I think you'll end up breaking a lot of older MGE mods if you remove MGEpipe. Not that you shouldn't rework the function that interprets commands- that definitely is not in great shape. If you could set it up so the MWSE MGE commands don't use the pipe (I think they do right now, which seems silly) but leave the actual functionality of MGEpipe intact, you'd get most of the benefit of scrapping the pipe without breaking any mods. Set up a "lookup table" or something that translates piped commands to the real function, and then based on the function's signature accept and return the right variables from the pipe.

Incidentally, I had an idea about augmenting Morrowind's scripts with Lua bindings; it's probably beyond my current abilities, but I posted https://sourceforge.net/projects/morrgraphext/forums/forum/866295/topic/4028821 about it. It'd give a lot of benefits, I think, but it might not be worth it. What do you think?

Everything is actually sent through the pipe, even the direct opcodes, and everything is read off the pipe buffer. That 2000 line function is the lookup tree and marshalling stuff. It's better to not aim for compatibility and rewrite the best mods.

If you want to add another script language, you'll have to add tool support; it's the reason why people make up their own stuff all the time. Compile time checking against static data, no separate toolset and debugging (at least tesscript can pop up ingame errors) are things you get with properly integrated languages. Without it, the testing cycle takes much longer. Once you get it finished and people start adoption, what does it buy you? It's really tough unless you have a clear vision of what new things it will let you do.

I know that http://www.mwmythicmods.com/MWE.htm#MGE is around, but as for a recent list? I haven't seen one.

I hope that I am not offending anyone, but neither can I think of any compelling MGE-function using mods. It would be great to clean up the MGEpipe or (even better) make the extended functions faster and easier to use... I can dream, right?


Bottom line is I don't know how concerned you should be about breaking old MGE mods, as most important ones have been superseded by built in features, but obviously your judgment is best.

I still see use in things like Close Inspection, Zooming Bows (though that is a bit clunky) and all the HUD mods. Problem is the initial MGE implementation of zoom was pretty bad, default zoom was an unintuitive 3, except it didn't really match the default view so it jumps when you turn on zoom. There must be more MGE mods that people find useful, I want to hear about them.

Companion Status Bars

I read "end all" and "rewrite". Are you going to remove all functionality or reintroduce them in a cleaner/faster/easier for modders way but breaking old mods in process? There are very few mods, some are superseded, some are already broken. I can volunteer to rewrite some if it is the latter case.

The thing is when I look at the functions I see lots of opportunities. For example weather can be overhauled to let more than 6-7 sky textures. Almost everything can be changed dynamically in theory. It is really weird to see there is little interest in MGE mods.

PS. Zooming bows should have a thief style crosshair. Have you actually seen it? I never saw a crosshair at all.

Is there any way to utilise the vanity cam in MGE? I would very much like some new camera features that allow a smooth rotate - if the vanity cam could be adjusted to different angles e.g. lower and a little faster or any other way to use the camera such as a reverse vanity cam - instead of the cam focusing on the PC in 3rd person - perhaps staying in first person but still rotating - this would enable panoramic shots as well as improved screen caps.

There's MGE opcode commands that compile in MWEdit, it would be a minimal useful subset of those. I've played Thief, to make it like that requires the bow animations to be remade to line up the bow-sight, and all of the bow meshes. It has to be designed in.



The vanity camera is designed for a whole body view rather than scenery. You can somewhat simulate a smooth rotating camera by going to the controls options and changing the x-axis control from strafe to turn; this lets you hold down a movement key to make a panorama. MGE probably needs a Steadicam mode which damps mouse movements a lot, it would make some shots a lot smoother.

what is different to this than reg MGE?

The original post has a list of features that have changed from MGE SVN 178, but it certainly sounds like more goodies are on the way, too. The most noticeable change for a lot of people would probably be the shadows -- they're glorious!

sorry to double post, but why not just help build normal MGE, or is all this stuff experimental?

This is built with a different compiler, and the existing MGE code is messy. There's still a few missing features from the last release that needs to be put back.

soooo many thanks for that mod! now good old morrowinds look totaly owns the boring oblivion graphics :celebration:
just some questions that went through my head:

1.) now that u have implemented semi-functional mwse, do u think you will be able to get full mwse/mge support in future releases?
2.) much more iam interested in the 3d water + caustics, you think this will be compatible with your shadows soon?
3.) realtime shadows from other lightsources (torches,light spell) are impossible? i dont mean the original character shadows as they dont fit to the graphics anymore

btw great work with the bloom & ssao shaders, looks very subtle and the strong bloom on hills under water surface is gone!
but the ssao is very strong visible through spells and transparent objects ... i can live whith that :happy:

0.8.2 released

Config

• MGEgui edited and reduced a lot to be simpler to use. Settings file is still compatible with MGE 178.
  
• Tabs are consolidated, mandatory/useless options are moved to excess tab. Need opinions on the rearrangement before eliminating them.
  
• Shader setup simplified to just choosing shaders.
  
• MGEgui now accepts fractional LOD bias.

Shaders

• HDR tuned to avoid overkill on skin tones.
  
• Sunshafts made a little brighter.

Optimization

• Texture anolysis script included for aiding optimization.

The included textureanolysis.py will examine all your installed textures for format issues. There are possible savings of texture memory and render speed. DXT1a should never have been used for textures, it never worked with mips and generally appears blocky. There's plenty of other problems too. I've seen Ordenador, but it does encode some things to DXT1a which is somewhat counterproductive. If people could try it out it would be useful.

MWSE-MGE mods aren't maintained, I feel it's more efficient to rewrite the best mods to only use the most recent MGE functions. I could get water to work eventually, but there's still rendering bugs with the current stuff for some people (like rain) that needs fixing first. Realtime shadows need serious memory, each shadow casting light requires MGE to render the whole scene again from the light source, and it won't capture shadows from small objects or actors at all. It just likely to look bad and end up with unplayable fps.

A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_%28software_development%29 is a fork, with pros and cons.
pros: one more coherent vision, achieving new technical heights (shadows... wow, just wow! :celebration: )
cons: you risk to loose precious contributions nuking little things you could easily keep (changing shader variable names, replacing ticks with time...) and possibly pissing off people. I hope to be wrong here.

I am not even sure DXT1a is absolute evil, after using Ordenador it seems to be smart enough to change textures to DXT1a only if they have 1 bit mask, textures using translucent bit mask remain DXT3/5, and those changed to DXT1a do not look so bad.
[EDIT]typos

[EDIT2]I had some problem trying to use textureanolysis.py, it seems having 2 Python version installed (2.5 for Mash and 2.6 for Blender in my case) caused error:
import wx ImportError: No module named wx

I solved removing all 2.5 and 2.6 and installing a single Python 2.7 with proper PyQt and wxPython AND a comtypes-0.6.2.win32.exe needed by Mash but not included in wxPython, maybe a little tricky for the casual player.

Now textureanolysis.py seems to work well, a small improvement perhaps would be making it show if.bmp and .tga have already some .dds with the same name overriding them in the same folder, anyway Ordenador is great to clean these things, and the reduction to DXT1a can be unchecked.

well the only mod i want to use is the 3rd person crosshair mod wich requires MCP/MGE/MWSE you think this would be possible? maybe i better ask the author.
3d water would be nice ... but only the caustics would be enough for me.
thx again for this mod ... just did some imperial cult quests around ebonyheart/vivec at sunset ... stunning! :woot:

I like the condensed interface a lot. I don't have any specific recommendations at the moment (I only had time to install the new version and look around the GUI, not really to use anything), but it looks good.

Your texture anolysis script has shown me how many of my textures need fixing. What should we do with the output from it? Would it be helpful for you to have a copy of my long (long, LONG) output from running it? I'm not certain how to go about fixing them -- is there some sort of batch script that can be run to generate proper mipmaps for everything?

Time variable is a very welcome addition. (I think benchmark is fixed too. And other fixes for shader editor?) Ticks was depended on frames per second which is varying so I couldn't get any animation to work. Now I can make animations with shaders.

On shadows
http://www.wolfgang-engel.info/blogs/?p=130

Deferred lighting. It could be fun.

PS. I like the new UI. The position of shader setup is a nice touch and getting rid of the best config button can only do good. But where is the shader editor?

http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Utilities.Detail&id=76, olé! :toughninja:
great tool, I'd suggest unpacking some mods in a separate folder and trying experimenting/optimizing it until you understand how it works before attempting using it on a whole Morrowind installation though.

The problem is when you try to resize the texture for the next mip level, filter 1 opaque texel + 3 transparent texels = 25%, but you can only encode 1 bit. You end up with a texture halo in the distance. Even inventory icons can be resized, so DXT1a is a bad idea every time. Everyone should be using premultiplied alpha too but that's another story...


Each Python install has its own library directory, I think. Ordenador is very flexible, it seems to do gamma properly which is good. The whole texture anolysis thing was first made because the shadow algorithm has to check for transparent textures on everything, the more efficient textures are the better it works. You could also run the anolysis on a mod package first to fix all the textures inside and repackage before installing it. Hopefully it can be an automatic part of MGE eventually.



http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Utilities.Detail&id=177650&id=76 works well, make sure you read the comments.

Fully dynamic lighting is big trouble still. I like the idea of SH environment probes, you can have a mostly static component, and the final render only samples that once instead of 20 street lights. The amount of cube maps you would have to render for shadows would be crazy otherwise. The shader editor is coming back after I get SharpDevelop to stop giving errors about it.

registered a new account just to say - i reinstalled MW for the first time in years the other day, have been putting together the necessary mods + extensions for a few days trying to get it just right, and finally got it all down pat and played for a few hours today. it was great but with all the improved graphics and features MGE added, the old stencil shadows stick out like a sore thumb and I was left wondering if anyone happened to be working on dynamic shadows.

Lo and behold... so thank you for working on this, I'm going to test now but whether it works for me at this stage or not, it's great that this is being worked on. shame it can't be adapted to being full dynamic, but it's already pretty amazing how far rusty old Gamebryo has been pushed. I wonder if Bethesda ever imagined back in 2000 or '01 that their game would look anywhere near this good.

[edit]

Okay, my findings:

-Unless I'm missing something, you can't actually generate distant land thru MGEXE without ticking the distant land checkbox, and you can't tick the checkbox without having distant land. Worked around that by generating the distant land with the 1.8.2 SVN version.

-And then it crashes upon loading a game. Interior and exterior cells. I tried disabling all shaders to no avail.

The very boring log:

MGE XE 0.8.2MWSE 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

http://speccy.piriform.com/results/PpOyug9QWSCCQoJWf4ZkZLo. Forceware is the latest, I have the AMD gaming drivers, etc.

Hope this is helpful in development. Am staying very excited about this mod.

I just realized I haven't generated distant land/statics since MGE XE 0.7.2. If you can find MGE XE version 0.7.2, install it and generate distant land/statics with it, then make sure it works in game before installing the newest version of mgexe.

Thanks for checking this out. I just rearranged the GUI last release, good thing you found that problem, it can be fixed sometime today. I hope to get it to an easy to install state, but it will be a while. Is MGE 3.8.2 working normally? I assume it's set up and working as part of the install process. As a Win7 user you may be having problems with the UAC Virtual Store; check \Users\\AppData\Local\VirtualStore if any files have been moved there.