Shelter from Magnus' Blaze 5 : III - Morrowind

» Tue May 17, 2011 6:47 am

This happens when I don't check "Interior Water (heavy)" while generating statics. I don't think it's checked by default.

The screenshots I posted are with that option checked during static generation. You are correct that it is unchecked by default.

That fixed it. But it's weird that original MGE doesn't need this. (IIRC)

http://i54.tinypic.com/w9viok.jpg
http://i56.tinypic.com/10ekhl1.jpg
(although I must say that the water is way too transparent in the canolworks)

» Tue May 17, 2011 2:45 am

Hey guys, I've had a problem with Mge and XE for a while, I also asked about this somewhere else but they couldn't help me there. When I'm in-game, the textures on everything except for distant land and the sky constantly flicker bright white. Screenshots: http://img820.imageshack.us/i/flicker1.jpg/ - http://img143.imageshack.us/i/flicker2.jpg/ - http://img59.imageshack.us/i/flicker3.jpg/ (Do note that these were taken using Mge rev178, and not XE. The problem persisted when I switched to XE though). I do know that the problem has nothing to do with AA, AF, LOD bias, distant land, shaders and V-Sync, Z-, W- or Table-fog. I tried to disable those and it didn't work. Also, I can't test wether or not it has to do with MGE at all because when I disable MGE morrowind CTDs on startup. Any thoughts on what might be causing this?

P.S. I have an ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro with the latest drivers and Ati Tray Tools enabled.

Try a clean Morrowind install with MGE XE and if the problem persists, then I would say that this is a driver/hardware issue.

» Tue May 17, 2011 1:17 am

How would I revert back to MGE svn 178? I didn't see anything about it in the Readme.

I really appreciate all the hard work on this but have found that I become too reliant on mods that add to the HUD.

» Tue May 17, 2011 1:52 am

simply delete all files that came with the MGE XE package and redownload svn178. You will probably need to regenerate distant land though.

» Tue May 17, 2011 12:19 pm

Sorry to "clutter" this magnificent topic with my humble comments. I just want to express my admiration and gratitude for this amazing achievement. Thank you Hrnchamd for your efforts and sharing your work. And also cheers to the Community for supporting the development :foodndrink:

Last year I had to replace my computer and had to remove my Morrowind and Oblivion installations. Now I'm in good shape again and to reduce my burden waiting for Skyrim I decided to re-install Morrowind (my favorite TES so far...) and embellish it with new graphic mods. I just recently heard of MGE XE back in Morrowind Overhaul - Sounds & Graphics Topic by KINGPIX (He has compiled a very nice package there btw) and just tried out MGE XE last night. I'm literally jaw-dropping :drool: the "ambiance" is so rich now!

I had problems with some shaders not compiling but just noticed that I must install DirectX June 2010 update. Hopefully this will allow me to edit the active shaders chain according to the suggestions on 1st page.

Keep on rocking!

» Tue May 17, 2011 3:26 pm

I've finally managed to take a http://i626.photobucket.com/albums/tt346/rhymer1987/Morrowind%20bugs/e0d81136.jpg of the error I have...

» Tue May 17, 2011 2:23 am

Might not be top priority, but I wasn't able to generate distant land in MGE XE on a fresh install so I had to generate it with the normal MGE first.

» Tue May 17, 2011 5:58 am

Hi everyone! If you're reporting errors please follow the information in the OP, I need the mgeXE log and computer information because it's impossible to fix things with just "x doesn't work" reports.

Anyway, is it normal for MW/MGE blending to be different from the "normal" MGE? The distant land seems to popping in with chunks, even with MW/MGE blending enabled. Other than that, MGE XE is awesome and should be the main version of MGE.

The draw order is different to normal MGE, those chunks are what Morrowind is drawing at the edge of the draw distance. The blending should hide them but it doesn't seem to work quite right when the distant land mesh doesn't match Morrowind's land.

Additionally, I asked this before, but back then it was nothing more than an far away idea - but can MGE's future involve rendering all the close up static (not nailed down / alive) objects instead of having Morrowind's engine render them thus producing a (presumably) massive performance boost? Considering that I don't see why MGE can't fully mimic Morrowind Linear/Quadratic lightning anymore...

This isn't possible because it ignores dynamic lighting, transparencies, bumpmaps, animation, disable flags, everything. MGE can't see the current state of the lights in the cell.

Hrnchamd, could you please correct this so that slash is implemented?

It's implemented the same way as regular MGE. I can get all three attacks without trouble here.

Hey guys, I've had a problem with Mge and XE for a while, I also asked about this somewhere else but they couldn't help me there. When I'm in-game, the textures on everything except for distant land and the sky constantly flicker bright white. Screenshots: http://img820.imageshack.us/i/flicker1.jpg/ - http://img143.imageshack.us/i/flicker2.jpg/ - http://img59.imageshack.us/i/flicker3.jpg/ (Do note that these were taken using Mge rev178, and not XE. The problem persisted when I switched to XE though). I do know that the problem has nothing to do with AA, AF, LOD bias, distant land, shaders and V-Sync, Z-, W- or Table-fog. I tried to disable those and it didn't work. Also, I can't test wether or not it has to do with MGE at all because when I disable MGE morrowind CTDs on startup. Any thoughts on what might be causing this?

That's pretty bad. What happens when you toggle distant land, statics or fog in-game?

I've finally managed to take a http://i626.photobucket.com/albums/tt346/rhymer1987/Morrowind%20bugs/e0d81136.jpg of the error I have...

Please follow the reporting guide and post the mgeXE.log. That is an out of memory error in that screenshot, though. The game has to load textures for all of distant land so it might be using up too much memory if you don't use mipmap skip when making distant land. I may add a texture memory line to the log file.

» Tue May 17, 2011 12:39 am

Edit: Problem solved, my mistake!

» Tue May 17, 2011 2:36 am

Hrnchamd, what about interior shadows? MGE has interior reflections, so is it possible to scan static lights when MGE generates distant land and implement shadows from them? And we could detect player's torch through scripts as well.

» Tue May 17, 2011 2:58 am

:blink: hope you're NOT seriously!!??

I'd certainly agree if you'd included 'Necessities Of Morrowind' to the list or Vurt's plugins for example, but THIS?
Are those features so indispensable and immersive, really?
Hope you're not seriously.. :ermm:

I did neglect to mention Ownership Indicators. Without the missing scripting features that enable MGE/MWSE mods MGE XE is like sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner and finding you've got gravy but no turkey. Yes shadows are nice; they are some very tasty gravy. But without the meat the meal just isn't good.

» Tue May 17, 2011 1:12 am

I did neglect to mention Ownership Indicators. Without the missing scripting features that enable MGE/MWSE mods MGE XE is like sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner and finding you've got gravy but no turkey. Yes shadows are nice; they are some very tasty gravy. But without the meat the meal just isn't good.

I suspect you are very much in the minority with this opinion. As far as I'm concerned, you've got your gravy / turkey metaphor backwards.

Also, I tried using ownership indicator with regular MGE and it did not work. I've seen similar reports from other users. I'm not sure when that did last work reliably (I'm assuming it did at some point in the past), but in at least that one case it doesn't belong in a conversation of what you're giving up by using MGE XE.

» Tue May 17, 2011 5:08 am

It's implemented the same way as regular MGE. I can get all three attacks without trouble here.

It doesn't work correctly for me - even when I move mouse left to right or diagonally, I still get only the bash attack.

A wild guess, and probably a wrong one - may it have something to do with the animation replacer i'm using?

» Tue May 17, 2011 2:15 pm

Hi there!

Unfortunately even downgrading from MGE 186 to 178, installing the DirectX Jun 2010 release and following the instructions, I was unable to edit my active shaders chain like suggested. SSAO, DoF and sunhafts don't compile. It always shows an error related to "...the argument if is not yet implemented...". I don't have crashes or errors in-game. Is only that I can't use this XE shaders.

Another question: The very first time I tried to edit my shaders chain the XE shaders did not showed on the list. I exited and copied all the XE shaders to the "default" folder and after that they were shown. Is this the correct procedure?

Thank you!

» Tue May 17, 2011 3:01 am

Unfortunately even downgrading from MGE 186 to 178, installing the DirectX Jun 2010 release and following the instructions, I was unable to edit my active shaders chain like suggested. SSAO, DoF and sunhafts don't compile. It always shows an error related to "...the argument if is not yet implemented...". I don't have crashes or errors in-game. Is only that I can't use this XE shaders.

Another question: The very first time I tried to edit my shaders chain the XE shaders did not showed on the list. I exited and copied all the XE shaders to the "default" folder and after that they were shown. Is this the correct procedure?

Are you using MGEXEgui instead of MGEgui? MGE XE shaders and shader setup are separate because they aren't always compatible with standard MGE (which uses an old compiler).

» Tue May 17, 2011 4:15 am

Are you using MGEXEgui instead of MGEgui? MGE XE shaders and shader setup are separate because they aren't always compatible with standard MGE (which uses an old compiler).

To be honest, now that you mentioned...I'm not sure. Probably I didn't updated my shortcut after upgrading to XE :banghead: Thank you for the reminder...I will check this evening.

I am editing to inform that my problem was fixed. My shortcut was still pointing out to MGEgui. Sorry about that. The shaders compiled OK. Thanks!

» Tue May 17, 2011 9:06 am

Just a question: is it normal for the godrays shader to decrease my fps by about 10 when it's reasonably high (30-35) but only by 1~2 when my fps is pretty low (like 15-22)? I hardly notice the difference whn I'm in Balmora, but when I'm exploring the Ashlands or something it goes from smooth to annoyingly choppy.

» Tue May 17, 2011 12:23 am

I have problems with distant land. I'm pretty sure it's a general problem with MGE and not specific to this build, but anyway: whenever I load a game outside with distant land enabled, I get an instant CTD as soon as loading has finished. I'm currently using latest MGE XE build.

May it be related to the options chosen during distant land generation? I'm pretty sure I haven't been experiencing this problem for long.

» Tue May 17, 2011 2:33 am

Just a question: is it normal for the godrays shader to decrease my fps by about 10 when it's reasonably high (30-35) but only by 1~2 when my fps is pretty low (like 15-22)? I hardly notice the difference whn I'm in Balmora, but when I'm exploring the Ashlands or something it goes from smooth to annoyingly choppy.

This is normal, made hard to see due to measuring performance in FPS.

If you go through the math:

at 35 fps, 1 frame takes ~29 ms
so, if your FPS is reduced to 25 when the shader is enabled, then each frame then takes ~40 ms
i.e. the shader takes 11ms to run

now, at 15 fps, 1 frame takes ~67 ms and we know that the shader takes ~11 ms to run, so we would expect ~78 ms per frame, which works out at about 13fps.

Or in less mathematical terms, the shader (at least this kind of shader) takes a fixed time to run and as the FPS increases then it becomes a more and more significant part of the total render time.

» Tue May 17, 2011 3:07 pm

MGE-XE crashes everytime i generate distant statics with "interior water (heavy)"

Spoiler

MGE XE 0.8.17 >> 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 >> 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\SSAO Fast.fx loaded -- Post shader Data Files\shaders\XEshaders\Depth of Field.fx loaded -- Post shader Data Files\shaders\XEshaders\Bloom Fine.fx loaded -- Post shader Data Files\shaders\XEshaders\HDR.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 >> Distant Land release << Distant Land release

» Tue May 17, 2011 12:33 pm

the latest beta has some problems with castles as it seems: http://img20.imageshack.us/i/castleu.jpg/ -this happens to many castles on vvardenfell (ebonyheart, sadrith mora, tel vos and some others i cant remember atm)
iam not sure if you noticed the following post, but would be cool if you can fix that too:

Spoiler

i experienced now a few times that on target spells going right through an npc or creature without hiting them.
while ~6 hours of playing this happened 4 times in very different situations.
i cant understand wether mgexe is causing that - but i never noticed this before (maybe connected to the disapearing particles? but i had spells going through npcs with visible particles).

i like the increased brightness with hdr especialy in exteriors, now the bloom is better noticeable on clear weather.
the interiors could be a little darker for my taste.

EDIT:
- reflection error when underwater & close to surface in vivec sewers (http://img823.images...eflecterror.jpg)
- some objects cause reflections behind the object in interiors (http://img263.images...flectbehind.jpg)

and after some more testing i definitely can say that the above mentioned problem with on target spells happens from time to time.

ANOTHER EDIT:
- still some artifacts on the border between mge and vanilla viewdistance (http://img146.images...45/blending.jpg)
- no object has bloom over its edges, i tested this extensive because i felt something was wrong with bloom. at least the bloom-soft shader needs a little bloom around bright objects i think (http://img842.images...5743/bloomw.jpg) i know its very difficult to tweak if you dont want to get too much bloom on the object itself but i hope its possible

» Tue May 17, 2011 10:59 am

I've also noticed that, PeterBitt. I think (think) it is a problem with the fog distance rather than the castles specifically.

» Tue May 17, 2011 1:34 am

I've also noticed that, PeterBitt. I think (think) it is a problem with the fog distance rather than the castles specifically.

yes scince last version there are overall more popping objects noticeable, but no other objects popp in that obvious for me.
while creatures have fading transparency at distance (best viseable at netchs), the statics are just popping in.

edit: i forgot to mention that auto-fov is causing that i can look through ceiling when jumping (1920x1200, 16:10, auto-fov 85,28 (values around 80 work well))

» Tue May 17, 2011 12:28 am

Hmm, http://pikucha.ru/i4zFa may improve interior lighting. But current shadows implementation considers only one distant light source.

And here is http://free-zg.t-com.hr/cssm/ - it may be interesting for Hrnchamd.

» Tue May 17, 2011 3:28 pm

Hmm, http://pikucha.ru/i4zFa may improve interior lighting. But current shadows implementation considers only one distant light source.

And here is http://free-zg.t-com.hr/cssm/ - it may be interesting for Hrnchamd.

I'd love to eventually see interior shadows.