Hope this is the right place to post. So I installed MGE and have the most beautiful water in the world, but there are a lot of things that still look bad!
These aren't just aesthetic defects, but things that look bad enough to break immersion.

I'm hoping there are existing solutions for these, or maybe my whining can spur someone to work on new mods / code patches?
Has anyone else been troubled by these? Has anyone found solutions?
Where can I go if I want to help out on a project to address these?

1. Spell effects - some of these are really ugly. The poision explosion looks like an expanding translucent green icosahedron. The fire explosion is even more crude. I've never seen a mod even touch these effects. Is it all hard-coded in the EXE?
2. Drawing lag - MGE's one-frame lag in updating the distant land drawing at the edges of the screen looks bad when you turn quickly. I'm not sure this optimization in MGE was worth it. Is there a way to turn it off?
3. Resting graphics - When resting, all kinds of silliness is drawn on the screen including huge chunks of missing landscape. Would this require a machine code patch to fix?
4. Cell loading graphics - When you open a door, MGE shaders can result in psychadelic colors shifting around the screen as the same frame is processed over and over. Using Anti-aliasing 2x seems to fix it for me at least.
5. Transparent vegetation problems - A lot of vegetation mods with partly-transparent leaves change abruptly when transitioning to and from distant land. Can highy detailed distant land textures / models make this less noticable?
6. ovr files - There's no commonly accepted MGE distant land static override files. I end up seeing a lot of ships that don't have reflections, or vice versa. I'm not sure how to cope except to download random ovr files and lump them together. Maybe teaming up to make a giant ovr file in SVN would be a good idea?

A lot of this sounds like dev-patch country though a modders might address any of these given the interest. Interest of competent modders comes when they are impressed by what is already there however ...

re 5) distance viewing is something that can be tricky to decide on because it can make a big dent in processing. You might think in terms of middle as well as long distance though

1. yes, someone just released a fire/frost effect replacer.

2. yes, you can disable it i'm pretty sure.

3 & 4 pretty much the same thing i think. not sure, but i doubt it.

5. i think that's an issue with the MGE shaders you are using. some shaders just dont like transparency.

6. you see reflections with no ships? spooky! not sure about fixing it as i personally dont use any overrides.

>1. yes, someone just released a fire/frost effect replacer.

Nice, I just found this mod a second ago
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/991190-betaresource-new-fire-and-frost-explosions/page__hl__explosion
http://www.mediafire.com/?bytzdigtm91

>2. yes, you can disable it i'm pretty sure.

Any idea how to disable the one-frame MGE lag?

>6. you see reflections with no ships? spooky!
Yeah, I think this bug happens whenever a ship is moved by a script from its initial location.

1. You found one already. I also use http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6621 (well, a stripped down version -- I only wanted to replace the Shield effect and rather liked the one in this mod). There also http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=6196 and the NPC-sized addon (recommended). Not too many out there, I know, but knef's Fire and Frost alone make things more exciting!

2. It isn't an option so much as an optimization programmed into MGE. A switch somewhere would be nice, but there isn't one currently. You have two options if you want to avoid it: a) use an earlier revision ( SVN_126 is the package you'll want), or B) Use MGE XE 0.8.0 on top of MGE SVN_178. The former is missing some newer features that come with the optimizations, the latter is still technically a "demo" but I very much enjoy.

3. Not sure what you mean by this.

4. AA resolves it for me as well.

5. I haven't really experienced this -- what mipmap levels do you set during distant land creation?

6. The static override list is something I've wrestled with for a while. I tried creating my own from scratch but it never ended well, I wasn't willing to compromise on anything and it killed performance. There is also the issue that you must modify it to fit your personal needs depending upon preference and active mods. There used to be a pretty decent "base" list around, I'll see if I can dig it out. The ghosting issue will never go away for certain things like stronghold creation -- MGE's statics are defined before runtime. Your only hope for such things is to create an override list to be used after whatever quests change whatever statics in question, and regenerate distant land for your character after he/she has completed said quests.

>3. Not sure what you mean by this

I meant that when you rest / go to sleep with the T key, there are some big graphics errors.