Thanks for the compliment. What does everyone think of the current shadow darkness? It seems to match the darkness of faces pointing away from the sun at the moment. Has anyone tried lower ambient light settings?

Can I just check I'm getting something right: to run this I need to download the old version of MGE (v1.8 beta) from yout TESnexus download page to overight the current version I have (v3.8.0). Why is this? Seems a bit odd.

That's not right, you should read the instructions again. Follow the links. The thing to download on the download page is clearly labelled MGE.

Hrnchamd's TESNexus download page doesn't link to MGE 1.8 but to MCP 1.8 which are two different utilities. One is used to fix the bugs in Morrowind.exe, the other adds new graphic possibilities. If you want to use this version of MGE, you must install first MGE 3.8.2 rev 178 linked in the first post, then on top of it, install MGE XE 0.7.2.
Edit: It looks like I have been too slow.

I think the shadows could be darker. However, it already looks a bit strange sometimes; even with your light settings, the darkness of faces* pointing away from the sun is sometimes lighter than the shadows these objects cast. If there was a way to increase the darkness of those faces, then I'm all for it.

* I'm assuming "faces" is some term from modeling here, right? Because I'm not talking about NPCs, but about rocks and other objects.

Sorry, I missread the download page and thought the MCP link said MGE, and thought this was the MGE beta 178 you mention on the first page. I understand now.

Very interesting thread and very nice lightning, last version of Mge XE looks incredibly good.
With MWSE and water caustics, it'll be perfect :3 I'll be following this one, looks very promising.

Caustics yes. MWSE, well I'd rather see it updated externally with all the needed MGE stuff. Dunno if that is possible with Hrnchamds approach.

What? 3D water effects in the latest MGE (non-xe) work fine on ATi cards.

For some reason I thought that the latest external MWSE was actually a higher version number than the internal MGE version. But I don't actually know.

Technically the dynamic water vertex motion uses vertex texture fetch from a 3D texture. 3D texture access is labelled as pixel shader only in the DirectX specification so it's not exactly correct to use it in a vertex shader. It isn't guaranteed to work properly on every card. At least, that's what I think the problem is.

Also the graphics card vendors do lie, for example the X1x00 series doesn't do vertex texture fetch even though it's sold as a SM 3.0 card. The Nvidia 7 series only does it with specific floating point formats.

Marketing doesn't lie, it merely tells you what you want to hear!!!!!!!!!!!! lol, j/k

Well, it ran fine until I changed to MGE XE. I hope to see it again some day
I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but you can't see swimming NPCs through the water. All you can see is the part above the water surface. Guess this has to do with NPCs not being statics, right?

Concerning the shadow darkness: I guess it would be even better if the faces pointing away from the sun would be a bit darker too, yes. Can you tweak that with the ambient light setting you mentioned? If yes, where would I find that setting? It sounds like it's in the mw.ini... all these different programs involved with making Morrowind better and prettier sometimes really confuse me :/

morrowind.ini has sections for each weather type, like [Weather Clear]. The ambient light settings are named Ambient Sunrise/Day/Sunset/Night Color. You may want to adjust one at a time and check the results. A global reduction in ambient might work, but without observing all results it might make night time too dark, or affect foggy weather lighting too much, or otherwise have unwanted consquences.

Does it just happen to me or is it a known issue that distant statics pop out behind the 'Above Water Fog' end distance?
I haven't seen any posts about it yet.
It gets ugly once the weather changes and the 'Above Water Fog' end distance shrinks. It happens with both fog methods.

This is already fixed for exp fog. For normal fog, behind that distance should be fully fogged and shouldn't stand out from the background in principle. I'll run some comparisons during weather transitions.

What makes it noticeable is the 'White Mountain' problem, since there is no fog in the sky.
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/9863/morrowind20100820135058.jpg

Would really need a sharp shader that still blooms light sources without blurring other things for awesome next gen look!

I used to use peachykeen's Sharpen.fx
I don't think it's compatible with later MGE shader usage.
Everything looks so blurry to me now :blink:

//Author: peachykeen//Title: Sharpen//Pack: MGE Shader Library//Desc://	Sharpens the image slightlytexture lastpass;sampler s0 = sampler_state { minfilter = linear; magfilter = linear; mipfilter = linear; addressu=clamp; addressv = clamp; };sampler s1 = sampler_state { texture=; minfilter = linear; magfilter = linear; mipfilter = linear; addressu=clamp; addressv = clamp; };vector rcpres;float4 lSharp(in float2 Tex : TEXCOORD) : COLOR0{	float4 inColor = tex2D(s0, Tex);	float4 blur = inColor;	blur += tex2D(s0, float2(Tex.x, Tex.y+rcpres.y)) * 0.25;	blur += tex2D(s0, float2(Tex.x, Tex.y-rcpres.y)) * 0.25;	blur += tex2D(s0, float2(Tex.x+rcpres.x, Tex.y)) * 0.25;	blur += tex2D(s0, float2(Tex.x-rcpres.x, Tex.y)) * 0.25;	blur += tex2D(s0, float2(Tex.x-rcpres.x, Tex.y+rcpres.y)) * 0.25;	blur += tex2D(s0, float2(Tex.x-rcpres.x, Tex.y-rcpres.y)) * 0.25;	blur += tex2D(s0, float2(Tex.x+rcpres.x, Tex.y+rcpres.y)) * 0.25;	blur += tex2D(s0, float2(Tex.x+rcpres.x, Tex.y-rcpres.y)) * 0.25;	blur /= 3;	float4 final = lerp(blur,inColor, 3);	return final;}technique T0{	pass p0	{		PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 lSharp();	}}

I noticed this topic very lately... Hrnchamd, you make this game a constant miracle!

Here are some test result on a laptop computer:

Config:
WinXP SP3, MGE svn178 + MGE XE 0.72
CPU Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz
DDR2 2Go RAM
Graphic:
nVIDIA GeForce G 105M, 256Mo, GDDR3 (CPU Clock 500Mhz, Shader Clock 1070Mhz)
Driver version: 258.96 (latest)

At first, it is working well. I have followed the installation note. I got no crash during the test and shadows are displayed. The "toggle distant statics" key, "set timescale to 1000" command are working properly.

Alpha channel:
Have problems with http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=7514.
Here is a http://img705.imageshack.us/i/mgescreenshot40.jpg/.
These dark marks appear only when I am at a short distance from the trees.

Shadows display:
Under vality's bittercoast trees, leaves do not produce shadows, only trunks are visible. In this http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/2962/mgescreenshot01.jpg, being under the trees and the sun being high in the sky, if the rendering was realistic I should see shadows everywhere and only a very few light on the ground, but this is not happening.

Underwater surface effect: OK (http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/4763/mgescreenshot37.jpg)

Speed and performance:
I am using Vurt's grass mod at the moment. With MGE svn178 I get 12-22 FPS in full screen resolution (1366x768), with no shader activated. When playing with MGE-XE, I get a big FPS drop: 5-10 FPS, even moving the mouse cursor in the menu becomes painful in many area. The FPS is particularly slow when walking on the grass (when grass is very closed), falling to 3-5 FPS. I can try to test and compare without grass mod activated if you think it can be useful.

Shaders: not tested. I usually try to avoid shaders to keep a decent FPS, or I just 1 shader only. Here, the speed was already too so I did not try to activate any shader. At first I've tried to activate the true-bloom XE shader included within the archive but I did not see any difference in game, may be it was not wokring.

I took a few videos today to show the difference between the grass animations in MGE 178 and MGE XE 0.7.2, because while everything else works perfectly for me, I do still notice a heavy stutter in the grass.

Note that both of these videos are taken using the same draw distance and static settings, etc, and that my framerate was 60fps (well, locked to 30 with FRAPS, but the point being the rest of the game is still smooth).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zXG27oPg3c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEbJQoykpHA


It may be necessary to wait a little bit to watch the videos at proper resolution, depending upon how long YouTube takes to process them fully... but even with YouTube's quality loss the issue should still be evident. You can see how in the former, the grass animation is smooth while the latter has some smooth areas with other bits stuttering completely. Again, during the stuttering, the game is still smooth -- but it just looks out of place. Hopefully this can be helpful for you, but if you need any other information let me know.


CPU: Q6600 @ 3.2 gHz
RAM: 4gb DDR2 800
GPU: GTX 260
OS: Windows 7 x64

Shadows rely on distant land. Unfortunately billboards don't work with distant land at the moment, and they lack the 3d information to get matching shadows that cast on leaves and the ground. I'm working on a better grass rendering system, though there shouldn't be such an fps hit. The truebloom defaults are only to bloom the brightest objects, I have to tune the defaults again for more lighting conditions.


This is a great comparison, which I really couldn't run myself (I get 15 fps with grass). It could be the grass shader or the timing source so you'll have to tell me if it works with the next release.

Hi Hrnchamd.

Is there any possible remedy for the problem of disappearing / invisible rain? Eliminating the use of a custom raindrop mesh (example: SWG's Skies) and sticking with the default Bethesda one helps this situation, but it doesn't seem to fix it entirely. Certain angles / views seem to result in the raindrops not being visible. If it matters, I'm also using MCP's rain collision feature along with the accompanying suggested .ini edits.

@Hrnchamd: I'm quite impressed by what you've got going on here. I congratulate you, and I look forward to it's future. I've caught wind of this a bit late, though I did notice it quite some time ago. I'd help test, but I've been a little burned out. I just don't really feel up to much of anything. I'm kind of glad there isn't a new version of the MCP to test, hehe... Then again, that might just motivate me.

So I'll be cheering you on from the sidelines for now.

*cheers*


Not quite. There will still be issues with ash storms and blizzards unless Hrnchamd feels like tackling that. Unless we just pretend that everyone always leaves their windows and doors open in such weather. It should be easier to do than getting the water to not flood a cave put into an exterior. Heh. That will be the day.

Still looking forward to these features being merged with the main build of MGE.

Hrn, anything in particular that you really really need tested before the next build?

Having tested this experimental release of MGE yesterday, I'm really amazed by the visual enhancement added by these real-time shadows in-game. Wow!
This feature add much more immersion, and fit perfectly with any 'bloom' shaders, but, I think the water shader look like... well, doesn't offer the features available on the latest MGE releases, without real 'volumetric' waves, caustics effects and water foams (experimental feature only)... :'(
Otherwise, it works flawlessly, and I don't noticed any framerate drops, running very smoothly on my average computer.

Breathtaking! Just awesome! Congratulations for this impressive project and for the great optimization of this graphic effect! ^^


I really hope to see this real-time shadows system merged with the next main MGE development release (maybe n the rev.019x?), along the -experimental too- scattered clouds and water foams shaders! Good luck for the development and for your next projects! ; )
Oh! And thanks to all the amazing developers of the MGE project for making Morrowind always more beautiful and immersive! You are awesome!!