Morrowind - Overhaul Project Released

Originally Posted by JDR13
I think it looks fantastic, but I also have to agree with those who say it varies a bit too much from Morrowind's original art style.

Too much additional foliage, and too much "green" in general for a volcanic island imo.

That's why we made the MGSOO program.
Do you want less green? Use simple trees/Vality's trees and turn off the grass.
The result is a less-green game, and more lighter, too! (the grass and the new trees are heavy).
Maybe is somewhat less impressive, but certainly it will have fidelty to the original game

… And more green ?

Sorry, I just couldn't resist from that …

Did some more tweaking and I think I've found a decent graphical balance, closer to the true Morrowind and friendlier FPS.

A note on FPS: FRAPS says my wilderness FPS is around 20, which for Morrowind is actually just fine. My intown is 16, pretty borderline but there is no combat so its workable. Bottom line is the engine was never meant for this kind of thing so you take the good with the bad. My machine can play Nehrim at 40FPS so what can I tell you. Some NPC animations are jilting in the distance, not sure why. I think I'm almost at the point where I'd stop tweaking and start playing.

A note to KINGPIX:
I highly recommend some king of tweak guide. Way to many things to choose and some debilitate performance for no gain. Again, just an opinion.

Here are the key changes I made MGE:
1. Grass in MGE to 0. It doesn't belong in Morrowind anyway.
2. Kill all shaders in the list except Occlusion and GodRays. Frankly, the HDR and other shaders were doing nothing but killing performance. I don't see a noticeable difference really.
3. Distant land to 400 (orginal MGE default)
4. AA to 2x
5. AF to 8x
Changes in MGSOO:
1. turn off all the extra trees, color and bushiness. There is too much object pop with all that stuff anyway. You can't see it in the screenshots but it is bothersome.

Checkout the cool god rays

Thx, I'll fiddle around some more myself with the MGE.

Gonna have to deactivate some stuff anyway cause it seems I can't complete the quest for the dead tax collector Processus Vitellius in Seyda Neen as there seem to be trees standing where his body should be.

Guess you gotta remove "theoldforest.esp"

If you have a problem with a tree that is standing in the way of something you can go into the console, click the tree (make sure the name of the tree pops up in the top of the console) and enter disable. This removes the tree (but leaves it visible in the far view distance - the MGE rendering)

There shouldnt be any popups with the trees at least not with mine (vurt). Some can have a bit of "draw in" of the leaves from certain angles (has to do with the normals). But if every tree is popping up you probably have minimum statics size turned up too high (i have mine at 100) or you have forgotten to include an .esp in MGE..

Imo, HDR and God Rays is a must in the shader list. SSAO looks extremely nice too, especially in interiors, huge difference. I leave grass at around 60%, i created it so that people with hi-end computers could leave it at 100% or if someone wanted to take a nice screenshot, but it should be lowered for most people when playing.

Draw distance i leave at around 10-12 or so (big improvement over vanilla), AA to off and AF to max. AA is really hurting the performance, but might be needed if you're running on a lower res than 1920x1080. World Texture/Normalmap resolution i usually leave at 512 or 1024, i dont really notice a big difference. "World Mesh detail" looks ok on "High".

I get around 35-52 FPS (if Crossfire decides to work on my old 4870x2) with these settings. Average around 40 somewhere. The game is very playable even if you get 20 FPS though, much more so than other games at that FPS, for some reason.

Thank you, all of this helped a lot
Can't get FPS over 18 in town but outside of it it stays around 20-22.
I can live with that though.

What Processus Vitellius concerned he wasn't exactly under a tree it seems, just next to one but there was too much grass so I must have just always missed him.

Here are my specs just so you guys know:

OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-BIT
Graphic card: Ati Radeon 5870 1024MB GDDR5 (x2) in Crossfire
Processor: Intel i7 CPU 950 3.07 Ghz
Memory: 6GB Dominator DDR3 1866MHz
Motherboard: P6T SE

All latest drivers installed, I keep my system very clean and not much running in the background.

Edit:
Got another question for you guys, hope you can help me out with it.

I downloaded this companion Julan Ashlander who I'm supposed to find in Ghostgate and since he needs to be picked up before I'm too far into the main story I would like to do it as soon as possible.
Now how do I get to Ghostgate as easy as possible?
Something in the readme mentions something that he's attacked by Daedra and I have to rescue him so I hope I can take them on with a low level character.
I would like to have him along with me but don't feel like playing hours on end first till I get there or can handle it.
Its been so long since I've played Morrowind that I kinda forgot everything about it.
Maybe not a bad thing so this can feel like a whole new experience to me again.

Thx in advance for any tips and help.

Tarash, I can't answer your question but I want to say thanks for lisiting your hardware. This was my #1 question and it seems that even high-end performance rigs have issues with FPS which supports the idea that the Morrowind engine isn't designed for the present day graphics/textures. There is quite the resource demand.

Tarash, like all ATI owners know, Crossfire sucks and only works sometimes and with some drivers. At some point i'm gonna download several drivers and see which decides to work with Morrowind (or work at all, for that matter). When it does kick in it doubles the FPS which is really nice. If you get around 18-20 it's not working.

Originally Posted by Rills
Tarash, I can't answer your question but I want to say thanks for lisiting your hardware. This was my #1 question and it seems that even high-end performance rigs have issues with FPS which supports the idea that the Morrowind engine isn't designed for the present day graphics/textures. There is quite the resource demand.

No problem, I just found it very odd that I got such low FPS but the post of bemushroomed made it clear.

Originally Posted by bemushroomed
Tarash, like all ATI owners know, Crossfire sucks and only works sometimes and with some drivers. At some point i'm gonna download several drivers and see which decides to work with Morrowind (or work at all, for that matter). When it does kick in it doubles the FPS which is really nice. If you get around 18-20 it's not working.

Thx for letting me know cause I wasn't aware that Crossfire sucks.
Not being sarcastic, I really didn't know that.
Its the first time I bought ATI cards and for my next comp I think I'm gonna go back to Nvidia.

Guess I'm gonna have to be happy to play the game this way.

Btw guys, I got to Ghostgate to pick up this companion, was able to defeat 3 clanfears that were attacking him, but something isn't working right cause he's lying on the ground on his side and does the walking animation.
I could talk to him and even chose the option that he teleported to the inn at Ald-ruhn hoping that that would work but it didn't.

Uninstalled him and went for companion Beryl from Grumpy.

Originally Posted by bemushroomed
Tarash, like all ATI owners know, Crossfire sucks and only works sometimes and with some drivers. At some point i'm gonna download several drivers and see which decides to work with Morrowind (or work at all, for that matter). When it does kick in it doubles the FPS which is really nice. If you get around 18-20 it's not working.

Crossfire or SLI systems are not working with Morrowind.
SLI sucks too.

The "readme" file of Drakensang 1 & 2 also says that this game can have problems with SLI (or crossfire), as far as I can recall it from my memory …

I changed the texture sizes to 512. Visually no difference, but performance no difference either. 2x vs no AA does make a visual difference but seems to have no performance impact. I'll keep 2x AA.

I've tried in the meanwhile varied settings and it always stays around 18-22 fps sometimes even drops down to 14 fps.
When I look up to the sky it boosts to 44-47 fps.

I'm keeping the settings I have now though, time to continue with the game

I just wish I knew what the attribution was around the performance hits. Is it the trees? The textures? Shaders? Honestly, after messing with it I realized I'd be perfectly happy with vanilla Morrowind with just a hi res texture pack.

Ok I wanted to check this last thing and so I turned off all the grass mods and in town it still doesn't give higher frame rates but outside of town I get around 30 fps now.

So what I got now is:

- resolution: 1920x1080
- AA: no
- anisotropic: 16x
- shaders: HDR, SSAO, God rays, underwater blur, water wobble
- distant land:
> shader model 3.0
> draw distance 30
> water reflections: sky, landscape, blur reflections, nearby statistics, distant statistics
> dynamic ripples: height of waves 50, caustic intensity 50
- textures: 2048, 1024
- world mesh detail: high

Oh yeah and in MGSO I chose the "lite" versions.

Heh…it sounds like this thing is more demanding than Skyrim will be in top res/detail

(all the best with the project, nevertheless)

Hehe I get that idea as well

Yes Morrowind MGE is more demanding than console "optimized" games such as Oblivion or Skyrim, depends a bit on which shaders you use, but i'd say it's more demanding.

I hope the MGE devs can get crossfire to work, it's really nice to have 50 FPS instead of 25 (it does work until i save or go into the console - then back to 25 FPS)..

Originally Posted by bemushroomed
Yes Morrowind MGE is more demanding than console "optimized" games such as Oblivion or Skyrim, depends a bit on which shaders you use, but i'd say it's more demanding.

I hope the MGE devs can get crossfire to work, it's really nice to have 50 FPS instead of 25 (it does work until i save or go into the console - then back to 25 FPS)..

Console "optimised"?

You do realise that Morrowind ran on the Xbox 1, don't you?