I can see the Unique Tree from Vurt Bitter Coast plugins at the beach and I see the Mount where Ebonheart stays but to see itself I need stay at the distance where stay the Food of the Gods Restaurant of NOM mod.

What the hell am I working on

A pixel shader based replacement for Morrowind's lighting.

Teaser comparison images: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-1-1326748682.jpg http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-2-1326748683.jpg

Morrowind uses fixed function lighting, inherited from 2001 era graphics. It has several limitations, but its strength is fully dynamic lighting, making modding much more accessible. One of the limitations is that the maximum incoming light is limited to 1.0x the colour of the texture. A dark blue texture will never get brighter than dark blue, no matter the brightness of lights.

The other limitation is that it uses vertex lighting. With low poly models, where vertices are far apart, this means lights don't always cover models properly. With shaders, per-pixel lighting can be calculated. Linear, low poly Imperial architecture benefits from this: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-3-1326748683.jpg http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-4-1326748684.jpg, and other complex interiors with small lights http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-5-1326748685.jpg.

The difference in lighting is more subtle than just the effect of a bloom shader. Examine the lighting in this location with post shaders off http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-1-1326748780.jpg and post shaders on http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-2-1326748781.jpg. Not only does it appear brighter, but the colour shift towards green is gone. With a warm texture and warm lighting, the fixed function lighting would saturate the red light channel to 1.0, but the green channel would still have room to increase, causing the shift.

When lighting is limited to 1.0, a fully lit object can appear flat due to the lack of lighting gradient. The shader takes care of that limitation by accumulating light past 1.0 brightness, then resolving the brightness later with a tone response curve. When an object is in proximity to bright light sources, the brightness is pushed up without it saturating to white, even on faces. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-3-1326748781.jpg http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-4-1326748782.jpg http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-5-1326748782.jpg

These improvements also apply to exteriors, though lighting is somewhat sparser outdoors. The main differences are in places with a lot of small radius lights like these added by TLM http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-1-1326748835.jpg, and window glows http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-2-1326748836.jpg http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-3-1326748836.jpg. Low poly Imperial exteriors now show lights where they were mostly neutralized by the low poly count. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-4-1326748837.jpg http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-5-1326748837.jpg

Lights show up better in low direct light conditions such as this foggy day on Molag Mar http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-1-1326748978.jpg. Trees capture the colour of flickering lights better http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-2-1326748978.jpg, avoiding the colour shift as mentioned before. Multiple light sources show up better over diverse low poly objects. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-3-1326748979.jpg

Per pixel lighting improves the feel of interiors through more accurate lighting. It's not fast, about the same as SSAO, but pretty cool. It also opens up the way to more shader tricks, like solutions to alpha shadowing and fading alpha objects in better.

Me gusta!

Hrnnnng!

Hrnchamd Mwaaa! *Manly Hug and Kiss* You are a wonderful person.

Hrnchamd, you made MCP and then added Polish support as I requested (our whole community should shake your hand because of that). You made MGE XE, and now this is in works. What else are you capable of doing?!

Very exciting work. You never disappoint!

awesome news, this looks fantastic! i never thought it would be possible to improve the lightning that much
i love how useful the torch looks in the pics! looks like they even spend light in lit areas http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/images/26348-3-1326748781.jpg!

Incredible!

I do not want to add more, but what the hell ...
Excellent.

This is miraculous! Next up: the cure for cancer

Wow I drop by to report on my issues and am blown away by your new lighting effects - they are really immersive - in my own modding I spend a lot of time messing about trying to get lighting to work correctly or in setting up lights for screenshots so this is really exciting

On my disappearing mouse issue I updated my drivers to 11.2 selected Morpological filtering as well as letting the applications chose settings and slid the Anti-aliasing mode to super-sample (there is no option to turn it off)

Mouse is back - might be worth noting in release notes for any other AMD user who gets the same problem

Thanks for your help

If that shader's compatible with Windows Glow and doesn't kick my game's butt in terms of FPS hit, then I want it. I've been wanting brighter lights, but the mods I've seen that tweak that just aren't to my taste.

Me fall ova!

Christmas never ends... Kudos!!

Will go on testing with MGE SVN178 and report.

It is amazing.