Morrowind Graphics Extender

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Wow.... if that actually works smoothly that is far better than anything previously available.

Just leaving a quick note to say that I do check this thread, so feel free to post.

If anyone wants to make any bug reports, please give your graphics card and driver version, the dll you were using, any relevent MGE settings and some step by step instructions for how to reproduce the bug.

Hi, I'm Rene from Germany so excuse my bad way to explain myself in English.

I've found the MGE yesterday - downloaded and tampered all night around with it.

I love it! Thanks to the Autor.

But I've a little problem with it: I like the Distant Land Effect but I would like to have some Fog-Effect on that Distant Land so it doesn't look that weird when I walk through Balmora : I can see the hills 5 Miles away very clearly and the house just a few hundred feet away dissapears. Cant there by made something with some transparency/alpha setting to make the Distant Land look more foggy and to make those hills further away dont look so clearly?

And - by the way: Are the distant-land-files actually DirectX-Meshes?
So can I edit those with my very own Nif/DirectX-Mesh-Editor (yes, really, I've got one, written on my own, you can download it from >>>HERE<<< but works only on Morrowind-nif-Meshes.

Perhaps I could convert the larger Buildings like the Hlormaren-Castle or the Vivec-House-Islands into simplified DX-Files and add them into the Distant Land-File so I can see Hlormaren from the Hill in Balmora - and not just the naked ground thereunder? Would that be possible?

Edit:
There's a checkbox "Enable Dithering" - and I've got a Gforce 5200 FX-Card and I can see a difference if I check/uncheck this box. It looks dithered. There's just one small problem: First I checked the box: my game looked dithered as I said, fine, OK. Next try, I unchecked the Box, tested and was still dithered. Then I changed settings to MW-Defaults - that finally made the dithered look dissapear.

There are graphics card/driver dependent bugs in fogging. It works fine on ATI cards, but with your nvidea card you may have to turn fog off completely if you want to use distant land. It's supposed to look like the screenshots on the download page - in balmora none of the houses should be fogged, but at a distance of around 15 cells away everything is fogged completely. Make sure fog mode is set to depth pixel, because either of the vertex modes conflict with distant land.

The distant land textures are standard DTX1 dds textures. The cell meshes are just raw vertex data. (3 floats for the position, 3 floats for the normal, 2 floats for the texture coords. There's a grid of 65*65 verticies) The world mesh is a bit more complicated because it also contains the index buffer data and 2 ints to tell MGE how big the mesh is. It's much faster to load raw data than it is to load a .x or .nif. There's no way to add distant buildings and stuff atm, but MGE is open source, so you can add it in yourself if you like.

People mostly use nifskope for editing nifs, but you could always try posting your utility somewhere where it would get seen. Not many people will visit this thread.

the fog in distance works fine- thats ok. in default 15 cells away i can see fog. i tried to set it down to 1 - but the fog is too dense then- i cant see the cell i'm in- but i can see the hill-tops 2 or more cells away then. so theres no problem with my card... I guess the thingo'magic I'm looking for is to make the distant-land look more transparent or diffuse. Maybe I can fool around with those textures to get some unclear and foggy looking landscape?

Or would there be a way to place some huge fog.nif-meshes around the current cell?

and, by the way, I changed that link up there because I'm already done translating...

Cooler than snot! Really adds life to the original morrowind game.

Hi... I just reinstalled Morrowind plus both expansions for the first time in a LONG time, all because I know there are all these mods out there that make the game look much better. Yours included. Im interested to know what mods you use (i.e. Better Bodies, Texture replacers... etc) and mainly what settings you are running with the MGE. Im new to the pluggin and am a bit confused at what would be my best settings. Ive been messing around with it since last night, and FINALLY got distant lands to work. I guess it couldn't load some world meshes. So I ran the Distant land Texture and mesh creator (Advanced) and hit run button and after it was done ran the game and it worked. So i could see things now but not the way i was expecting. Like in the beggining Rocks along the next hill over behind the strider would (how can i put this) start to disappear when i start moving the camer (in first person looking around). Once i get looking at a point new rocks would apear and the others that started to disapear were gone... So any help on a best possible setting would be great.

Oh and my video card is a ATi X1800 XL All In Wonder!
Thanks

My question is, do you have to download this and then change all the stuff in the CS, or does it do some of it automatically. I am not at home right now, so I cant check it out right now, but I would like to try it out. I just didnt know if it is something that you can just activate it in a program or if you have to change everything in the CS.

Also, there doesnt appear to be a download link, so if you could offer an alternate link or see if we can get Darky to fix it...

EDIT: Ok, question... Is there any way to turn the zoom down so my journal isnt so big that I cant see the top or bottom while running in dual monitor mode? The crosshair and journal grow about 2 or 3 times their normal size and I cant read my journal. Kinda annoying...

Lad...you just made my day.

Give this man a medal!

wow, this looks really awesome but i can't seem to get it to do the distant land thing

When i run the mod in basic (dx8 or 9) i can see the distant land but the textures look corrupted, like i have have brightness and contrast set too maximum.

When i run it in full (dx8 or 9) i cannot see the distant land. Fog is gone as well so I am assuming it has effected that, but no distant lands

I'm running 2 geforce 660gt's in sli, i've tried alot of setups in sli and without. To no avail.

I can see from comments that people with nvidia cards have got this working i just can't understand what i'm doing that is wrong, it sort of works in basic but does nothing in full. I've read the manual but i'm really out of my league to understanding just about all of it.

I'm also getting an error in my video options menu. Not that i can see the whole message ! "warning: video resolution does not all....."


Please help me!

OK, this is awesome. only one problem... does this conflict with tribunal? beacause i'm gettin moutains in the middle of mournhold, and i dont really know why. so if you would be so kind as to fix this...

If you look on your world map, you'll find that Mournhold is, by some magical device, located in Ebonheart. I think that it should be possible to fix this by adding an intermediate EXTERNAL (MH is all indoors, I believe) cell, preferably located in the appropriate location.

Well, I tried this out, and it appears to drastically reduce file loading speed. I believe 1/10 of normal would not be an overstatement. If it loaded all files needed for a cell before letting the player move around, this wouldn't be a problem, but as it is, you several seconds of dead-time whenever you turn, at least until everything's loaded. The same problem occurs for the interface sounds.

Is it possible to apply a shader to the distant land only? I'd like to see some something like a blur shader applied to the distant land, that'd be sweet as.

Thanks a lot, Timeslip.
Even if Morrowind has it special place in my heart, regardless graphicsbetterings, - this is really a great mod. Makes this masterpiece of a game even more masterpiecefully. hehe. Thankz!

Last version work's, this version not works, why ?

It's pity that I could not use this. When I use it,the game will show a error message 'Render Creation Error:""' and terminated.

When I run the "distant land texture and mesh creator" I get a fatal error that crashes my computer. The Microsoft Windows Error Reporting system tells me the problem is caused by video driver. I have the latest driver for my video card, ATI Radeon X1300PRO.

YES ! This version works. Thanks !

I LOVE this mod, but i dont exactly like the mountains rising out of mournhold. does this come from this mod, or vibrant morrowind?

No words. 10/10

It's this mod. If you can call it a mod... It's more of an utility, isn't it? Anyway...
You can fix it by using this mod.

Hello.
First of all: THANKS!
Next: I think everyone'd agree when I say it looks a little bit strange when using distant statics with a minimum object size of above 750. But as I went below it I sheerly had some troubles with my FPS-rate in cities such as Balmora, Suran or even Seyda Neen (it fell below 15 fps).

My hardware:
- Geforce 7600 GT
- Crative Sound Blaster X-FI
- AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 2.21 Ghz
- 1024 MB RAM

My MGE 3.15 settings:
- Distant Land: 2/8; 3/9; 2/11;
| - World texture resolution: 4096
| - Average vertex heights activated.
| - else: defaults
- Distant Statics: 725
- Anisotropic filtering level: 16x
- Mipmap LOD Bias: -1
- Thread loading activated.
- else: defaults.

I tested distant statics myself using the default object size of 1000 and my fps-rate increased to 25-30 fps (leaving all other settings at the same). So am I right in saying that this fps crash is caused by the amount of objects Morrowind has to picture when using distant statics at 725?
Then, is it possible to improve the quality-fps-ratio by leveling distant statics settings? For instance having the option to choose three minimum object sizes:
Cell 1-2: 600
Cell 3-5: 750
Cell 5<: 1000

So the little objects you cannot see 8 cells away don't have to be pictured while the landscape in the cell you're in is more detailed. That'd be really nice.

thankfully,

Madore

After all the hype I was tremendously disappointed to run this and have every function throw up an error of one kind of another. Memory write errors mostly and some errors where it gave no useful feedback at all. And before someone blames my computer, I can assure it is not. It runs for days on end without need for reboot. Only this app complains about memory problems.

Not quite sure what went wrong but i upgraded from 3.03 to 3.15b and now none of my shaders work in the shader editor.

I cant choose dx8/9 dll's, is this intentional or a bug?

Wish i could reap the benefits of the optimizations, but until it gets cleaned up a bit i have to stick with 3.03

I think it would be best for anyone who has problems with MGE to ask it at the official forum thread. However, the last one was closed because of the 200 post limit they have, and a new one hasn't been created yet. Search the morrowind mods forum (on the official forums I linked to, not here) to see if there's a new thread.

To the maker of this mod

Thank you so much i loved morrowind so much but the graphics are inperfect and they look a lot better now Cheers!

Hello. After I installed this... Tool? Utility?, people started walking and running much faster, and the sentences and names of skills got mixed up, and had a lot of s's added. And I can no longer just press "space" to say yes or accept choices in game. This annoys me ever so much, partly it did not even work, which makes me feel that I have messed up quite a portion of the things in the game, by installing something that did not even work. Could you please tell me how to get rid of these annoying errors? Thank you in advance.

Yours Sincerely
-Mr. Harlequin Crow.

Ah, now we're talking! Don't know if it's my new card or this new version, but I had much better results next time around. A few bugs like the hills in the sky in Mournhold, and some issues with the distant land generation. After running the land generation for the second time with lower texture resolutions, the game crashed the second upon game loading. I uninstalled, reinstalled, then tried to generate again, this time with more mods selected, and the distant land generation caused my computer to spontaneously reboot. Once I trimmed back the files used to just the Morrowind and Bloodmoon ESMs, it worked again and the game worked fine. The other mods I tried to build distant land for included...

- White Wolf of Lokken Mountain
- Ald Vendras (the Lokken ESP)
- Tamriel Rebuilt Map 1
- Silgrad Tower
- Havish

If I get time I will try again and see if I can isolate the specific file causing problems.

Still all and all, this is excellent work and I look forward to future revisions. 9/10

Thanks for the update Timeslip!

Finally, they made a new official thread. I suggest posting your problems/comments/questions there, because it'll be noticed much faster.


Try the Distant Land Interior Fix. I also recommend the Distant Land Weather Fix.

And I think we should give this guy some kudos!

Will this fix a bug I had with the lighting going weird?

Probably. If the new version didn't solve it, try clicking on Morrowind Defaults in the main tab. It might be a problem related to the settings you use.


(Let me add that I'm not involved in the testing or production of MGE at all, I'm just answering questions here since Timeslip is busy answering questions on the official forums already, and updating the mod.)

That didn't work last time, in fact it was still like that when disabled. It was fixed when I unistalled it though. Hang on I'm going to try it again.

How... do i run the game with the mod enabled? When i start the game as normal, the mod doesn't start with it, and i have no idea what else i could do.

Well that's because it's not really a 'mod' like all the others. It's more of an utility.

You run MGE from the MGEgui file in your morrowind folder, and there you can change all the settings. Then you close it, and play Morrowind. No plugin files have to be activated, and MGE doesn't have to be active while playing Morrowind. Having MGE opened while playing Morrowind can even cause problems, if it doesn't give an error message right away.

But as i said, it doesn't start with Morrowind. It doesn't change anything in the game. I've already configured MGE.

Are you sure nothing changed? If nothing changed, you didn't configure it correctly I think. Or they weren't very obvious things.

If you mean the distant land... Besides ticking the distant land button, you also have to generate it with the Distand Land file creation wizard, at the tools tab.

NOTHING has changed. The resolution hasn't changed. It still plays the opening vid. There is no HDR, and no distant land. And yes i did go through the wizard...

I reinstalled MGE, and now the custom resolutions work. But that's about it. And now the mouse lags in the game.

Mmm... I don't think I can help you. Ask at the official thread.

Thing is one of the most awesome things ever made for Morrowind, in my opinion. :3 I seem to be having a bit of a problem, though when it comes to shaders. The shader editor window is supposed to have some DX9 checkbox, but I don't see one anywhere. Also, I can't get any shaders to actually display when I load Morrowind. Any help?

The DX9 checkbox was removed in MGE 3.1. There's no longer a DX8 mode, so it's effectively always checked.

If the shaders aren't showing up, make sure the 'hardware shader' checkbox is checked, as well as 'update shader variables' and 'supply HDR info to shaders' if applicable.

Ahh, that'll do it. That makes it my most favorite thing in Morrowind, like, ever. xD Thanks a lot!

For some reason the fast full bloom is heavier on performance than the DX 9HLSL HDR 5, which says Warning: Slow!.

ummmm.....i uninstalled the mod, and everything else i could find related to it, but it now wont let me boot up morrowind, it says system could not find right path or whatever "try running mgegui.exe to recover save files" wgat dose this mean, and how can i fix it.

Hi, This is an excellent mod, 10/10.
However... I seem to have the same problem that Doctor Cox mentioned (on the 11th March), more specifically in my case, The game crashes on startup when I have Tamriel Rebuilt Map 1 plugged in. I can run It no problems with just Morrowind, Tribunal and Bloodmoon (And possibly Firemoth plugin, but I don't remember if I tried it) but with Tamriel Rebuilt its no go. Any ideas?

Are you running distant land? And if so, did you generate the distant land with the Tamriel Rebuilt plugin active? If not, try generating the distant land again but with TR active this time.

I just picked up a new laptop running Vista Home Premium and am returning to Morrowind for the first time in a while (after playing Oblivion in between, no less). I decided to install some of the latest mods for Morrowind and this one seems to be the one to beat, but I can't get 3.3.2 to work under Vista. I've tried running both MGE and Morrowind as Administrator, but I'm getting complaints while trying to create the distant lands data:

"A fatal error occurred loading land data from your plugins. Distant land setup cannot continue.

Failed to load default ground texture (Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3DX, Version=1.0.2911.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.)"


I did download d3dx9_30.dll and drop it into the Morrowind install directory, so I'm assuming it's some other DX9 DLL that I'm missing since I'm on Vista. Any thoughts? I'd love to get this going!!!

Thanks,
Scott

In response to Povuholo (13:34 20th Mar 2007)

Yes, I've made sure distant land is on, and I generated it with TR on. So that's not the problem. :-(