Morrowind Graphics Extender (MGE)
by Timeslip

The latest version of MGE (3.3.2) requires a fully patched copy of bloodmoon, a DX9 compatible graphics card, .NET 2, MDX and the August 2006 version of DX9.0c or later. Distant land requires a sm1.4 compatible graphics card, and reflective water and HDR require sm2.0.

The previous version of MGE (3.0.3) is the last version which doesn't require bloodmoon or a high end graphics card. Works with external versions of MWSE up to 0.9.2a. Doesn't support distant statics or reflective water. You can find both versions on the download page.


Downloads:
Download MGE from PES
Download MGE from TESNexus
Directx 9.0c Latest Version
Distant Land Interior/Weather Fix (by harlanrm) - optional download
Tweaked Water Shader (by harlanrm) - optional download


Screenshots:
(with infinite view distance and reflective water)
1 - 2 - 3 - 4

(with optional Bloom/HDR/Tweaked Water Shaders/IVD/Reflective Water)
Grazelands Dawn
Grazelands Dawn
Ascadian Isles Dawn
Ascadian Isles Dawn
Ascadian Isles Evening
Vivec Sunset
Vivec Sunset
Vivec Sunset
Vivec Sunset
Balmora Morning
Balmora Morning
Molag Amur



Note: If you're going to try generating distant land for Ald Vendras, make sure you download texture fix from here (scroll to bottom of page for link) and extract it to Morrowind's \data\textures\ folder before running the distant land generator or MGE will crash trying to generate the cell textures.



If anyone asks any questions about MGE, please redirect them to post in this thread, as it makes sense to keep them all in one place, that way people may be able to find the answers here or in Previous threads.

got the problem fixed, thanks the program was automaticaly creating another folder withing the destination (/NewFolder), thereby screwing itself over. cant wait to play

Splendid! =)

Just something to note,
Loading times with Shaders enabled increase
Disabling FOG increase performance by a good amount

I read 15th thread of this, I have a problem the same as Alphax that I believe it has not been answered. When using MGE, minimap would not display correctly. When I uninstall MGE, minimap will display correctly so I am certain that it is MGE causing it. I heavily rely on minimap and not to world map for the name of caves,houses,etc. especially if I have quest. Any idea how to remedy this?

Can you explain what is wrong with the minimap?

I having a bit of trouble during the "Creating Cell Textures" part of the wizard. Its stuck at 3 bars and wont go any farther.

It takes a VERY long time. I suggest you just let it sit. Patience is key.

I had the same problem and I just waited it out and it worked fine for me.

You might be confused when I mentioned minimap. I'm not referring to 1X1 inch minimap on the lower right corner but to map that has customizable size whereby you can see world map and local map. When I go to different exterior cell and it loads, the rendering of local map will not be correct. It is like it will render below exterior cell. Example when I was going to siltstrider north of Vivec Foreign Quarter, in the local map it will show my local at the center of Vivec Foreign Quarter Canton. I was planning to make a screenshot but MGE automatically disabled screenshot.

In MGE, go to the Input tab, click Launch Macro Editor. Click the PS (Printscreen) button. Then in the drop down menus select 'Function' and 'Take Screenshot'. Click save, close and you will be able to take screenshots.

Go ingame and take a screenshot of your minimap, I don't think I can help you, but it may help someone help you. Is your world map off centered as well?

It seems to work fine for me: (pic)

Worldmap is working fine.

Yes, I always display it by clicking the upper right corner button. I don't like using 1X1 inch minimap, it's too small.

Ok I will get a screenshot.

EDIT:Here is the screenshot. Okay I'll try Dragon32's advice

I got the new direct X downloaded, its asking for a place to put the extracted files. Where do i extract to?

I am having the same problem as skaari, these are his screen shots
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v356/Sho...xtras/part1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v356/Sho...xtras/part2.jpg

The screen seems to flicker from light to dark once every few seconds.

This is a noob question but does MGE let you take screenshots in game, if it does can u explain how to use it?

These two might help: (i)Try using Wrye Mash's fix map function, (ii) look in your Data Files\Textures folder and delete any _land_default.* files in the root of that folder. If someone's included a non-standard size one in their texture replacer it can cause map problems.
Anywhere. I extract mine to a temporary folder, run dxsetup.exe and then delete the temporary folder.

@ Basilboy64: See Vality's post all of four posts above yours

Yes, read my post about 4 posts above yours - and please in future only quote what you need to, not an entire post.

Wrye Mash don't correct it.

I don't use any texture replacer. Maybe it can be corrected by configuring MGE I used default MGE. Vality7, what is your configuration?

My configuration....well most of it is just set by default after having clicked "Best Quality" on the Main tab - I don't think I really changed anything other than maybe the AA, but that would have absolutely nothing to do with the map. I don't have distant land ticked at the moment, and only one active shader (HDR5), resolution is 1280*960 fullscreen, that's about it.

This is a great mod! I can't wait to get it working, but I'm having a slight problem. The game runs fine when indoors, but the minute I step outside, it crashes. Some help would be great.

Oh, and I get the message "Could not load world mesh for distant land".

Generate Distant Land First

edit: nevermind, I figured it out. Thanks!

I have this problem as well. Seems to happen around dusk.


edit: fixed it. Changed fog mode to "range vertex".

Hullo. I have been using MGE for a while now, playing with the various settings and generating distant land with various qualities and so forth, but I must be missing something obvious, because I cannot get my Balmora to look like that screen shot. That is, I can't see distant buildings - they only pop up when I get close enough. Do I just need to decrease minimum static size or what?

is range vertex the one that disables distant lands (or am i thinking of something else?)

Did you make sure that the 'Use Distant Statics' box (in the Global Graphics tab) is checked?

Yes, it is definitely enabled. Although perhaps I should disable it and see how it looks.

No, the distant statics were definitely on, as there is a hugely noticeable absence with them turned off. Before when arriving by stilt rider I could see the far wall of Balmora over the river, but not all of the houses. With distant statics turned off, there are fewer houses and no wall. I suppose I could try regenerating distant land with smaller statics settings or something. Anyone have any other ideas?

When I had the problem (I've just done a re-install of MW and don't have MGE back yet), Mash would fix it (for a little while) and it turns out that I did have a _land_default.tga file in my Textures folder (256x256). Still... I'll have to try it again without mods.

Here's another one: How do I get the way distant land to kind of 'blur' out, like in the screenshots. Mine just stops where the land stops and looks a bit unrealistic.

bump

Nope, it's a way of handling fog (Render state tab > Fog mode)
Try that, also a screenshot would help me picture your problem.
Global graphics > Fog distance. Try playing around with that value. Mine's at 15 btw. Can't remember if that's the default or not...

Tried it, and it fixed the problem. I just wasn't taking the static sizes down far enough. What do you use?

This mod never worked for me, and probably never will. If I walk outside with distant lands enabled, it crashes. I generated land textures, meshed, etc.
EDIT: And how would I go about turning on HDR? I must be blind because I can't find the option.

I think the last time I did it (I was identifying plugins that crashed distant static generation) I just left it at the defaults, I'm not sure if the wizard adjusts those based on gfx card or not. Might have to redo that stage...
What world mesh setting did you use? Try toning that down (I use High on a 8800GTX). Timeslip's said that no gfx card around at the moment can cope with the higher settings (Insane?)
Misc tab > check both "Update shader variables" and "Supply HDR info to shaders".

Tools tab > Shader editor

Use the "Select technique" combobox and Preview to find one you want (e.g. DX9 HLSL HDR*). Then "Edit active". Double click the one(s) you want. Click Save. If you've selected more than one you can use the "Preview active chain" to get a feel for what they look like together. Use the Up and Down in the "Edit active" to change the order the shaders are applied until you're happy.

I'd suggest assigning a key in the Macro Editor to the function "Toggle HW shader" - I've set mine to "H".

woaah haha
the land is appearing at far distance which looks really nice
but, when i walk through a town, the buildings and other architecture (walls, bridges in balmora) appear at a much closer distance than the land is appearing which looks VERY strange

i've got land distance at 3, fog distance at 12
everything else is morrowind default except for "reflective water", "keep fps constant", and the screen resolution is set to 1280x800 (which is also nice cause everybody looked short and stubby in 1024x768).

is architecture considered a "static"?
previous posts would make me believe so but...
still not sure

Do you have "Use distant statics" checked on the "Global graphics" tab? You need that checked to er... see the distant statics

nope it wasn't
i was wondering what "statics" meant
i'm like.. what's not static?

Turned it on, most buildings are appearing but some are still appearing among the other buildings as i get closer.

That sounds similar to what was happening to me. Try reducing static size in the last step of generating distant land.

I seem to be having problems with distant statics, related to specific mods

MGE CTDs when "New Suran Extended" is enabled and has a buffer overflow when "The Glory Road" is enabled

I have a feeling that non-standard .nifs are to blame, though i don't know how to fix this, other than not having distant statics in these areas

MGE 3.3.2 works fine for me but what exactly does filter world texture and the one beneath it do in world texture generator? I looked in the HTML readme but i can't see anything relating to these options. Any information appreciated.

I have a problem with MGE, though I'm usually bad at explaining these things so I hope it's clear enough.

When one first uses it, you need to use the tools and then allow it to create the things right? Well, it starts off good, but in the fourth tab, statics I think it is, I always get a windows error saying the program needs to shut down.

I've tried it several times now but it won't work. Is there anything I can do that will fix this?

Thanks in advance

What version of MGE are you using? If its the latest version generate your textures and meshes and then avoid static generation and finish. This'll stop you from having to repeatedly regenerate them. Then don't use use your morrowind .ini and skip land and mesh generation. Then try with just the default morrowind ones if it goes smoothly then its probably a static thats been added by one of your mods.

Ah, you can actually skip that? Goody.

I'll try that when I get home, thanks

No problem glad to be able to help.

alright
this time i tried to change the size of the statics when i was creating distant land files
did that, started up game, error message D:<
MGE could not load world meshes or something to that effect

before i just try to create all the files again, is there an quicker way to fix this?
i picked the low quality mesh

also, every time i try to recreate the files, it tells me it will overwrite, i click yes, then i get an error message about access being denied or something
this happens if i try to create files a second time after installing MGE (I have to reinstall every time I want to create files)

Grrrrrgggg

k scratch that
reinstalled. set everything up again. worked
whoever said a foolish man tries something twice but expects a different result was born before computers were invented
and probably didn't know many women
but i digress

still having problems with statics
but i can't take the hit to my loading time
so i'm giving up on distant lands
at least i get better resolution

Hate to ask a nooby question, but when you make a screenshot when MGE is running, where does it save? i've looked all over My Pictures and the morrowind folder, but the screenshot isnt there.

I can't find them either... WTF does MGE store its screenshots?!!!



I have another question, also. Is there any way to stop full screen shaders from affecting the UI?
I'm using a HDR shader and it works perfectly, even the HUD isn't normally affected. But as soon as I bring up my inventory or enter dialogue, the HUD and UI suddenly become very bright and blurred, making it very difficult to read anything.
I suppose I could bind a random key to "toggle HW shader", but this is far from ideal.
Since the HUD is unaffected normally I'm guessing it may be possible to stop this, somehow?

If you're on Vista, have UAC on and installed in the default location, who knows where your files are Otherwise, they should be in your Morrowind root folder...

Where have all the lists of "statics to do funny size things with" gone? I'm getting the classic "Ebonheart Dragon Statue" things happening...

No, I don't have vista. But the screenshots aren't in my morrowind root folder

Also, ANOTHER problem I'm having is that when the UI comes up in interiors, random textures disappear and you can see the distant land in their place :S
It's more than a little annoying


Oops, i seem to have posted this twice

No, I don't have vista. But the screenshots aren't in my morrowind root folder

ANOTHER problem I'm having is that when the UI comes up in interiors, random textures disappear and you can see the distant land in their place :S
It's more than a little annoying

One more problem is that when I enable any of the DX9 HDR shaders, a smaller copy of the screen appears overlayed on the top left corner of my screen.

If it helps, I recently bought a new graphics card (Radeon HD3870) since when various problems have arisen (maybe because i can do more with this one)

I have a Radeon X800XT card with 256mb and full direct X 9 support, but for some reason, distant buildings and objects do not show up as an option in MGE for me. Whats the problem?

i just noticed my water has some kind of weird animation to it D:<
i like the original water better

is MGE doing this and how do i change it back?

Certain mods kill the statics generator. I know Brother Juniper's Twin Lamps mod is one of them. I seem to recall there being a list of some known ones in an older MGE thread, but I'm not positive about that. Just remove any mods that you don't need statics for, and if you keep getting errors, it'll have to be trial and error to find out which one(s) is at fault.


What version of MGE are you using? There should be an option to choose 'distant land' and 'distant statics'(on the second tab, I believe), and then you will have to generate them.


Yes. That was the trade off for distant land and statics. You get it back by disabling those features.

edit:spelling

what if they are disabled?

Maybe just having MGE running switches the water? I was pretty sure that if you turn off distant land, you get your water back. I don't turn off distant land, so I suppose I had no proof, though.

The latest one, and I see the tab for generate distant land, but there is no 'distant statics' button.

Uninstalled MGE, crappy water is still there


now i'm a little p.o.ed

i still even have stuttering in between loading screens
D:<

In the Morrowind launcher, there's an option (under Options) for "pixel shading". That's where your nice water comes from. Otherwise, with a shader model 3.0 graphics card, you can enable nice reflective water (linked from first post ITT).

phew
thanks for that one
i was a little D:< for a second

Well they should be in the same place as Morrowind.exe. Right click on "My Computer" > "Search..." > "Search for files and folders named:" > *Screenshot*

MGE Screenshots are named "MGE Screenshot #.bmp" (or whatever filetype you chose on the Render State tab)
Here's one I saved:
Tried this? And/or create a macro to toggle Distant Land On and Off.
Odd, I have no problem with Brother Juniper's TL mod The ones I have problems with are: DungeonGolag.esp, marcMoriEstate.esp, House of Mannequins v1.0.esp, newarrows.esp and Wolf Manor 2.5.esp. PirateLord also said there were problems with The Zone (although I think that was for distant land creation). AFAIK, these are the only plugins people have reported as crashing distant static generation.
Generating Distant Statics is done as part of the "Distant land file creation wizard" on the Tools tab.

BTW, what's the difference between the various distant land interior fixes?

Yacoby's just disables distant land in interiors, Supernatural's disables under certain weather conditions. Harlanrm's does both of those. I just use that one now.

man any distant statics gives me a whooping 15 fps, its unplayable with this, unless I just put distant lands only, a real shame because it does look pretty. I have a 1900xt c2d 2gb ram, do you guys get similar performance?

Edit:Also what is the best shader tha doesn't affect performance? HDR1 seems the best for now are there any other worthwhile shaders? seems all the other ones cause insane performance hit.

Ok, couple of bugs here... something to do with FPS optimiser, fog, and statics (and I regenerated them using the statics list posted):

Holes in the landscape
More holes
The Ebonheart statue again

Do I need to change my settings, delete the distant statics, change the statics list again, ...?

Hi all!

If I use "distand land" function, the result is not good.

See these picture:
with distand land 1
with distand land 2
without distand land

These pictures from beginning of the game, MEG is latest.

Am I the only one who prefers no distant land? I love the fog!

(Also, MGE is awesome - I use it to bump MW to 1680x1050)

I use MGE(3.3.2), and I do see some loading time lag and FPS hits. I am sure that it is my GPU (Nvidia 5600FX). Should I revert back to version 3.0.3 for now? I'm not looking for a new card at the moment, but used to get good distant effects the the 3.0.3 version of MGE. Any thoughts on this are appreciated.

Oh, and if I had to go back, what is the easiest method of doing so?
Thanks,

Raed

I too started to manually add to a statics.txt file the structures that weren't showing correctly in Balmora unless the meshes size display was set low. That's a very nice thing as you can have nice looking cities without killing your FPS by lowering the global statics size display in MGE and in the end I did it for a lot of other meshes and still add some from time to time.

What won't show so don't bother with it :
- All of the BM trees but I think everybody already know it. I tried with different textures so I suppose it's a meshe problem. That point regarding these trees was probably aborded on an older thread but I can't find it. Btw if anybody know of a model replacer for these trees I'll be super happy if you could tell me about it as all of my searches ended up as failures.
- The BM ice layer over the lakes. regarding that point something really weird happens on my computer. Distant land can't display these ice layers with the exception of Terrain_BM_icelayer_12 (the big hole in the ice). Actually it will always display it even if I ask him to not do so. I don't know what to do there.

Since Dragon32 had the good idea to show us his own file maybe I can add other ones from my statics.txt file :

For Balmora and other hlaalu towns (some of the buildings labeled from ex_hlaalu_b_01 to b_28 already display with standard settings but it is of no consequences so testing wich ones could be removed from the list would be useless) :
#Hlaalu structures
ex_hlaalu_b_01=1
ex_hlaalu_b_02=1
ex_hlaalu_b_03=1
ex_hlaalu_b_04=1
ex_hlaalu_b_05=1
ex_hlaalu_b_06=1
ex_hlaalu_b_07=1
ex_hlaalu_b_08=1
ex_hlaalu_b_09=1
ex_hlaalu_b_10=1
ex_hlaalu_b_11=1
ex_hlaalu_b_12=1
ex_hlaalu_b_13=1
ex_hlaalu_b_14=1
ex_hlaalu_b_15=1
ex_hlaalu_b_16=1
ex_hlaalu_b_17=1
ex_hlaalu_b_18=1
ex_hlaalu_b_19=1
ex_hlaalu_b_20=1
ex_hlaalu_b_21=1
ex_hlaalu_b_22=1
ex_hlaalu_b_23=1
ex_hlaalu_b_24=1
ex_hlaalu_b_25=1
ex_hlaalu_b_26=1
ex_hlaalu_b_27=1
ex_hlaalu_b_28=1
ex_hlaalu_buttress_04=1
ex_hlaalu_buttress_05=1
ex_hlaalu_canal_01=1
ex_hlaalu_canal_02=1
ex_hlaalu_canal_03=1
ex_hlaalu_canal_06=1
ex_hlaalu_canal_12=1
ex_hlaalu_canal_13=1
ex_hlaalu_dsteps_03=1
ex_hlaalu_steps_06=1
ex_hlaalu_steps_07=1

Here is a screenshot of the result : http://archibald-tk.deviantart.com/art/Vis...art-05-75048912 with more house of course since it's the Balmora Expansion mod but that should give you an general idea.
In that screenshot statics size is 900/700. Letting it at the base value of 1000/800 will still display as much houses in the city.

Also that may be of interest to some of you, that won't eat a lot of FPS but that will allow many of the docks, wooden or rope bridge to reflect in the water. :
#Non affiliated structures
ex_common_plat_cent=1
ex_common_plat_end=1
ex_de_docks_128=1
ex_de_docks_3way=1
ex_de_docks_3wayb=1
ex_de_docks_3ways=1
ex_de_docks_3waysb=1
ex_de_docks_4way=1
ex_de_docks_4wayb=1
ex_de_docks_center=1
ex_de_docks_centerb=1
ex_de_docks_centers=1
ex_de_docks_centersb=1
ex_de_docks_corner_01=1
ex_de_docks_corner_02=1
ex_de_docks_cornerb_01=1
ex_de_docks_cornerb_02=1
ex_de_docks_corners_01=1
ex_de_docks_corners_02=1
ex_de_docks_cornersb_01=1
ex_de_docks_cornersb_02=1
ex_de_docks_end=1
ex_de_docks_endc=1
ex_de_docks_ends=1
Ex_De_Docks_Gate=1
ex_de_docks_piling=1
Ex_De_Docks_Piling_01=1
ex_de_docks_pilingb=1
ex_de_docks_pilings=1
ex_ropebridge_512_01=1
ex_ropebridge_1024_01=1
ex_ropebridge_2048_01=1

Here are some other buildings and shacks, as well as the small stone walls. Once again impact on FPS shall be low. I suppose shacks and buildings value could be safely changed to 2 :
ex_common_building_01=1
ex_common_building_02=1
ex_common_building_03=1
ex_de_shack_01=1
ex_de_shack_02=1
ex_de_shack_03=1
ex_de_shack_04=1
ex_de_shack_05=1
ex_drystonewall_c_01=1
ex_drystonewall_d_01=1
ex_drystonewall_end_01=1
ex_drystonewall_s_01=1

Finally a slightly more complete list of Imperial meshes that shall allow you to no longer have missing parts of the Imperial fortresses when you look at them in the distance (may also help with the vanishing imperial meshes problem at close range, not 100% sure on that one but I didn't encounter it for a long time) :
#Imperial structures
ex_imp_dock_01=1
ex_imp_dock_02=1
ex_imp_bridge_01=2
ex_imp_bridge_02=2
ex_imp_foundation_01=1
ex_imp_guardtower_01=1
ex_imp_guardtower_02=1
ex_imp_plat_01=1
ex_imp_towers_top_01=1
ex_imp_towers_med_01=2
ex_imp_towers_light_01=2
ex_imp_towerb_top_01=1
ex_imp_towerb_med_01=2
ex_imp_towerb_light_01=2
ex_imp_wall_01=1
ex_imp_wall_arch_01=1
ex_imp_wall_tower_01=1
ex_imp_wall_corner_01=1
ex_imp_wall_corner_02=1
ex_imp_wall_stairs_01=1
ex_imp_wall_stairs_02=1

That way you shall be able to see far more interesting things in the distance without having to change MGE settings

How much HDD space does cell 2048 and world 4096 take?

I'm having trouble getting rid of MGE. Starting the game gives this error:
"MGE Error. 3. Could not open the MGE Settings File."

I can't find whatever's left of it. Help?

edit: Thanks!

Thx for answer, but now please tell me how possible see this under Morrowind game. I see only Zoom function only... Sorry my english.

I downloaded Morrowind Graphic Extender. I generated all the new meshes, textures and statics required for displaying distant land. I check the show distant land along with all other options which is associated with distant land. (Picture ---> )http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa253/G...nse/namnls.jpg)
But the distant land didn't show up. Then I looked in the render state tab and unchecked the Display Fox option. Didn't work....
I played around with lots of other settings, but nothing has worked
(I have the required DirectX as wells as Tribunal and Bloodmoon with its latest patch. )
What should I do to make this work?

Edit: If it makes any diffrence my graphic card is an ATI Radeon 1950 Pro.

can anyone help me?

To be honest Grand Duke... I am watching your quest to find the solution to this problem very closely... I have an identical problem - no big difference in the horizon drawing between stock and MDEed morrowind... I also checked if all my "ticks are ticked"... Anyone there to help us???

Hi! My card too this. Tools/Distant land file create is finished? Then one tip: U run morrowind from original icon "Morrowind Launcher.exe", not directly "Morrowind.exe".

i always run Morrowind from the Morrowindlauncher.exe. but it doesn't work

I've just download MGE 3.3.2 and I'm a bit lost for what to do, is there a guide or readme that could take me though step by step? Also I play morrowind heavily modded with about 100 different texture mods so does this make a difference to the way I install it or the way it will run once it is intstalled properly? Thanks for any replies.

Thanks for sharing your statics file, it was really helpful. I love all the new things I can see now.

However, I'm not sure I understand your sentence about setting the statics values. I have been leaving my statics values at the defaults of 800/1000. But it sounds like you are using the values of 700/900. You seem to br claiming that you can still see as much as someone who uses the values of 800/1000. If my understanding of the values is correct, you should be seeing more than a normal person because you have chosen more aggressive numbers.

For example:

I have said "only show me things that are greater than 800 units in size", where you have said "only show me things that are greater than 700 units in size". If I'm understanding the statics values correctly, you've allowed for smaller things to be displayed, which would result in more objects to display. Therefore, you'll probably get objects someone that is using a value of 800 won't get.

If I'm completely misunderstanding the statics values, please let me know. And thanks again for sharing your statics.txt file.

Your interpretation is correct, it's me who wasn't clear in my sentence.

I wanted to say that thanks to the statics.txt file the amount of buildings shown on that screen was independent from the fact I had more aggressive numbers than what people usually use, and that even with lower settings the town will look the same. But indeed if you use a 800/1000 combo some other statics will not be displayed compared to my shot (usually from 700 to 800 a good amount of trees disappear).

Sorry, sometime I have quite a hard time being understandable.

I've been running MGE for almost 2 weeks now, and really like it. I don't plan on ever going back...

My only "complaint" is the MGE water looks too fake. Vanilla Morrowind water had tiny ripples on the surface, and when it rained, you could see the ripples from the raindrops falling into the water.

MGE's water is too smooth, like mercury. There is no rippley effect to it. And a pouring rain makes not a single ripple.

Is there any way to have the best of both worlds? I'd be tickled senseless if I could have vanilla Morrowind water in combination with the distant visibility of MGE.

I've played around with the Pixle Shading setting on the Morrowind launcher's Options menu, and with turning off and back on Use Distant Land and Use Distant Statics on the MGE Global Graphics tab. No difference in the appearance of the surface of the water.

Any suggestions?

OK - can anyone tell me exactly which part of the distant land creation process and which part of it's options (while enabling it) corresponds to thew actual horizon drawing??? I have literally tried eveything.... no luck so far... Help!

I helped my friend install MGE on his computer. I did it the same way I did it on my computer, and it worked. why does the same process work on his computer, but not on mine?

In the Distant Land File Creation Wizard, in the "Meshes" section there's a checkbox option. I can't get to the dialog without going through the Texture generation (which would take ages!) step. Anyway, the checkbox changes the way that the cell and world meshes are created. The "seam" you're seeing there is where the world rendered by the morrowind engine is replaced by the world as rendered by MGE. IIRC, by default the meshes created in the MGE wizard have some kind of "vertex smoothing" done on them. You can try recreating the distant land meshes with this checkbox either unchecked or checked - whatever the opposite of the default setting is.
If the problem is just the reflected boat in the water and you have the Siege at Firewatch plugin then that boat is from that mod. It's disabled until the quest starts but is visible to MGE when generating statics. Did you try using the list of statics I posted above? Copy and paste that text into a new .TXT file (and add Archibald_TK's values - thanks dude ). On the "Statics" part of the Wizard click the Browse button ("List of statics which override the sizes set above"), locate your new text file and select it. That has the Firemoth boat disabled so you should never see the reflections, or bits of the boat as in the first shot. The bits of a boat is similar to what Alphax had - that's MGE rendering the boat not the Morrowind engine.
As to loading lag, if you don't use MWSE mods then disable the internal MWSE (on the "Misc" tab). To uninstall, use the uninstaller. Manually delete dinput8.dll and d3d8.dll (if present). If they're present also delete:

• Bethesda Softworks\Morrowind\mge3
• Bethesda Softworks\Morrowind\Data Files\MGE meshes
• Bethesda Softworks\Morrowind\Data Files\MGE videos
• Bethesda Softworks\Morrowind\Data Files\distantland
• Bethesda Softworks\Morrowind\Data Files\shaders

Should do it.
What do you want to do? Set Screen resolution and anti aliasing on the Global Graphics tab, Render State for anisotropic filtering and mip maps. Distant land is done through a wizard on the Tools tab.
Best I've come across is harlnrm's shader
Used to have an ATi X800XT. Ran MGE v3.0.3 fine. I upgraded to the (IIRC) v7.1 Catalysts. Bang. No more distant land goodness. I fixed this by downgrading my drivers to some third party ones (NGO, I think) based off of the v6.6 Catalysts. Worked fine then.

I tried that, water still has the glassy smooth surface. Maybe this is just something I'll have to live with.

Does MGE significantly increase the load times of cells? For example, if you start a new game and head out of Seyda Neen towards Vivec, as you pass the stilt strider, there is a cell boundary at the bottom of the hill next to the tree on your right. Without MGE installed, the game paused for about 1.5-2 seconds at the tree. However, with MGE loaded I seem to be getting pauses of 7 to 8 seconds. My pauses seem to be much higher all over the map. Typically my game would pause for only about 1 to 2 seconds in most places on the map. Now my pauses about a minimum of about 5 seconds everywhere. It really makes the game unplayable. Should I be experiencing these kinds of pauses with MGE?

I generated all of my LOD data at the default values. I sent my fog distances to 2/3 from the default of 2/8.

BTW, this is a clean install of XP. This is what I did:

Installed XP SP2 to an Mtron SSD
Installed Chipset Drivers
Installed Ethernet Driver
Installed Video Drivers (8800GT)
Installed SB Audigy 2ZS Driver
Installed Direct X 9.0c (Off my Hellgate:Lodon CD, it had all the required DLLs for MGE)
Installed .NET 2.0
Installed Morrowind
Installed Tribunal
Installed Bloodmoon
Installed Bloodmoon patch 1.6.1820
Installed MGE 3.3.2

As a test, I installed my computer twice, once with the chipset (nForce4) IDE drivers, and once without. The same pauses occurred no matter whether I had the driver or not. I also copied the game to an antiquated rotating platter disk and tried running it from there, same thing. I also made sure that my audio was set to Software Mode.

On the Global Graphics tab try reducing the Land Distance setting to 2 or even 1.

I decided to take a little more analytical approach to the MGE cell loading issue. I did a test run from Seyda Neen towards Pelegaid. I used a stop watch to record the time it took for the first three cell loads to occur. The first three cell loading areas are:

* Just down the hill from the stilt strider in Seyda Neen, next to the tree on the right.

* Midway down the saddle to Pelegaid, just before the tree on the right. Right where the worm usually spawns.

* On the road to Pelegaid, near a tuft of grass in the road.

I did four runs for each test. All times are in seconds. Values of x.xxx mean I screwed up that leg of the run and didn't get that time. I did a couple of semi-pointless runs just to make sure my method was sound. I have included those results here for completeness. All times were taken on the following hardware with a clean install of XP and nothing but drivers and Morrowind installed:

Athlon 64 3800+ (single core)
nForce4 Motherboard
8800GT Stock
Mtron 32GB SSD (100MBs read / 80MBs write)
2GB DDR PC3200


So, what kind of analysis can we draw from these numbers?

* Simply installing MGE increased cell load times by 170-220% (for you non-math people, that means cell load times are 1.7-2.2 times slower). You don't even have to go into the GUI to configure anything. The simple fact that you have MGE installed is enough to increase your load times.

* Turning on Ansiotropic Filtering and Antialiasing doesn't effect the load times at all. This result should have been obvious without running the test, but I ran it for completeness.

* Turning on Distant Lands at the default values of 2/15, didn't increase the load times over the hit that was already taken for installing MGE in the first place. Distant land appears to be free, so it might as well be used. Modifying the fog values to a lower number didn't appear to have any real impact on cell load times.

* Turning on Statics caused an increased in cell load times of 260-370% over vanilla, and 150-185% over MGE with just Distant Land enabled.

Although the numbers didn't turn out as bad as I'd expected (based on my initial observations), they do lend credence to fact that the game felt much more unplayable. With load times, on average, being three times longer than normal, it is no wonder it seemed like the game paused for an eternity when loading cells.

So, is anyone else willing to run some tests and find out if I'm alone? Is everyone else putting up with these same kind of cell load numbers I'm experiencing? I've got an E8400 coming in the mail this week, so I'll be building my new gaming machine by this weekend. I'll try and update this information to see if the new equipment makes any difference.

One thing that I have noted, well actually two,
- Water Shader Enabled = Less FPS Everywhere
- Loading with shader makes loading times 3 times longer

Interesting. The first one makes sense. However, the second one doesn't make much sense to me. I guess I'll have to go back and test with the pixel shader water too.

For the loading 3 times longer, When I said shader, I meant HDR/Bloom/Blur Ones.

Well it does make sense because MGE gets loaded as MW starts, and any shaders are applied to the entire application, not just to the game world.

How many active shaders are you using? Which ones?

Basically I want morrowind to look as good as possible. I have a pretty decent computer so it will be able to handle it but I'm not sure what files to add when using the distant land tool in the wizard tab. Also are there any other tools in MGE that can make my game look better? My expertise in modding morrowind are limited to mostly just cutting and pasting texture mods so any help would be appreciated. Thanks

compability with the morrowind resolution changer or can this tool change te resolution also to a high resolution ( 1600x1200 or something like that )

Is it possible to use Distant Land without Bloodmoon?

The Meshes tab (where you specify the values like Very Low, High, Very High, etc.) dictates how much time and effort is put into trying to make the distant land contours actually reflect what the contours are really like in those regions. The higher you set this value, the more ripples and bumps you'll get in your distant land. This has no effect on the actual texturing of the distant land.

The texturing of the distant land is controlled by the "World texture resolution" value on the Textures tab of the wizard. It determines how much variation in coloring is shown on the distant land contours. Statics tend to block out a lot of this coloring, so it isn't too important if you plan to use Statics. However, if you don't use Statics, then you might want to bump this up to 8192, to give more variation in the coloring of the distant land. I find the default value of 2048 is just to muddy to make out and kind of detail.

Texturing of what I like the call the midrange land (the land between where the engine might normally stop rendering and the distant lands at the horizon) is controlled by the "Cell texture resolution" value on the Textures tab of the wizard.

The only way to get distant lands to look like what they would look like if you were up close, it to use Statics. The large rocks will be generated as Statics and placed in front of the distant land.

I hope that helps.

On the Main tab click the "Best Quality" button. Then click the "View max AA and AF" button. make a note of the numbers. On the Global Graphics tab set the "Antialiasing level" to the maximum your card supports, on the "Render state" tab set the "Anisotropic filtering level" to the maximum too.

Back to Global Graphics, your card may support a Z-buffer of D32. Try it.

On the "morrowind.ini" tab you can try enabling "High detail shadows", but from what I understand this can slaughter your framerates.

"Tools", Start the "Distant Land File Creation Wizard". Get it to use the files from morrowind.ini. Remove these if you have them: DungeonGolag.esp, marcMoriEstate.esp, House of Mannequins v1.0.esp, newarrows.esp, Wolf Manor 2.5.esp. Just step through each stage accepting the defaults.

When that's all done go to the Global Graphics tab again and ensure there're checks in all the checkboxes on the right ("Use distant land" to "Use sm3 water shader" <--- assuming your gfx card supports Shader Model v3).

Now, you could add a fullscreen shader to, like a faked HDR. Have a look through some of my earlier posts as I've put a step by step in there.
Looks like MGE only goes up to 1280 x 1024 in fullscreen mode. As its just changing a registry setting I'd expect you could use the two together without pr 788 oblems. Could be wrong though
If you mean without the bloodmoon.esm loaded then, yes. If you mean with a game not patched to v1.6.1820 then, no (as the first post says).

1, Bloom... I turned it off though for loading reasons...

for some reason i cant select 16X, it says my graphics card doesnt support it and i have a 8800gts.

I prefer the fog too, feels more mysterious and atmospheric.

Which, Ansiotropic Filtering or Antialiasing?

Antialiasing i can only set it to 8x

The 8000 series' 16x AA is a bit weird, because it doesn't actually exist as a normal antialiasing mode. You have to set the mode to 8x instead, and then set a separate quality level option. MGE doesn't support changing that second option, so the best way to do it would be to set MGE to 2x and then use 'Enhance the application setting' mode in the nvidia control panel.

Eh, I think MGE may screw up with that. I had a strange issue where I used FPS optimiser to set resolution (so the resolution changer is completely redundant so far, except for the fact that you get sourcecode) and then MGE said that it couldn't read the resolution (or something). Then again, I may have been fiddling with the aspect ratio... can't remember how I fixed it . But the thing is, MGE reckons it can set my resolution to 1440x900 (my desktop res), so...

Oh, 1280x1024 is fine for my screen. I seem to remember that FPS Optimiser stores the resolution in the registry as a non-standard data type (DWORD??), hence the silliness. I just use MGE to set resolution and ignore FPS Optimiser. I guess if this resolution changer thingy is well behaved one could use that, and ignore MGE and FPSO for resolution changes.

MGE can detect itself my monitor resolution: 1680x1050 (21'' wide) but i have to use FPS Optimizer to change the Field of View degrees from 75(default) to 85.2(16:10 wide)
Is there a way to change the Field of View with MGE itself or with that other resolution changer so i can leave fps opt?

In order to get the absolute best performance out of MGE, and to clear up many of the graphic anomalies that occur when using it, I am creating a custom statics list. By setting both the near and far values to 32,000, I can get it so that MGE will not generate any statics except for what I specify in my statics file.

However, I seem to have come across a problem with a particular object, and I can't figure out what is going on. The object in question is ex_dae_ruin_01, a daedric ruin.

It's a tower looking ruin that usually has a bunch of things that look like flags (they're called claws) flying off the top of it. The flags typically come off some pillars near the top of the structure. For some reason, when MGE generates this object, it only generates the pillars that are on top of the structure. When it goes to render the object in the distance, it renders the pillars on the ground where the rest of the structure should have been.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on with this structure, and why MGE is having such difficulty with it? Any solutions?

hmm, I'm having some major lag issues with MGE. I'm beginning to think that the "best settings" option is the best for your computer, not for the game.

Anyways, what are the biggest FPS factors in MGE. Right now, I dont have fog or distant land enabled, so it cant be those. Anything else?

The "best quality" doesn't take your whole PC into consideration. All it does is query your video card drivers to find out what the highest level of Antialiasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) is supported. It then sets the AA and AF values in MGE to those highest levels. Just because your card supports those levels, it doesn't mean anything will be playable at those levels.

Since you aren't using distant lands, then your AA and AF levels must be too high. Start reducing the NNx numbers for each until you get something acceptable. If you have no idea what either of those are, then just Google on the terms and you'll find lots of examples for what each does for you. Usually, AA is going to make you take the biggest hit.

alright, thanks, just one more question. What makes the graphic's so sharp?

That would be Ansiotropic Filtering.

then what does AA do?

Gets rid of jaggies. As I said before, a Google search will show you lots of samples.

What is the recommended settings for distant land (meshes, texture size), with an 8800 Ultra and 3 gigs of ram?

You should use Very High Meshes. You can try Ultra High, but is is believed there is no card out there that can do them. If the game crashes when you first enter an outdoor cell, you'll need to scale back to Very High.

Set your World Texture Resolution to 8192.

Cell Texture Resolution is a personal choice depending on what kind of texture mods you are using. For the default textures, I think the default value of 512 is a good value. Setting the value to 1024 or 2048 will make the mid range terrain look even more like the close terrain. BTW, 2048 textures will take 4GB of diskspace and the better part of an hour to generate on a state of the art machine.

I am currently generating screenshots of most combinations of values for inclusion in the ReadMe, or for posting on a site somewhere.

Silverglade, those screenshots would be most useful, especially if I can use them on the site in my sig

Does MGE work with visual pack 2.11, 2.2, and XT by qarl?

I use those and MGE works OK, so yeah.

MGE will work with basically any mod, as it's not a mod, it's just a program that runs in the background.

I'm afraid I need some major help. I'm using MGE 3.3.2, GeForce 7900GT with 93.71 Forceware, lates DirectX9 updates, etc.

I'm having trouble with distant land/statics. I've generated and enabled distant land and statics without any errors in MGE, but there are some major problems in the game. I've succeeded in slaughtering my FPS, but that's about it, just take a look at this screen shot.

http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh23/by...reenshot1-1.jpg

There is no distant land. There are no distant statics. The water is awful and the reflections don't work at all (they're all just that blue color instead of actual refections). Does anybody have any helpful advice/questions for me? Or would I be better off going back to my old MGE 3.0.3?

edit - also, I installed the water shader and weather fix linked to in the first post of this thread.

Well you see, I tried putting meshes at very high, and I don't even want to think about putting textures that high, and still my game runs very slow and distant land does not show up (yes I checked the distant land box), because it could not handle that.

When using MGE for the first time, you should start simple and work up from there. Until you know it is working, there is no sense messing with a bunch of settings.

After installing MGE, but before running it, you should read the ReadMe, especially the Introduction, Requirements, and Known Issues sections.

Before you ever run MGE, you should start the Morrowind Launcher, click on Options and disable the Pixel Shaders (set to Off).

When you first launch MGE, you shouldn't mess with any of the settings. If you already have, then click the Morrowind Defaults button on the Main tab.

Exit MGE. Make sure no other Morrowind background applications, like FPS Optimizer or Morrowind Script Extender (MWSE), are running. Launch Morrowind from the Morrowind Launcher. If you don't see a message in the upper left corner of your screen that says "Morrowind Graphics Extender (v3.3.2)", then you have issues as MGE isn't working.

Once you are able to see the message, you are ready to start playing with the settings. Exit Morrowind and run the MGE GUI.

Now, you are ready to run the Distant Land File Creation Wizard. Go to the Tools tab and start the wizard.

Until you know that the software will work on you PC and graphics card, I suggest you use the absolute minimum settings, even if you have the best PC in the world. This will put as little stress on your system as possible and allow you to test faster as the lowest settings take the least time to generate.

On the first tab, Plugins, click the Use morrowind.ini button. Delete everything from the list except for the ESM's for Morrowind, Tribunal, and Bloodmoon. Click Continue.

On the Textures tab, set both values to 128 and leave the check boxes alone. Click Continue.

The wizard will go onto the next tab while the first tab is still doing its work. Wait until the Continue button ungreys on the Meshes tab, and select Very Low from the drop down and click Continue. Once again, the software will go to the next tab while it continues to work on the previous tab.

On the Statics tab, click Skip when it becomes available. There is no point in generating Statics at this point, until you verify that Distant Land is working. Click Finish.

Go to the Global Graphics tab, and check the check box to Use Distant Land. Set the Land Distance value to 2, and the Fog Distance value to 15 (they should already default to that).

Exit MGE and Launch Morrowind from the Morrowind Launcher.

Load a save game or start a new game. Personally, I always start a new game.

Go to a high location and see what you see. I suggest you continue to tweak your distant land settings until you get them to the way you want, and once they are the way you want, then go ahead and generate the Statics. Once you have all of that done, only then should you start messing with the other settings in MGE.

Be warned that setting Cell Texture Resolution, in the Distant Land Setup Wizard, consumes over 90% of the time needed to generate the distant land data. On a 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo machine, the value off 1024 takes 20 minutes (1.2GB) to generate, 2048 takes 1 hour and 20 minutes (4.3GB) to generate, and 4096 takes 7 hours and 30 minutes (16GB) to generate.

That is very odd. I have XP 32bit, 4GB, 8800GT and an E8400 C2D and the game is easily playable for me at 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF (no vsync) using 512/8192, Very High, no statics. I get upper 20s to 70 FPS. This is a dedicated gaming machine though, and I typically only have two to three games installed on it at any one time. There is no other software that gets installed on this machine/ I don't even browse the web from this machine.

Edit:
Another thing, if your machine can't handle the meshes at the value you set, the game typically crashes to the desktop, it doesn't just not generate the distant land. If you aren't seeing the land but the game is still playable, then you have some other issue. I suggest you check out the post right above this one.

Hey, it's been a long time since I read an updates on MGE and I was wondering if any work has been done in fixing the problem of the water flickering through the ground after resting/waiting in or outdoors. I have an ATI x1900GT.

Silverglade, thank you for the very thorough response. Unfortunately, you were talking to somebody who has been using and abusing MGE for nigh two years now so a lot of your suggestions were quite, uh... superfluous. But, nevertheless, I thank you for taking so much time to help me.

I reinstalled MGE v3.0.3 and recreated distant land and it worked perfectly. Then I reinstalled MGE v3.3.2, loaded up the game without changing anything, and the distant land no longer worked so I recreated it with the newer MGE. My water now reflects correctly and it looks good, but my distant land is all messed up, just take a look.

http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/hh23/by...reenshot2-1.jpg

You can tell that the land is drawn out quite a ways, but none of the textures are colored in, it's all just that same shade of light-blue. Has anybody seen this problem before?

edit - I'm going to try different fog settings.

i followed silvers instructions step-by-step, but now im having problems.

i started tweaking the land and fog distance values, to suit my needs, inbetween testing out those different values, and it all worked out fine, then something i changed caused my view distance to go away, and the surface of water bodies to appear clear, with ripples, but clear, so basically fish were swimming in thin air i could jump in and it looked normal, even the surface looked normal while underwater.

i unchecked some things, and just could not find out what was causing this, so i gave up, anyone have any idea how i can fix this?

my current settings are (problem still persists )

no AA or AF
display messages and FPS counter (MGE version) enabled
Distant land turned on, 5 Land distance, 30 Fog distance
"Bind AI distance to view distance" checked
"Update shader variables" checked (not sure if i need it on )
"camera effects effect the HUD" checked
subtitles, "allow yes to all", "thread loading" are all also checked off

everything else is unchecked or on default settings

and i have a DX9 HLSL HDR 4 shader in my active shader chain

i have tried messing around with all my setting after it happened, still no result...i am starting to think that maybe the mod i installed called "Distant Land Fix for MGE" maybe caused something

any help is appreciated

EDIT: i tried replacing the distant land files, same thing happened. something is going on , ill try replacing the files again, but not loading that mod, maybe thats causing it?

You might want to try renaming your morrowind.ini file and letting the game recreate it.

By changing the fog to depth pixel and disabling distant statics, I again have distant land working fine. Now I just have to figure out these darn statics... now the problem is that when I enable them and load my character, the game instantly crashes. When I create a new character, the game crashes upon leaving the boat. I'm still tinkering, but advice is appreciated.

edit - I am using statics from Bloodmoon and Morrowind only.

edit2 - It is working! I recreated the distant statics using the default values again and it works.

i found out a bit more about my problem, and took some screens

from what i see, whenever i turn off distant land, the water shows up correctly, yet when i turn distant land on, there is no distant land, and no water surface, but if i go underwater and come up, it reverts to the correct surface, then flips back, its very odd...

i've tried reinstalling MGE and replacing the distant land files, but nothing seems to work.

before (distant land off) after (on)

before (off)
after (on)

does anyone know what's causing this? the weird thing is, it was working perfectly before this, then i clicked something, and totally screwed it all up, even if i loaded new land files, i did install two mods, the "MGE distant land fix" and "water shader tweak" both by harlanrm i think (cant remember exact name), maybe those caused something to mess up, and it seems like the water shader tweak isnt even doing anything, but that just might be my fault, ( not installing it correctly etc )


Thanks in advance

eh...I'm no expert, but first the water shader tweak will not help you if your water does not show at all. What's your graphic card? Does it suport pixel shader 2.0?

Anyway, does anyone know what kind of fogging oblivion uses (could you port it to MGE), it really sucks when the fog only outlines half of a object (for those who doesn't know what I'm talking about, oblivion's fog first make a foggy and complete outline of a object, then when you approach it you can slowly see the objects color and detail, morrowind on the other hand, just start making fog go away, and sometimes your left with half a tree in the distance). I may be wrong thought.

yes, i downloaded that just for cosmetics, then i found out my water was messed, as well as view distance

anyway, i have a Radeon x300 SE 128Mb graphics card, i think it supports 2.0, im on my mac atm, so i cant check, but i have run Oblivion on it before, if that helps.

Fortissimo, I hate to ask this question, but have you done the obvious thing and gone back to the Main tab and clicked the Morrowind Defaults button?

heh,yes, i have, yet the problem persists, i am going to turn off distant land anyway, i found out FPS Optimizer can extend it as well, and is more of what i was looking for, ill just keep MGE for its other enhancements, Thanks though, i don't know what caused it, but, its not a problem anymore

A couple of questions, sorry if they've been asked and/or answered before.

#1: How do I activate any of the shaders?

#2: I've got problems generating lower-quality distant land. When I open up the wizard it's automatically on a higher setting and immediately begins generating land-I've changed it to a lower setting, but I think the fact that it started on the high setting caused problems because I get error messages-I can't remember what it says or when it says it. If you need that info, I'll check it out. I'm hoping it's some resolvable issue with the wizard or something.

1: go into the shader generator in the "tools" section and click "edit active chain" from there, pick what you want, and double click to add it to the active shader chain, then click save, and your done. if you dont know what a particular shader does, open it up in the main screen with the drop down arrow and it will give a short definition at the top, before the script begins

2: when for example your in the second tab, "textures", it is not actually generating textures but generating whatever was the last tab. so for example, if your on the "Meshes" tab, it is actually generating textures, so that lets you change values before continuing. So in your case, that shouldn't be causing any problems, because when you select low quality, its actually not really generating that low-quality land, but generating whatever was before it.

I dont know what would be causing your errors, maybe you could post them up? it may just be because something is not compatible, like not having the right hardware to run MGE, etc

hope that helped

I got to the Distant Land Setup Wizard, and the progress bar is already starting even before I select the World Mesh detail option.

These are the errors I got with the land meshes I'd generated before:

When trying to check on distant land:

Error: Distant land files have not been created or are from an older version of MG. Use the 'distant land creation wizard' on the tools tab to create them

Before starting the generator again:

Warning: Distant land files already exist, but are either incomplete, corrupt, or from an older version of MGE, and must be deleted to continue.

I've got a PNY Verto NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 "Overclocked TM: Engineered for Higher Performance", an AMD 64 Athlon X2 CPU, and about 1.5 GB of RAM. That's good for playing Oblivion on I suppose medium settings or so.

i dont think you understand...

when you select the world mesh detail option it is actually loading your plugins, (the tab before) so it has no effect on how its loaded, it will only load the detail you selected, when you continue onto the next tab.

and those "errors" your encountering are perfectly normal, when you try to click the "use distant land" box, it is just telling you that you haven't generated it yet, and when you try to regenerate, it is just telling you that other land files exist, and if its okay for them to be overwritten, i wouldn't worry about those


and your system should be just fine for this i only have a P4 3ghz HP Pavilion, 512Mb RAM and a 128Mb radeonx300 SE graphics card , and it could run on mine, but i ended up disabling distant land.

Ah, THIS is my problem!





I get that on the "Finished" screen after it attempts to generate the statics.

This did not happen when I generated the high quality land.

Anyone care to tell me what the heck that all means?!

It's a small thing, but does anyone else have water that is white when exiting the prison ship? That seems to be the only time it happens, but it is a little irritating. I will have to rememeber to take a screen shot the next time.

I could use a bit of help. I have gotten everything in MGE to work to my satisfaction, I will probably tweak a bit. But, when I installed and activated Distant Land Fix for MGE version 1.6 by harlanrm I ended up with a strange screen.


My normal Balmora

The Strange Balmora

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Just making sure this gets seen.

You are probably getting that because you have a mod it can't create a static for. RUn the wizard again. Load your INI file and delete everything except for the Morrwind, Tribunal, and Bloodmoon ESMs. Click Continue. Click Skip on the next tab. That should put you on the Statics tab. Attempt to generate statics now. If you don't get the message, then it was one of those mods. You need to add them back a few at a time to figure out which one it was.

You get that in Balmora? I get that every time I exit the office after starting a new game, along with the boxes for Fliggerty's Easy Equipping - I thought it was from Yacoby's Oblivion Style Detect Owner. *goes to check*

Well, I am using a quick save game where I left my guy on the Balmora Silt Strider stand. That way I could compare different settings and such to get what I wanted. I have few mods installed - here is my small mod list.

GameFile0=Beryl's_Head_Replacer_v1.0.esm
GameFile1=Bloodmoon.esm
GameFile2=Morrowind.esm
GameFile3=Tribunal.esm
GameFile4=Better Bodies.esp
GameFile5=Better Clothes_v1.0.esp
GameFile6=Quick Char.esp
GameFile7=SG-BB-for-beasts.esp
GameFile8=Westly's Breton Male Headpack.esp
GameFile9=Westly's Female Head Pack-Humans.esp
GameFile10=Westly's Female Headpack - Elves and Orcs.esp
GameFile11=Westly's Nord Male Headpack.esp

Well, I checked and that is definitely from the Distant Land Fix and not Oblivion Style Detect Owner. It doesn't change into a horizontal line when you push activate which then disappears when you push activate again?

Oddly enough, deactivating the distant land fix made the water on existing the ship just fine. *chuckle*

Oops, I forgot, I have no mouse control at all. All I can do is press escape which then gives me mouse movement and I can exit. I just tried starting a new character and I get a failure there - HRM_IVD_Start RunFunction index greater than function count. I have to CTNL-ALT-DEL to get out of the game - it hangs completly. I wil try some other things to see what might be happening.

that bar you see is something the distant land fix adds, for some reason, just click it twice, and forget about it

That would work if I could move the mouse curser, but I can't. Plus, I can not start a new game with the mod activated - it just hangs up with the error messge I put in above.

Well, I guess it just will not run on my computer - don't know why. I'll just have to play without it.

Okay, I'm seriously pissed off now!

I've got the land generated, although only for vanilla stuff.

The problem now is it's giving me BS about the MGEgui being open when it's not open. I don't know how to "restart" MGE without restarting my computer. Anyone got any idea what its Process ID is in the Task Manager?

Ok one question from me. Long time MGE user, now back with a re install, I load MGE and get a MGE cannot rwad your resolution from registry error, the main reason I use MGE is so I can see Morro in pretty 1680 by 1050 whats the deal?

Process IDs are assigned randomly. MGE is the one that has the image name MGEgui.exe next to the pid. Alternatively, use something like process explorer to close MGE's mutex.

I've never heard of MGE getting stuck open before. Had you done anything with it other than the distant land stuff?


You get that error if you've used fps optimizer to change your resolution in the past, or if anything else has overwritten morrowinds registry keys. Open the normal morrowind launcher, use that to change the resolution, close it and reopen MGE.

The funny thing is I don't even see a task for MGE anywhere, neither the Applications or Processes tab (I even tried looking at the Services tab). Is process explorer a program I can download? I'm kind of tired of how the one that comes with Windows is so disorganized.

I haven't done anything else with that I haven't done before without any problems. Well, except that I've never really noticed much difference with the stuff like the Bloom shaders selected-unless the difference is supposed to be subtle...

Google: Process Explorer

Seeing as MGE was crashing before, you may have remnants of it in memory even if it doesn't show up in the process lists. If you reboot your PC, run MGEgui, and immediately close it. Do you still get the problems?

If MGE isn't listed in the processes tab then it isn't open. You can use process explorer to search for the program holding MGE's mutex. (Click 'find|find handle or dll' and search for 'MGEguiMutex')


No it's not supposed to be subtle. Or more accurately, regardless of subtility you should definitely notice your fps dropping into single digits.

Maybe I'm just not running it right. Bloom is supposed to make like really bright highlights on things, right? I've got Oblivion (and a CPU and graphics card capable of running alright on halfway descent settings), and I think I get the bloom effects...I'm not sure, actually-in all the graphical prettiness it's hard to pick out individual effects. Morrowind, on the other hand, should look very different, but I don't notice anything aside from the anti-aliasing.

One issue I've been meaning to address. When I close the GUI, shouldn't there be an icon in my task bar thing next to the time? I've never seen it and I always have to relaunch MGE from my desktop, and not being able to find it in my regular task manager doesn't help either. Is there any way to completely close MGE besides restarting my computer?

Edit: Did what you said and it didn't find any MGEguiMutex.

Hmmm...that's interesting, now Morrowind runs fine. Still don't see any really special graphical effects besides the distant land and anti-aliasing.

There's still some noticable FPS hits, not quite as bad as with the high quality stuff. I'm assuming this partly has to do with the game engine and not so much my computer-although my computer could still be partly to blame.

No. When you close the MGEgui, it is closed. There is nothing that runs in the background or on the task bar with MGE. This isn't like FPS Optimizer where it stays running while you run Morrowind. You only use the MGEgui to set your settings, then you close it and run Morrowind.

Hey word, you know how Vality7's trees render as the brown blob? the Ascadian Isles trees arent. Only my BC trees are browns the Isles are rendering the actual textures. I dont know if its just me though...

Then how the heck is it doing what it does? Or does it somehow actually alter Morrowind itself, or integrate itself into the Morrowind program.

This still doesn't explain why the bloom effects and such aren't appearing to work correctly.

It is everyone. His BC/Balmora stuff isn't compatible with MGE's distant land statics. He even says that he has gone back to just using FPS Optimizer. I have asked Vality, in his Balmora thread, if he has talked to Timeslip about the problem yet. Perhaps Timeslip can come up with a solution to it.

well it strikes me as odd that the As Trees render but the BC doesnt, are they THAT different? I thought that both the Asa and the BC trees were the same as far as the speedtree rendering essence.

Has anyone figured out how to get the large doors at the top of the Vivec cantons to render as statics? I tried adding ex_v_cantondoor_01=1 to my statics file, but they still don't render.

Doors are activators, not statics, and MGE only parses statics when it's searching through the esps for stuff to render. If you want activators to render in a specific place, create an esp file that includes a static using the door mesh, stick it in the correct place and then include that plugin when generating the statics.

That should work yes. You'd have to place the static doors a little behind the actual door so that you can still activate the activator door.

Sounds like a useful mod, if combined with other big door issues. Does anyone know of any other large doors in exteriors that could benefit from this? I might give this a try. Too bad that you can't sort doors by size in the CS...

It uses magic, of course

Here is what I believe happens. It seems to exploit the inner workings of Windows. When a windows application is told to load a specific DLL, Windows looks for that DLL in several known locations. The first place it looks is in the current directory with the EXE of the program making the call. It then proceeds to look in various other places for the DLL, including several directories under c:\windows, until it finds the DLL that was requested. Timeslip appears to be exploiting this fact and creates his own dummy DirectX 8 DLL in the Morrowind directory. Therefore, when Morrowind asks the system to load up the Direct X 8 DLL, instead of getting the real one in your c:\windows directory, it gets the one Timeslip created in the Morrowind directory. Once this fake DLL is loaded, the various functions MGE needs can be hooked.

It's all a guess of course.

No you wouldn't; you wouldn't have to have the plugin active in morrowind, just when you were generating the distant statics. As long as it's in roughly the correct location, (i.e. looks the same from a distance of one and a half cells away,) it should be fine.


Spot on.

Unlike the normal inject-some-code-or-a-dll method, it has the advantage that you don't have to launch morrowind with an external program, or have some other program open while morrowind is running.
Edit: Although it does have the disadvantage that protected operating system dlls are never loaded from the exe's directory even if they exist there, and on some versions of windows some of the dx dll's are protected. Luckily it doesn't seem to affect d3d8.

Ah, that's nice. It's a simple copy and paste of coordinates then.

In that case, I'll change the question then (asked to nobody in particular): Are there any big activators in exterior cells that could benefit from this?

Maybe the door of the Incarnate Cavern...

I hope you don't mind if I turn this into a mod. Though I don't see why you would.

Question: How do I get HDR to work? I'm using MGE 3.3.2, and I did this procedure:


I also clicked "supply HDR info for shaders" button. Any help?

Ok, I downloaded all BUT for MW Tweaked Water Shader -I was reding installations and there is said that I need to place the files in shader file....I have no shader file! "...Morrowind\Data Files\shaders\distantland\InGame.fx...! Where the hell should I place them if I don't have that folder?? Should I make one or..?
And besides is it needed for MWGE or can I run that one without it? But I would like you to help as I wanna make my game look the best it can.

Awww, looks like I've also got the issue with Vality's beautifull trees showing up at pieces of cardboard in the equally beautifull teaked water reflections. It just ain't right that two such lovely modifications shouldn't play well together.

No progress on working out a fix? (I know, it's too soon... have to ask though!).

i have a question wich might have been asked before but im too lazy to read every single post..
anyway i have a new computer with vista and DX10 now it seems that MGE doesnt like DX10 and it just doesnt work, when i try to install it gives me ceveral warnings but it does install, but when i try to start it it just doesnt work any help?




edit: typos....

The help says that this is compatible with the FPS Optimizer.

But under the Misc tab, there's a 'Keep FPS constant' checkbox. So what do people recommend - installing the FPS Optimizer, or simply using MGE's built-in FPS constant option? Does FPS Optimizer do anything desirable beyond what MGE does?

Also, when I try to export my settings, I get an exception:

And the settings file isn't generated properly.

I read this whole thread, though I didn't understand everything. Other than checking 'Use distant Statics', and messing around with Antialiasing level and Anisotropic filtering level, are there any major settings recommended to improve performance?

FPS Optimizer has non-FPS features that MGE doesn't have. You can run both of them side-by-side to get those other features. I would only choose one method of maintaining your FPS.

Did you bother to see if the file mentioned existed?

Wow. I finally got MGE to work properly, and I have to say thanks for this. Not only does my game look absolutely amazing, but it's /so/ much more stable now as well. I haven't had a single CTD since I got MGE set up, and I used to get them all the time.

I got MGE working last night and I'm amazed, the game is so much more fun to play with fog disabled. The on problem I've had is that I generated distant land but whe I enabled it my game would crash whenever I tried to load it or start a new game, any ideas?

Rendering too far perhaps? with too high settings?

No graphics csrd out there right now can uses Meshes at Ultra High. If you have a modern 8800 series, you should be able to use Very High, otherwise, you'll need to tone down your Meshes. Try Medium to start.

I was generating everything at low setting, I think I'll try absolute bottom-quality and see if that works. Also, should I make my save while inside a building or does it matter?

It shouldn't matter. Did you follow the directions in this post:

http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.ph...&p=11789444

I have a Radeon 9700 Pro (2.66ghz, 1gb RAM), but it seems I can't get a decent framerate with Use Distand Land on. It drops to around 14-17 fps. With 6x AA and 16x AF as opposed to none/off it doesn't really make much different, maybe 5fps; with 6x and 16x I get 25-36 fps typically, which is playable. But I have to turn distant lands off. Are there any optimizations I should look into to be able to turn distant lands on?

Also, whenever I move from one area to another (say move inside a building), the loading screen after installing MGE is now all sorts of different colors (pink, brown, etc.). Rather than before when it used to just be plain black. Doesn't really matter and the loading screen only typically shows for a second or two, but is this normal for MGE?

Thanks. Is FPS Optimizer recommended by MGE users?


The file does not exist (else it would be very strange!). It's not the Morrowind CD either, though everything on there is compressed and the compressed files are unviewable. What's up with the error though? And should it be looking for DX8 stuff (if that's what the filename indicates) - I have DirectX9.0c.

I use both all the time. Perfect together.

I have a request, there is a program on morrowind summit (http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Utilities.Detail&id=51) which fixes the world map bug so you can see modded islands. However according to the comments it is full of bugs and currupt savegames, could you perhaps add the feature to MGE?

Will an Intel 2 extreme for mobile,

With

512mb RAM

Run this?

A few questions about MGE.

Can you still have the usual pixel shaded water if you're just using the fps optimizer and not IVD? - I like fog.
Is it compatable with Morrowind Enhanced?
Will it only work with MW in the default Bethesda directory or can it be used with multiple installations?
Can it be easily removed without messing up the game?
Does using shaders and HDR create much of an fps hit?

My specs are WinXP, 3GHz processor, 1Gb RAM, 256 mb 7600gs graphics card, sound card.

Vality7's screenshots are so gorgeous I'd love to see if my game could look like that.

Yes
Don't know..sorry I don't use it
Again i don't know...
Yes
Oh yes :-)

Thanks Khula. Hmmm...a big fps hit sounds like bad news. Still if it's easily removed it might be worth a go just to see what all the fuss is about.

On my old 9800Pro I just used distant land (without statics, 3.0.3). Worked OK. Perhaps try that version? Or decrease the settings you use in generation (distant land and distant statics)
Render State tab > Enable "AA Colour Fix"
I use both too. Although 1.96a not 2.0.
Morrowind is a DirectX 8 game, MGE tricks Morrowind into using Timeslip's code (through the d3d8.dll file). The dx8.data file's created by MGE when (IIRC) you first run it and make some changes. Chances are the file'll be there now.
Yep, I use them both
I remember Timeslip posting about this. But, as I don't have multiple installations, can't remember the details. Try an advanced search in this forum for Timeslip's posts containing the "multiple installation" string

Hello, can anyone tell if it's possible to adjust the speed of which the FPS optimizer changes your view distance, Morrowind's polygons are such unpredictable little things.
Thanks in advance.

FPS Optimiser? Or in MGE? In FPS Optimiser you alter the "Auto adjustment options" on the "view" tab. Or just assign your mouse wheel to increase / decrease. Dunno about MGE.

I'll do that, thanks Dragon32

Oh, well that sucks. They say FPS optimiser is very buggy, dunno if I should get it.

I was having a bunch of problems with MGE, including low framerates, and perhaps even worse, 10-15 second delays when loading a game, as well as long delays while walking around. I think this was mainly due to having statics on, but it was only when I unisntalled and reinstalled, and then checked 'Use distant lands' with 'Use distant Statics' unchecked, and *didn't* run the distant land file creation wizard that things started to run smoothly. For some reason, running the distant land creation wizard (even with the lowest settings) made things run slower for me. I guess the default files are quicker/smaller or something?

I'm glad I got things to run smooth though, the distant backgrounds look very good, and their absence would've been quite noticable at times. And my fps seems unaffected by MGE now.


Thanks

No, still not there. I get the same error when trying to export, and when trying to import the exported file (though I think the exported file is corrupt anyway).

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, and even redownloading, but that file is still missing. Anyone know if it's available anywhere? And if it affects anything other than importing/exporting settings?

NVM got it working.

The 2.0 version is, a little. But most people use V1.96a, which isn't buggy at all and has all the FPS optimizing features 2.0 has. The only thing 2.0 adds is a map fix and some other things that, while useful in some situations, don't contribute to the optimizing of your FPS.

I've just recently today installed MGE, but am having a few problems, despite having read through the help files. I've spent the necessary half an hour to generate textures, but now, rather than Morrowind running without MGE, I'm met with a "Render Creation Error" message when trying to boot the game.

I don't visit the forums often, but I've read through as much as I can, and can't seem to solve this. Could anyone offer some help, please? It would really be appreciated.

v2.0 added some plugins to the download. They're the ones that seem to cause problems. The only problem with the v2.0 EXE is that one needs to close it down using Task Manager after finishing a gaming session. A faff but not that much. If you don't need the extended map then 1.96a is great - I've been using it for years (well 1.96a or 1.96, the only difference being that 1.96a is recompiled with a new version of the compiler) without problems.
I have a vague memory of someone else having this problem and having to install v3.0.3 first, uninstall it and then install v3.3.2 to finally get the file.

Weird, just done a search and the only .data files I have are "dinput.data" and "usage.data". Did you by any chance upgrade from v3.0.3 to v3.3.2? Perhaps the uninstall of v3.0.3 wasn't clean...?
What gfx card do you have? Try what Silverglade suggests here.

Close enough to 200, here's the new thread: http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=817099