Morrowind Graphics Extender

[bluekatt]

threads and mods liek this actually make me doubt the claims of morrowind fans that graphics dont matter and that

gameplay is paramount

if that is true then why do people fall over themselfs to download mods to spruce up those horrible ratfaced

graphics of morrowidn which werent all that great to start with back in 2002 with its dull and drab color palette horribly drab textures and dodgy graphics

compare halo from 2001 and morrowind from 2002 and its not hard to see whose graphics are stil good looking 7 years on

hint its not morrowinds

 

so not to put down the work the modder did because it is quite wonderfull really

but peopel tend to praise morrowind over oblivion stating graphics dont matter and then i see mods liek this with pages upon pages of praise

something doesnt add up there

[CernelJoson00]

Bluekatt, the players would be idiots if, when offered a chance to improve the graphical experience of Morrowind, they turned it down.

[leoogsvavar]

Mine didn't work :(

[Vality7]

Bluekatt, the thing you need to realise, is that a lot, or possibly most of the people who want/need these better graphics mods are infact probably Oblivion players, returning to Morrowind because they realise it does actually have better gameplay.

 

Morrowind fans argue that Morrowind has good gameplay, and that it doesn't need good graphics to make it a good game, it can easily go without, and it's true. Morrowind on Xbox with no mods can keep one entertained for years. If you imagine Oblivion without the shiny graphics, combat and physics etc, there's really nothing special underneath.

 

But that doesn't mean that if people want to give Morrowind better graphics it's suddenly going to make it a bad game, all it does is improve it, as unlike Oblivion it does have a really awesome game underneath it all, and it doesn't make the Morrowind fan any less of a fan just because they want to make it look better.

 

So Morrowind doesn't need better graphics, but there's nothing wrong with people wanting them to add to the game.

[krywur]

morrowind is a great game and eventhogh it's graphica are lower

it's a good game and this didn't work so...yeah

[hfffoman]

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.

Edited June 29, 2008 by hfffoman

[Deepblue686]

Hmm.....what hfffoman has said may help me to get this to run well too. I just have MGE's settings on Morrowind defaults with reflective water added and the game still runs as though I can't even run it without MGE

 

I've tried lots of times whenever I re-install Morrowind on a new computer and all attempts have the game running very poorly

 

The computer I have now can run Oblivion on max video settings so I though I'd be ok

[hfffoman]

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?

[Deepblue686]

Hm.....I've done what you did and I still don't see any FPS change. It still lags in some locations or certain directions you look in.

 

It also gives horrible loading times (not too long but still longer than usual), especially the loading during the game

 

[hfffoman- mostly by Darknut such as hi-res Talvanni and Hlaalu textures. ]

Darknut did more texture packs? All I found was his dwemer ruins one.

 

Also, I'm not rating this program until I can get it working well with good FPS

[hfffoman]

Hm.....I've done what you did and I still don't see any FPS change. It still lags in some locations or certain directions you look in.

 

It also gives horrible loading times (not too long but still longer than usual), especially the loading during the game

 

[hfffoman- mostly by Darknut such as hi-res Talvanni and Hlaalu textures. ]

Darknut did more texture packs? All I found was his dwemer ruins one.

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.