For the moment it seems to work well. Its excessively clear underwater imho. A murky water its a must for me.
Also there are any new knowledge about the overlapping alpha problem? Im talking about the ghosfence thing. We can make in the last instance a ghosfence with only one texture to solve the problem.
Also, like others said in fog weather all the surrounding mountains appear pure white. In some way its a nice feature, it seems a mystical kind of fog, lol.

Hrnchamd do you have any plans to add or make comparable or even draft in your own version of phal's new atmospheric light and cloud sunrays? atmospheric light and your awesome shadows are like a match made in heaven but havnt met yet

You can adjust water murkiness with the 'Below Water Fog' in the Distant land tab. The auto calculated value is a too clear for me, I use -0.5/0.3 for underwater haze. Ghostfence is still problematic: what kind of shadow should the wall of souls cast? I honestly forgot about it. Finally, the bright fog, which bloom shader do you prefer? Maybe the ini fog colours need adjustment as well.



Phal hasn't released the code anywhere I know, you'll have to find him.

I've noticed an issue with the SSAO shader.
When you have a strong blind effect (+80%) the AO appears lighter than what it's being drawn onto.

Just a quick feature idea: I'm not sure if this is even compatible with MGE XE's shadows, but I ran into this video of using MGE to cast cloud shadows. It seems a nice atmospheric touch that would integrate well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi3iZplFOTs

Yeah, that could be nice effect - and according to what vtastek said in that video comment's , "it's only one line of code" Combined with static shadows and sun rays the effect could be quite awesome,

Heh, I didn't even read the reference to MGE XE in the comments. I don't even bother reading the You Tube comments any more due to the fact I can usually get a more mature discussion listening to my seven year old stepdaughter and her friends bickering.

0.8.5 released

Config

• Shader chain is moved to the ini. You need to remake your shader chain.
  
• HDR resolve function is automatically detected from the shader chain.
  
• A few updated tooltips for MGEgui.

Shaders

• Bloom soft edited again not to bloom distant land in foggy conditions. Needs testing.
  
• Underwater effect shader added. It's still in early development and looks best near the surface. Note that it doesn't react to weather conditions yet, because it looks interesting at night as well. Opinions please, I'm not sure how it will endure.

XE

• Underwater surface fog reduced, the sky should be less washed out as you surface.
  
• Water caustics angle fading adjusted, overall weaker unless the sun is pointing right at it.
  
• Added more scene detection to stop shadow casters clipping through water.

Please try the new underwater effects shader. It should look interesting for a little while, and maybe give people some ideas.




Eventually. It's hard to integrate both methods together, though distant land will benefit the most.

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/6229/mgescreen1.jpg
http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/7405/mgescreen2.jpg

Maybe it's the sun's texture?

The sun alpha doesn't look very smooth in both screens, it's just the water gives the most colour contrast (yellow opposite blue). Maybe you can blur the sun alpha channel and resave with DXT5.

Bloom Fine is a darkening the screen a little too much(especially nights). Decreasing fog colors' intensity would be a better approach, maybe.

Underwater effects are amazing. If only they can be more smooth in animation.

If I look at the ground in a degree(20-30 degree down) that my crosshair(I have actually no crosshair, middle of screen) aligns with normal Morrowind distance water end, water plane(Morrowind distance part) becomes visible over ground. It has a 4-5 pixels of sensitivity.(opacity changes, mostly visible at noon)

This version its a bad step in my rig. A lot of FPS lost. One artifact appear everywhere, the water horizon appear on top of the environment flashing badly http://img442.imageshack.us/i/artifactr.jpg/. Still stands the ultra bright horizon in fog environment perhaps with a lower intensity. Using SSAO, sunshafts, underwater effects(ON/OFF to check if this are the responsible of the artifacts but dont) soft bloom and HDR.
Im using also FPS Opt. 1.96 for the app that activates the crosshair only when focus an interactive object. Can this be enabled in your tool to avoid the use of fpsOpt? lol
Last nvidia drivers 260.99 and last directX.

The new water effects are a very impressive step forward. The animation a bit nervous, lol. The actors now can be seen in underwater from the outside.

Hum thanks for the underwater fog tip. With your values my underwater looks now perfect. :foodndrink:


Another thing I cant get to work properly are the Macro editor. I macroed the screenshot function with success but every other functions as the zoom one dont seems to work whichever was the key selected.

omg the underwater shader is amazing :liplick:
the animation needs to be smoother but the transparency of the watersurface from underwater is great.
you think it might be possible to get rid of the buggy transition from underwater to above water http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/9618/mgescreenshot143.jpg (picture is brightened)?

EDIT: i noticed that the underwater shader is only visible in a radius around the player but when you look up, you see that the sunshafts are a ring around the player.
from deep underwater the effect looks weird: http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/6489/mgescreenshot152.jpg

You're also getting those swamp leaf things displayed through solid objects.

So, hardware wise, is this neat utility less demanding than MGE? If so, I might give it a try.

edit: Just did a trial run in Gnaar-Mok. It's way less laggy than regular MGE. Even Ghostfence shows up, I think I'm going to use Mge XE from now on. Water looks even better than MGE too, good work. The shadows? Awesome.

Bloom filter can't darken the screen, what do you mean?



I think the shadow detection thing (just for shadow casting actors not to clip with water) isn't working very well for all setups, that makes it draw water over everything when it's confused. Crosshair is part of the input system, I suppose it can be done after all the bugs/crashes are fixed. Here I use a soft very transparent spot for a crosshair, which is only really visible if you focus on it. In the next release I will cause the Morrowind screenshot key to call MGE to take a screen, instead of all this macro messing around.



The transition is because the fog has to be set for the whole scene, but your camera is only half in the water, it would just bug the fog above the surface instead. That's why I'm writing a replacement for underwater fog. And yes the shader is still in development, making it work from all angles is seriously difficult.



It's designed to be a little less heavy than MGE, and it loses that 1 frame lag for objects coming into view that stands out. Glad it's working for you.

That's certainly not what I was thinking when making that sentence. :facepalm: Bloom Fine is a fine shader, I like it a lot. :thumbsup:

I was getting very dark screens at night/interiors, beyond originals. And sometimes in daylight too. I am seeing pitch blacks. My load order:

SSAO Fast
Underwater Effects
Depth of Field
Sunshafts
Bloom Fine
HDR

I have set hdr to 10 seconds.

Strange thing with MGE XE.. The leaves on the trees in the distance are altered. They are smaller, edgy, so there's less bush. I don't want it to do that. When I get closer, they fade in to full leaves, like they should and were 100% before MGE XE.

Also, I tried deleting MGE XE, redoing distance lands setup with MGE, but something permanently changed my grass so it's like pure black - infact everything is very dark outside of my "view distance" range.

HDR must be acting strange. In the log file, does it say shader chain indicates HDR is on? There's no way it should make nights darker though.

0.8.5 Report

Config

• Shader chain is moved to the ini. You need to remake your shader chain. Confirmed, remade shader chain.
  
• HDR resolve function is automatically detected from the shader chain. Confirmed, HDR seemed to respond as it did before but without needing the checkbox.
  
• A few updated tooltips for MGEgui. Confirmed at least for lighting coefficients, I forget what others would be new.

Shaders

• Bloom soft edited again not to bloom distant land in foggy conditions. Needs testing. Not yet checked. I've still been using bloom fine.
  
• Underwater effect shader added. It's still in early development and looks best near the surface. Note that it doesn't react to weather conditions yet, because it looks interesting at night as well. Opinions please, I'm not sure how it will endure. Noticed the same transition issue that PeterBitt took a screenshot of. I like the idea, I'll be waiting to see how this progresses.

XE

• Underwater surface fog reduced, the sky should be less washed out as you surface. Definitely noticed this.
  
• Water caustics angle fading adjusted, overall weaker unless the sun is pointing right at it. Caustics did look a bit weaker.
  
• Added more scene detection to stop shadow casters clipping through water. I am unsure which shadow casters were problematic before, so I won't comment on this.

No major problems to report other than the transition issue when going underwater. The water system has come along nicely since 0.8.0, though!

A quick report on 1.8.5.

I have none of the graphical artifacts mentioned above with my GeForce GTX 280. No darkening, no water glitches (and underwater actors are once again drawn correctly). Performance hasn't noticeably changed.

Also, after the application of the 4 Gb patch, there are no more crashes on fast travelling. I regenerated distant land with near-maximum settings (including Ultra High mesh size which always caused CTDs for me), and it didn't crash once in 20 minutes.

Some distant statics are still bloomed in fog. It is much less pronounced and only affects statics on the verge of visibility. I might make a couple screenshots if I have time.

The underwater shader is very promising. It's a bit unnatural right now (and overly bright at night), but still great. As for suggestions, I don't know what can be added via shaders, but occasional bubbles would be good. Maybe also some kind of distortion. In my opinion, Morrowind current underwater feels quite empty and dry.

One more thing. When I tried to generate distant land, MGE crashed with OutOfMemoryException. Strangely, I just tried once more and it didn't crash. I've never seen this happen before.

That's it. Keep up the great work.

0.8.5 Report

Issues

• There seems to be an intruding plane that only appears while looking directly at the center of something.. can't tell what, the water plane? Even though it's behind land + objects. It also seems to add some foilage on top of everything else. I'm not sure shaders are the problem but: HDR, SSAO Fast, Sunshafts, Underwater Effects, Bloom Fine.
  Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKD9_no_wok
  
• There seems to be a compatibility problem with MGE XE's d3d8.dll and the my tree leaf textures? With or without shaders, with or without generating distance lands. mge3.8.2-rev.0178 works fine. I think mge3.8.0b did this as well, but I can't remember. Perhaps somebody can recommend a compatible tree texture? I think I'm using Vurt's.
  Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybzIIB5EUsA
  Comparison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjDRRiWD_4
  
• My log still says 0.8.4

Quality

• MGE XE is most definitely faster. However, it seems to have a much lower, to the point of unnoticeable, object shadows (SSAO). With MGE shaders I can easily see shadows inbetween models of buildings that result in much better quality.
  MGE Shaders: knx_SSAO_v09, DX9 HLSL HDR 4, sunshaft_v002a
  MGE XE Shaders: HDR, SSAO Fast, Sunshafts, Bloom Fine
  Comparison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjDRRiWD_4

Note: These are HD videos, but do not do in-game justice. Notably, everything is blurred/anti-aliased in the video, but is not in-game, and the issues are much more extreme.

The previously mentioned dark grass seems to have stopped after a reboot. I'll see if I can reproduce it, if it happens again.

So, those are the trade-offs effecting me. Thanks for all your hard work! Would you be able to throw the fork up on SVN (or Git preferably) so I can help?

Log:
MGE XE 0.8.4
MWSE dll injected
>> CreateD3DWrapper
-- CreateD3DWrapper calling Direct3DCreate9
<< CreateD3DWrapper
>> D3D Proxy CreateDevice
-- D3D Proxy Factory OK
<< D3D Proxy CreateDevice
>> CreateInputWrapper
<< CreateInputWrapper
-- Proxy Keyboard OK
-- Proxy Mouse OK
-- Proxy Mouse OK
-- Proxy Mouse OK
-- Proxy Mouse OK
-- Proxy Mouse OK
>> Distant Land init
>> Distant Land init shader
-- Shader compiled OK
-- Shadow map shader compiled OK
-- Depth shader compiled OK
>> Distant Land init post shaders
>> Post Process shader init
-- Post shader Data Files\shaders\XEshaders\HDR.fx loaded
-- Post shader Data Files\shaders\XEshaders\SSAO Fast.fx loaded
-- Post shader Data Files\shaders\XEshaders\Sunshafts.fx loaded
-- Post shader Data Files\shaders\XEshaders\Underwater Effects.fx loaded
-- Post shader Data Files\shaders\XEshaders\Bloom Fine.fx loaded
-- Shader chain indicates HDR On
<< Post Process shader init
>> Distant Land init depth
>> Distant Land init shadow
>> Distant Land init water
>> Distant Land init world
>> Landscape Load
-- Landscape textures loaded
<< Landscape Load
>> Distant Land init statics
-- Distant Land finished loading distant statics
>> Distant Land init fog
<< Distant Land init
>> Distant Land release
<< Distant Land release

BTW, bump mapping in the d3d8.dll might be nice. There exists some for HL2/san andreas that have it.

I feel so fail, because this is probably the best MGE I've seen (except grass) and it's from Jan 2010... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqcUw8cy_sk&feature=related Mostly mod and water related though.

Hi!

Made a fresh install with the new "Morrowind Graphic and Sound Overhaul" today.
Tried MGE XE 0.8.5, great performance boost!


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3485341/Morrowind/Morrowind1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3485341/Morrowind/Morrowind2.jpg

How can I increase the drawdistance of the grass, so it's identical to the first screenshot?
Anyways... great work!

It's your View Distance in your Video settings in-game. On the first post of this thread it says to increase it.

BTW, is it just me whose water moving too fast in MGE XE? It's so rapid.. compared to MGE..