Morrowind Mod:MGE XE

MGE XE (Morrowind Graphics Extender XE) is a continuation of MGE by Hrnchamd.

New Features over MGE

Source: Jac's thread on the official forums

• All objects in Morrowind view distance receive shadows.
• High quality selection of default shaders included.
• Screenshot enable checkbox now works as expected, since the screenshot code is patched. Just use PrintScreen, no macro required.
• Object pop-in at the screen edge no longer occurs. Distant land and grass culling is not delayed by a frame any more.
• Grass parts when the player is nearby; grass is lit better.
• Shaders no longer affect the crosshair, nor spill over the screen during cell loading, nor screw with cutscenes or the main menu.
• Windowed mode snaps to the screen edge to act like fullscreen, allowing fast Alt-Tab to work.
• Support for using shaders with the UI display quality fix in MCP.
• New underwater surface effects, with total internal reflection.
• Water shows up in the local map again, previous MGE versions did not allow it to render in the map.
• Scattering exponential fog and better sunsets, thanks to phal.
• MWSE upgraded to 0.9.4a (includes dll)
• Fullscreen alt-tab is functional (still slow to reload).

How to Install and Uninstall MGE XE

Source: Jac's thread on the official forums

Install

1. Update DirectX 9.0c. (This won't conflict with DX10+.)
2. Install MGE XE to the Morrowind directory. If you've never used MGE before, run the Morrowind launcher as admin and set a resolution in the launcher options (to generate Morrowind's first time settings).
3. If you are using HUD mods made for standard MGE, you should deselect them from your load order. MGE XE requires its own HUD mods to fix design problems with older mods.
4. Run the new MGEXEgui. Read the instructions page. If you are upgrading from MGE you should regenerate distant land with 150 minimum static size (or smaller for more shadow casters).
5. If you use Crossfire/SLI, turn off "Responsive menu caching" in the In-game tab, to avoid performance reductions as the menu cache is SLI unfriendly.

Note: that Morrowind view distance in-game is set to maximum when you first load a game. MGE XE requires this.

Recommended: set timescale to 10 or 15 in the console to slow down the day cycle (or 1000 to speed up). The movement of the sun is very visible. Don't expect everything to cast a shadow, it's only objects large enough to appear in distant land. Small objects will cast weaker shadows for their size.

There are some HUD mods for use with MGE XE available from the same download page, mostly upgrades of Yacoby's mods and Vampiric Embrace. HUD mods for previous versions of MGE are unlikely to work.

Per-pixel lighting beta

Replaces the standard vertex lighting with a shader generator that generates per-pixel lighting shaders. This is still somewhat slow compared to standard lighting. The lighting effect improvements vary depending on the overall lighting setup in each cell, some work better than others. Beta testing the lighting requires changes to your settings.

You must set your In-game tab > Dynamic lighting coefficients to (4.2, 0, 0.34). It is adjustable, but the linear coefficient will be ignored. Bind the 'toggle lighting mode' function in the macro editor to a key for comparing the difference. You may notice dark spots in some cells, these are negative lights placed in the world. I'll have to figure out how to work with them. When the shader generator fails, objects will turn a default purple. Please post your mgeXE.log and a screenshot if you see that occurring.

Reporting problems

All errors while running Morrowind are logged to mgeXE.log in the Morrowind directory. Check there first if it crashes or white screens, it may explain why. Errors from running MGEXEgui are logged in the mge3 directory.

When reporting errors, always post mgeXE.log (in a spoiler tag to avoid clutter) and OS, video card details, and driver version. Please report rendering errors with detailed information and a screenshot. If the distant land generator crashes, please post your mge3/distant-land-crash-dump.txt.

Uninstall

MGE XE and MGE svn 178 are designed to be easily substitutable. To go back to MGE:

Replace d3d8.dll with the one from the MGE svn 178 package. (Optionally) Regenerate distant land, setting the distant static size back to its previous value.

Fully uninstalling:

Delete MGEXEgui, mge3, d3d8.dll and dinput.dll from your Morrowind directory.

See also

Scripting functions added by MGE XE
Nexus download page