hfffoman

Nicely written. Clear, helpful and not condescending. Thanks

Macole I am far from an expert in the way Oblivion, its mods, or the construction set work. I was at first put off by Bash being awkward to learn about but it is so cleverly programmed it does nearly everything for you automatically. Its installation method is so much better than OBMM, nobody running more than a dozen mods should be using OBMM any more. Without any complicated setting up you can switch between different mods and test them in a few seconds. For example yesterday I was feeling unhappy with my water, so I quit my game, uninstalled Realistic Water and switched to enhanced water, and was back in my game and had decided to continue with enhanced water all within a few seconds. No complications. I can go back to realistic water in a few seconds any time if I want to. I no longer use OBMM for a single mod (though I did use it to unpack a few OBMM files before installing them with Wrye Bash). The bash patch is utterly simple. One click on the boss button and all the mods are ordered. Click to rebuild your patch and all the options are configured automatically for you. I spent a couple of hours studying the readme and the pictorial guide and it felt daunting but in practice you just keep clicking ok. It is a brilliant piece of work and you are really missing out if you stay away from it. The hardest thing to do is installing Bash and python and that isn't very hard.

I agree with the logic of the new system but not the way the old ratings have been grandfathered into the new score. Counting a 7 as a positive endorsement is too generous. Had everyone strictly followed the ratings guidelines it would have been appropriate but in practice people didn't. People rating at 7, and often at 8 or 9, had serous reservations about the mod. I used to look hard at the ratings. If a mod had 25 people all rating at 10, that was a strong indication. If it had the same number of people rating at an average of 9 that meant a lot of reservations. The difference would be enough to dissuade me from downloading at least until I had read all the comments. I think it's a pity this information has been lost.

It's a good idea to look on the official forum as there is a lot of dicussion there. The first thing I found was that a new version of MGE was released about a day after I got mine to work. :) Deepblue, I don't remember who did which texture pack but there are definitely several by Darknut. I am happy to send you my modlist when I get home.

I have done a fair bit of exploring with the settings and maybe others will find the results useful. The first screen where you set the distances (I can't remember the exact header but the defaults are 4 and 15) had a big impact on framerates, particularly the first number. I set it to 2 to get a decent rate. The textures (default 2048) don't seem to make any difference. I reduced it to 1024 and the size of my files went down from 475MB to 473MB and there was no noticeable difference in the framerate. The mesh quality also doesn't seem to make much difference to the framerate. I tried low and very low and couldn't tell much difference. On the final screen I tried reducing the settings by skipping 4 levels of mipmaps instead of 2, and increasing the threshold for distance statics from 1000 to 1500. This made a big difference to fps. I am not sure if one or both changes made the difference. I am a bit surprised how much I have had to tone down the settings as I have a very high end machine. I am now getting around 32 fps typically outside though it can go down to 24. If I turn off distant graphics in MGE my fps shoots up to around 70 outside. I have Morrowind Visual Pack and various other replacers mostly by Darknut such as hi-res Talvanni and Hlaalu textures. I haven't tried looking on the official forum. Maybe there is a lot more discussion there. Can anyone answer this little question? My Morrowind has real lighting - in the dark all the lanterns provide circles of light, and the windows of the houses glow from the outside. This seems to be much better than the fake lighting in vanilla Oblivion but I don't know where it's coming from so I don't know if I can safely add TLM The Lighting Mod. The only lighting mods I have is lanternreplacer but that's just a texture mod. I don't know if it's coming from vanilla or MGE?

This is a piece of genius programming by Timeslip. Unfortunately I have spent a whole afternoon and failed to get it to work, despite having a powerful machine with an 8800GT 512MB which isn't far away from the most powerful card on the market, and I am not running any complex esps (though I have a textures directory crammed with replacers). I have tried fiddling around with practically all the MGE settings but Morrowind always crashes the instant I go outside. Disabling distant land solves it. I would be delighted to hear any ideas. I have the patched game with Tribunal and Bloodmoon.I am only building distant land files from morrowind.esm and bloodmoon.esm. Also, does anyone know if the non 4:3 resolutions work? Morrowind certainly THINKS it's it's still in 4:3 but I am not sure. Is it worth trying Morrowind Resolution Changer? Thanks guys Edit: some time later I tried dropping textures to medium and that seemed to be the issue. Blimey, if my computer needs to use medium textures, I don't know who can use the higher ones.