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

Changes:

• Exp fog back in action
  
• Most alphas (leaves and stuff) should render properly against the sky when using MW/MGE blending
  
• Shadows should be more stable when looking around
  
• Water ripples should no longer flicker
  
• SSAO fast half-res shader added
  
• Included SSAO shaders have some bias changes to reduce artifacts on landscape meshes
  
• Performance adjustments on heavy shaders

Please test alternate grass rendering, bind a key to toggle grass. Instead of disabling grass it will switch to alternate rendering. Just compare fps and report CPU/graphics card and fps difference. Don't be surprised if it's slower.

Please discuss all the things I've asked about in my previous posts, and could someone make a video of the underwater surface?

I still need to do some thorough checking in-game and provide useful feedback for 0.7 and 0.7.1, but in the meantime, I did upload some short videos showcasing the new underwater effects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwGuIzo-f0I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5yUS1QPhLo

Edit: Still doing testing, but some easy parts first. Current items I've checked on:

Great job, Hrnchamd. I haven't had much time for Morrowind recently, but I coudn't resist testing your modifications.



I measured FPS in several regions (near Caldera, Ascadian Isles, Coast of Azura). In all cases, the alternate rendering was 1-2 FPS slower (down to 17 from 18, 23 from 25 etc). I tried to run around and look in different directions but it didn't result in any larger difference.

My specs: Core2Duo E6400 @ 2.13 GHz, NVidia GeForce GTX 280, Win7 32-bit.

The boards seem to have eaten the next edit I was trying to add to my previous post, so I'll make it concise this time. Alternate grass rendering path seems to lose 0-5 fps, usually around 3-4, but there are also a good number of places I tested where it was equivalent to the old rendering. Hardware the same as before: Q6600 @ 3.2gHz, NVIDIA GTX 260 core 216 at stock settings.

Grass animation still seems a bit jittery compared to 178 I think. Will have to double check. Noticed some odd alpha/rendering behavior with grass when using the alternate rendering path, and it seemed to not draw grass as far away, but these are probably aspects you're working on anyway given your previous post.


Shadows seem to respond pretty well to the weather now, and I haven't caught them jumping around like they did occasionally before. Seems much more polished overall with these changes.

I forgot to add that even with edited bloom shaders in the new version I still can not seem to get any bloom/hdr at all. Am I the only one? If so I would assume the problem is on my end.

Okay I see the water is back at it's full glory, and more. Is mwse supported yet?

I have a very strange problem and can't find out how to fix it.

Before this, I used the regular MGE 1.8.2 build 178 without any issues. It started when I installed MGE XE 0.7.1 (following all the instructions in the first post).

When in an exterior cell, the game freezes every several seconds. No error messages on the screen, just zero FPS and active reading from the HDD, as if loading something. It goes on for about 10 seconds, then stops but happens again after a little while. It only happens when I move or look around; it never occurs when standing still or in an interior cell.

I regenerated Distant Land using different parameters, lowered DL settings, cleared shader chain, but it made no difference whatsoever. The pause is always about 10 seconds long and it doesn't go away even if I stroll back and forth in one place, not leaving a cell.

Everything else works fine, no crashes, no strange graphical glitches.

My specs: Win7 32-bit, Core2Duo E6400 @ 2.13 GHz, 2 Gb RAM, NVidia GeForce GTX 280. ForceWare driver 157.21.

EDIT: Sorry, I was mistaken. It does only happen in certain places. I found one in Pelagiad. I can run around with no pauses but whenever I cross the invisible line it starts loading. It is possible to trigger several consequential loads by walking along this line.

I can confirm this -- had it in my edit that the boards ate, forgot about it when reposting :brokencomputer: . I haven't noticed this with 0.6 but in 0.7 and 0.7.1 it is prominent.

Yes it's true... Dammit I thought I had memory problems! That explains things. I confirm this issue as well.

Wow - great-looking screenshots there! :tops:

I can confirm the HDD thrashing issue also. I've a pretty fast drive, so it's only a few seconds, but - noticeably there. Presumably on exterior cell change. One can stand at a cell border and inch back and forth across the line - each crossing brings on a new bout of thrashing.

The exp. fog is working, but it suffers from an issue that phal recently fixed in his latest test build. Quoting here:


Huge success with the alphas-against-sky rendering. Solved every issue I'd noticed to date. Thanks!

I think I notice some more stability in the shadows when looking / moving. Still a wobble there, but it's minor.

Tried out the alternate grass rendering - FPS fluctuation varied from minor (17 to 16) to significant (45 to 32) depending on scene. Distant grass doesn't render quite as far out with alt. rendering. The animation itself looks a bit better - I'm not seeing instances of erratic movement (e.g., moving in one direction quickly followed by sharp, unnatural move in opposite direction) with the alt. rendering.

A little weirdness with underwater shadowing in the distance - tried to capture in a screenshot - it's most visible on the right side: http://yfrog.com/ncmgescreenshot001j.

All in all this was an extremely impressive update. Thank you.

Thanks to Princess Stomper for pointing this thread out... pretty amazing detail in those screens. Great work!

I got the HDD issue too.

I was looking at the cascading water around Vivic, any way to have that reflected in the water? It is it looks decidedly odd at the moment. Also underwater looking up, one can not see the cascading water at all.

It is getting better and better Hrnchamd, great work, thank you.

I believe that for animated pieces like the waterfall, the distant static rendered for it is only the first frame, since distant land doesn't currently have a way to apply individual animations where they would be necessary. Thus, when you're looking for the cascading bits in the reflection, they won't be there. It'd be cool if this could be added, but it seems impractical given the current system. Who knows, though =)

I was not talking about the distant land reflection, but immediate. Not that I know how the nuts and bolts work, if Hrnchamd can fix it, that would be nice.

The .Nif loader for MGE does not currently load animation data neither does the renderer render. I figure there would have to be a lot more code. I also suppose most of that code can be borrowed from niflib. Since MGE has a pretty optimized loading for NIF files I'm not sure animated statics could be made similarily efficient.

If I am not mistaken, the water in the XE build does not yet support all of the current features in the standard build. Water caustics, interactive water, and water waves appear to be absent. I may be wrong about water waves.

Again, if I am correct, MWSE is still not a supported feature in hrn's build. Yet.

Hrn, I'd like your thoughts on http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1032390-wipinteractive-grass/. I am specifically wondering if the XE build has the capability for 3rd person interaction.

Just a quick report regarding what others are experiencing with alternate grass rendering and cell loads with MGE XE v0.7.1:

* Alternate grass rendering does not render properly when directly viewed against anything outside of MW's draw distance, i.e. distantland (terrain, statics) and sky; additionally, the water outside of MW's draw distance does not render where the grass meshes would be; looks like an overlapping alpha or depth map issue, grass is not getting foreground priority.

* Exterior cell loads are occurring exactly when changing between cells at the cell boundaries; usually there was a bit of buffering as far as distance goes so that stepping over a boundary and back again would not cause immediate reloading (afforded by having the current cell and adjacent cell already loaded); cell loads also occur when the region changes (which is the same behavior as with stock MW).

* Compared to MGE rev-0178, initial exterior cell loads are a lot slower (up from ~1 sec to ~2 secs on my system), and load times used to be almost instantaneous when returning to an adjacent cell that was previously occupied - with MGE XE v0.7.1 only cell loads between regions (and which are not also at a cell boundary) load almost instantaneously when returning now.

Because of how the cell loading behaves now combined with normal behavior of cell loads between regions, traveling in exteriors is extremely stilted and choppy - especially where four adjacent cells meet near a region boundary since it's likely the player will be moving across two cell boundaries then encountering a region boundary in quick succession. :meh:


System specs:
Pentium D 830 3.0 GHz, FSB 800 MHz, 3 GB DDR2
GeForce 8800GT SC 512MB, nvidia driver v195.62
WinXP32 MCE 2005 SP3


[edit] forgot to mention my OS.

This would be appreciated. In the near future I would like to package fixed meshes along with MGE XE.



Hmm, maybe the drawing order for alphas is a bit off. I can't make reflections animated though, without some changes to the distant land generator.


All the disk churning is the log file, apparently it takes 10 times as long on Vista/Win7. It should go away in the next build. Please discuss the visual aspects I've asked about before.

I'm trying to avoid removing the negative start fog, perhaps by a linear approximation of the first part of the exp curve. It needs a bit more work for now.


All the disk churning is the log file being written, apparently it takes 10 times as long on Vista/Win7. It should go away in the next build. Please discuss the visual aspects I've asked about before; I need more than bug reports.

Phal hasn't really fixed it, he's managed to make it less apparent but the fog colour mismatch is still there when using exp fog.

I can confirm this and it is actually worse than that. Even when stationary, just turning around 180 degrees causes long stutters.

My previous report about console and sunset CTDs aren't happening anymore.

System specs:
Pentium D 820 2.8 GHz, 2 GB
GeForce 8800GTS(G92) 512MB
Windows 7 x64

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

Changes:

• Grass alternate rendering v2
  
• Excess logging on cell change removed
  
• Exp fog less terrible, grass doesn't match still

Please test alternate grass rendering again, bind a key to toggle grass. Instead of disabling grass it will switch to alternate rendering. Just compare fps and report CPU/graphics card and fps difference. May be faster, it should use less CPU (as long as the bottleneck isn't shaders).

Also what to do about exp fog? The blue fog seems like a substitute for coloured/filtered lighting underwater, and the same for storms.

HDD thrashing is gone.

Alternate grass rendering made zero impact on frame rate over a wide sampling of scenes (including the previous two I reported, where I retested). I can't say I noticed much difference between the two in terms of the animation itself.

Exp fog "less terrible" doesn't do the change justice. The fog blending on foggy days is considerably, very noticeably, better.

Did you do anything with the underwater shadowing? The weirdness in the distance I reported last time appears to be gone. The aquatic world is looking very nice indeed. I do miss the caustics, but I'd give them up in an instant for everything this build brings to the table.

Yet another solid step forward. Thanks.

Ah thanks, I thought he meant we had to use non-mge water. And a bump for your request.

In the midst of running about a bit more this morning, I noticed one issue - not sure if it is new to this version or not. The rendering of the landscape seems a little bugged in areas with sharp changes in elevation. I'm not set up for recording video or I'd make one to help demonstrate. To see an example, exit Balmora on the Moonmoth side, and move down the Odai toward the Bitter Coast along the left bank, pressed up against the large hill.

EDIT: Took a http://yfrog.com/7dmgescreenshot001j to demonstrate.