Could've sworn it was, but you got me.
I'm just gonna stop posting, because I'm no help at all.

I know have found a bug you might want to look into.

In Vivec Mage Guild, there is a High Elf you knows right when you arrive by teleport, that has a shadow bug. I don't really know how to explain it other then this, I'll try to see if I can get a screenshot of it. Its a minor problem, nothing worth thinking about, until you turn on MGE XE. Now with vanilla it still works, but if you add a few graphic enhancing mods, like Vivec Textures and what not, the game gets difficulties, and crashes more are less immediately after looking in the high elfs direction.

The fix is simple tho, just turn off NPC shadows, and things work perfectly, but still if you can look into it it would be great. Maybe it needs fixing through a mod (MCP) and not through MGE XE, I don't know.

Cheers for all your work so far

Your problem has nothing to do with MGE XE. It is an issue with high detail shadows and mesh replacers. Either turn off high detail shadows or stop using the mesh replacer associated with that high elf (whether it be his robe or his shirt or something else he is wearing, maybe his hair).

MGE XE allows STATICS to cast shadows. NPCs have always been able to cast shadows, and there has always been an option in morrowind.ini to turn on high detail shadows.

why using vanilla character shadows at all? they look pretty bad and cant stand mgexe quality standards :wink_smile:

True, and they don't take armour/clothes into account when rendered. SSAO is way better and more realistic.

No. Is it necessary?? Why?

Ask Hrnchamd, i only know that when i tried to disable it (testing my dissapearing flame problem, and toggle DL macro doesn't worked too) the game showed these errors

Hi there. Love the shadows!

Would it be possible to use this shader with MGE XE? I tried replacing the Technique TO line with

technique T0 < string MGEinterface="MGE XE 0"; >

, but it says it won't compile.

Here's the shader:

//Polik GroNak Blurry HDR Bloomtexture lastpass;texture lastshader;texture lastframe;sampler s0 = sampler_state { magfilter=linear; AddressU=Clamp; AddressV=Clamp;};sampler s1 = sampler_state { texture = ; magfilter=linear; AddressU=Clamp; AddressV=Clamp; };sampler s2 = sampler_state { texture=; magfilter=linear; AddressU=Clamp; AddressV=Clamp;};const static float scale = 4.5f;//spread of bloomconst static float BloomBoost = 1.50f;//brightness of bloomfloat4 HDR = 0;//float4(0.5,0.5,0.5,0.1);const static int kernelsize = 9;const float1 blurPixs[kernelsize] = {	{-4.00},	{-3.00},	{-2.00},	{-1.00},	{0.0},	{1.000},	{2.00},	{3.00},	{4.00}};const float1 blurMags[kernelsize] = {	{0.55},	{0.70},	{0.85},	{0.95},	{1.00},	{0.95},	{0.85},	{0.70},	{0.55}};float2 rcpres;//31float4 DownScaleBloomV( float2 Tex : TEXCOORD0 ) : COLOR0{	float3 color = 0;	float3 color2 = 0;	if (Tex.x < 1.02/scale && Tex.y < 1.02/scale){	for (int i=0; i												

Hey everyone, I've been working on MCP for a week or so.

Please read the opening post, when you report a bug you need to post logs and system details, I can't guess what's wrong with a one line description.

The < string MGEinterface="MGE XE 0"; > was made for a reason, most shaders won't work just by adding it because of the variables and interface changes. Don't expect it to work.



I think it needs to be a separate shader then.


That's very very blue. Could you post the coordinates for that location? I'm not sure what's going on there.



It could be several things. In your graphics card control panel, try setting "maximum pre-rendered frames" or similar to 2. Try updating your sound driver. Try turning off vsync.



Yes, it uses the distant interiors fog setting instead of standard fog. When density is zero, fog is pushed to maximum range. I may have to change this, please report which cells give problems.



The sail cloth alphaproperty needs to be corrected.


It saves drawing every static placed underwater, but the range can be pushed back to two or three cells. It was difficult before so I'm doing some code cleaning.



This looks good in screenshot but making it work over time is a different story. It needs a lot more work to make it look good.



Chromatic aberration I feel is not in good taste, you don't see it in photographs of shallow water, and RGB refraction is not the same as sunlight spectrum refraction. I'm not going to add it for that reason. In ingame.fx, the ReflectionPS function is where the foam should be, if you can find the right code it can be added to WaterPS.

Blur reflections will come back, but water isn't intrinsically blurry like that, there has to be a different method. Someone will have to contribute ideas on efficient cloud shadow weather interaction, it seems like it will have to affect everything on-screen or it will look wrong. No texture hooks will be added.

Those house textures are 90% textures from Visual Pack 2.11, roof is from AOF.



That's a good set of details, it will help a lot!



Caustics should be working. You set it with the caustics % thing on the distant land tab. It uses a texel gradient filter in place of N dot L lighting though, which could be the problem.



This shader is broken. There isn't a texture bound to sampler s0, and possibly other problems. It might take a while to check everything.

I can understand why you wouldn't want chromatic aberration, but what about 3d waves and ripples(both pc and rain cast...perhaps npc as well would be over the top awesome)??

As far as cloud shadow weather interaction, could you explain perhaps what you mean, do you mean that they would have to be active 100% of the time, or that they would have to interact with structural shadows, or that it would have to cast on water as well?....I'm sorry, I must be tired, because I'm just not exactly sure what you mean. And no texture hooks is kind of sad because I was hoping for a distant animated ghost fence....

Good to here, I'm glad I can help!

Also good to here from you again, this thread looked like it was falling into a bit of chaos.

People need to remember this thread is WIP; bugs should be reported to get this project going, not to get your personal installs going. Know what I mean?

Here and in general the water surface (reflection) is not affected by shadows at all. It's because the water is cloudy and it has a very short visual depth of a few cm, that shadows can cast near the surface. Shadows could block out sun specular reflection, but most reflection comes from skylight.



The overall feeling and interaction with shadows, blending, polygon facing. Texture hooks could never hook distant land, it's not even related, distant statics have their own vertex format and shader.

Observation [sunshafts/sun]:

- I feel it's of some priority that the sun is stopped from fading at dusk. It needs to be bright as ever while being clipped by the horizon to achieve a real nice sun set. Just imagine that with matching water shining O.o Currently it looks quite bad. Correct me if it's just my install but I believe it's universal...

- It would nice to see more pronounced sun rays during foggy weather, despite the sun being clouded. A good balance might be difficult but would look great if done right.

I'm having trouble with this, it's not working. From what I can tell, it only is reading the standard MGE and not XE. Any ways I could force Morrowind to use XE?

OK, a bit of wizardry with End-user runtimes and it's working! Well, kinda. As soon as I load a save game, it just shows a brown void around me with some torches flickering, and promptly crashes. Help?

Sounds to me like it wasn't installed correctly. XE files should replace all MGE files and thus MGE shouldn't be there to run, Only the GUI should be remaining of the svn MGE. Try installing MGEXE again and be sure to copy and replace with ALL files/folders in the XE .rar to you'r morrowind directory.

NPCs casting water ripples is so unlikely it may as well be impossible. MGE would have to fetch the location of every NPC drawn to do that and I'm not even sure if it could.

I do however second (third? fourth?) the desire for 3D waves and for PC ripple casting. Really, the only thing noticeably holding XE from absolutely surpassing latest main builds is the absence of 3D waves. I had sort of had my fingers crossed on the hope that Hrnchamd found 3D waves a feature important enough to be a goal for 1.0.

Shore foam looks nice but it's situational, looks out of place regularly.

Hrnchamd is right that water is not intrinsically blurry like with water blur but in my opinion water blur as it is implemented in latest main MGE builds, however unrealistic, is still a fair improvement on the water surface with no blur. The blur helps reflections from appearing overly crisp, helps water stop from 'looking like mercury'.

MGE XE's shadows look nice but MGE XE cannot draw shadows for NPCs. Therefor, it is still worth using vanilla character shadows as otherwise you are stuck where statics cast shadows but NPCs do not, looks strange. Admittedly, vanilla shadows are buggy - the are often times cast on the wrong side of a static, for example. Better than nothing, though.

SSAO is not really a replacement for NPC shadows, there is nothing particularly 'more realistic' about having vanilla shadows off but SSAO on. The two compliment each other nicely.

False. Morrowind's own 'vanilla' shadows DO take armor and clothes into account provided that high detail shadows are enabled in the .ini.

Woah hang on. My other post about the sun shafts had me thinking today at work...

Would it be possible for the sun shaft shader to interact with fog??? Like shun shafts only being cast in the presence of fog... more fog = more opacity?

Think about it... if this is possible, and you tweak the shader to cast at wider angles and have a wider off screen range (if that does what I think it does) you would create a far more realistic effect than the current one, which while is very pretty, really has no realistic properties (contextually anyway).

Imagine seeing sun shafts being cast through trees in the distance but when you come real close to them they vanish unless in foggy weather (also would be nice to see day time based fog ie: morning fog but thats another story). Also imagine the effect if clouds were to affect sun rays and you could see distant clouds casting large sun shafts on the land.

This would also create an extremely effective way of doing underwater sun shafts.

This would be a huge step in the look of morrowind imo because irl you see sun shafts in the distance, not while looking at the sun. I hope this is possible and i'm not on a mindless rant Please give you're thoughts Hrnchamd!

Shadows look amazing, but because no 3d water waves are existing, I copied MGE-gui again.

Question,
now everything runs slower, (no shadows - waves are back), major drop in fps - solution?

Ehm, reinstall MGEXE? If 3D waves could easily be implemented in MGEXE I'm sure Hrnchamd would have added them in.

Sounds like a question for the norm MGE thread, but I have found XE to be much more efficient, so much so that I can push draw distances to extremes.

Highly unlikely, yes, impossible, definitely not, Phal, in fact, had NPC reflections working in an ingame.fx. The problem, as expected, was a very hard performance hit, which is why it probably wouldn't be implemented, however, Hrnchamd has squeezed far more out of MGE than previously thought possible from a performance standpoint, so perhaps he has some ideas on how to make it work. Not that it matters, as for me, I'm just waiting from 3d waves and PC water ripples to replace my gameplay install with XE. The NPC stuff was more just a pipe dream that I decided to shove out there for kicks, because I figure if I ask one off the wall request, the others are more likely to be done at some point.

i know that mgexe cant cast shadows for npc, but i think that the vanilla shadows look ugly and misplaced in a shader 3 game.
i completely agree with you about the water, i hope so much that we will soon see 3d water and really looking forward to improved water blur!

have got a suggestion btw: can you add checkboxes to distand land creation for the following situations:

- ghostfence down, dont show the blue wall in distant land
- royal strongholds build, include the new build strongholds of telvanni, hlaalu & redoran to distant land
- distant static for that bloodmoon house you can build (cant remember right now)
- remove distant static for seyda neen starting ship completely to get rid of its reflection & static

i know that this is possible with static exception list, but it would be a welcome addition to mgexe simplified gui.
if thats nothing you plan to do, can someone plz give me an advice on how to do that with the exception list? thx

Someone pointed out some of the leading gallery screens looked a bit overdone with DoF, I think the low-light pupil adapation coefficient made it blur twice as much as usual in dark areas. I chopped a few pics off the gallery because they don't look so hot in retrospect. How do people find the DoF in interiors at the moment?

I'm quite ok with it, though I don't pay attention to it at all, which is the point I guess; not to focus on background things. Up close people always over blur a ton though, that could use some work.