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Agents are GO!
Dec 29, 2004

Psion posted:

I was replying to this, CoP. Not YOU. :colbert:


because if this is true, casm would fail, but it doesn't, therefore, :psyduck:


This seems all too plausible.

Let me rephrase: Expecting Gamebryo to do two things well at once? Madness.

As I said, I use CASM, and I'm fairly certain at least a few of my crashes are due to it trying to save at particularly hectic moments (always having a non corrupt save from a few minutes earlier more than makes up for that.)

I would not be surprised at all to find out that Bethesda wrote a "special" save function to cut down on crashing like (IMHO) CASM occasionally causes, at the cost of being more prone to data corruption.

Ironically, it seems to me that Morrowind would be less susceptible to this because the action does stop when you save.

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Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?

Cat Mattress posted:

What I know is that serialization in Beth games is "lazy" and when loading a save, it will not load everything unless it feels that it needs to. For example there's a bug in Skyrim if your character is a vampire where, upon restarting the game, the face will get totally messed up unless you first load a save from before your character was a vampire, and then the vampire save. This is because the game doesn't bother resetting face data between saves of the same character, but will apply the vampire morph each time, forgetting they were already applied once in the vampire save.

Morrowind doesn't have that bug because it doesn't use the Oblivion/Skyrim facegen system, but I wouldn't be surprised if similar causes (not resetting all data between saves) would cause other bugs. And I wouldn't doubt that quicksave uses a "lazy" serialization that will omit to write some data that will "probably not be changed, so why bother".

I discovered a hilarious bug with NPC vampire faces if you use positioncell to teleport them or disable/enable them: their heads disappear. They end up with a with a spooky neck stump and a frame of hair around where their head should be. Equipping and removing a full-face helm resets their head data and fixes the problem though. I had to invent a face-fix script for vampire companions to solve that problem without having the player need to do it manually via companion share.

Agents are GO!
Dec 29, 2004

Hey Stuporstar, I think I've figured out the problem with the lantern collision in Urviriths Legacy: having a 2pt Slow Fall enchant on an Altmer character. I get hung up on almost every one of them when wearing it.

Edit: in that it slows my descent just enough for the tall Altmer to get hung up.

Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?

Agents are GO! posted:

Hey Stuporstar, I think I've figured out the problem with the lantern collision in Urviriths Legacy: having a 2pt Slow Fall enchant on an Altmer character. I get hung up on almost every one of them when wearing it.

Edit: in that it slows my descent just enough for the tall Altmer to get hung up.

Actually, it's a problem with the lantern replacer used in MGSO 3.0. The modder added collision to several lanterns that were never intended to have it, and without intending to as well. Collision on lanterns is great if you actually have a physics engine that supports it, but in Morrowind, it turns them into concrete barriers. I remember back in the day some other modder's terrible attempt to finish off Uvirith Awakened added lace curtains with collision to every other doorway, which rendered whole rooms inaccessible without turning clipping off. It was loving disasterous. Anyway Melchior, the guy who made the lanterns, is a devout Telvanni player, so the minute I told him he accidentally made all Telvanni towers less navigable, he fixed it right away. I did try to minimize the impact the lanterns had on navigating Tel Uvirith if someone's running MGSO without updating the lantern replacer, but since it's a problem in all Telvanni towers (just less noticeable because you spend less time in the others), it's a good idea to upgrade the lanterns anyway.

Here's the current version of the Dunmer Lantern Replacer. If you install that version overtop your MGSO install, it'll clear the collision issue right up.

Edit: And here's that poo poo version of Uvirith Awakened. http://mw.modhistory.com/download-44-14815 I love the option for public screenshots on that site. When I found out someone uploaded that piece of poo poo version, I took it upon myself to warn potential downloaders about all the loving doilies. The impassible doilies.

Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Nov 20, 2013

Agents are GO!
Dec 29, 2004

Stuporstar posted:

Actually, it's a problem with the lantern replacer used in MGSO 3.0. The modder added collision to several lanterns that were never intended to have it, and without intending to as well. Collision on lanterns is great if you actually have a physics engine that supports it, but in Morrowind, it turns them into concrete barriers. I remember back in the day some other modder's terrible attempt to finish off Uvirith Awakened added lace curtains with collision to every other doorway, which rendered whole rooms inaccessible without turning clipping off. It was loving disasterous. Anyway Melchior, the guy who made the lanterns, is a devout Telvanni player, so the minute I told him he accidentally made all Telvanni towers less navigable, he fixed it right away. I did try to minimize the impact the lanterns had on navigating Tel Uvirith if someone's running MGSO without updating the lantern replacer, but since it's a problem in all Telvanni towers (just less noticeable because you spend less time in the others), it's a good idea to upgrade the lanterns anyway.

Here's the current version of the Dunmer Lantern Replacer. If you install that version overtop your MGSO install, it'll clear the collision issue right up.

Edit: And here's that poo poo version of Uvirith Awakened. http://mw.modhistory.com/download-44-14815 I love the option for public screenshots on that site. When I found out someone uploaded that piece of poo poo version, I took it upon myself to warn potential downloaders about all the loving doilies. The impassible doilies.

You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.

Also, those doilies are obviously sabotage by Therana. :tinfoil:

Gyshall
Feb 24, 2009

Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.
Anyone know what the latest/best/compatible versions of the Great house/Sixth House/House telavani/etc mods are? I basically want to play Morrowind modded to the tits with those giant lore friendly quest/faction mods, and there seems to be a number of them that are either compatible or need patches to be compatible, and I'm kind of lost.

I'm using Darknut's Greater Ruins and TR, for what that is worth.

Krowley
Feb 15, 2008

I just noticed that the Oggu modpack in the OP is older than one I had on my drive.

From the readmes, it's Release 1 (February 28, 2010) while I've got Release 2 (April 5, 2010). Is this just an oversight or is there something wrong with the second release?

Malsgrein
Nov 29, 2005

As far as I know, and in my opinion, Release 2 is a straight improvement.

Someday, someday there will be a release 3.

When I have more time and a better PC I'd like to do the same style of modpack for Oblivion and Skyrim. Chocolate Pack. Like vanilla, but better.

Krowley
Feb 15, 2008

Cool cool. I uploaded it here in case anyone wants it https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1692077/oggumsmods2.exe

I did notice it was missing leveledmagicka.esp, which can be found here, unless it was edited in some way for the modpack.

Bone_Enterprise
Aug 9, 2005

Inception Cigars
www.inceptioncigars.com

Krowley posted:

Cool cool. I uploaded it here in case anyone wants it https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1692077/oggumsmods2.exe

I did notice it was missing leveledmagicka.esp, which can be found here, unless it was edited in some way for the modpack.

Downloading this and putting it up with the other one....or should I delete the other one?

thecolorpurple
Feb 6, 2013
I haven't used it in years, but none of the mods in my "installers" folder in the main Morrowind directory are showing up in wrye mash's installer interface. Any clue as to why?

Bone_Enterprise
Aug 9, 2005

Inception Cigars
www.inceptioncigars.com
Files mentioned prior are active on my host now, started the upload before I went to work and just now remembered to check on it:
Oggumsmod2: http://www.staglanparty.com/mw/oggumsmods2.exe
The leveledmagicka.esp that Krowley mentioned, if it is even needed for the above pack: http://www.staglanparty.com/mw/leveledmagicka.zip

I left my old link live for the "original" oggumsmod the OP links to as well, if it is not needed I will remove it from my host.

Agents are GO!
Dec 29, 2004

Okay, I've managed to make a better font pack for Morrowind, Grab It Here

Examples:









To use them, first unzip the file into \morrowind\data files\fonts\

Next, you'll need to open morrowind.ini and change the fonts section to this:

code:
[Fonts]
Font 0=Arial_Narrow_Bold_AA_17
Font 1=Courier_New_Bold_18
Font 2=Oblivion_Bold_AA_36
Now, I seem to have an environmental effect stuck on my character, the "Sixth House Shrine Whispering." Is this normal for just having Caius Cosades tell me I may be the Nerevarine? I mean, is this something added by MGSO, or a bug? If it's a bug, how do I remove it? Is there a console command I could use?

Finally, what's the deal with the missing textures in MGSO? I have several (Female Daedric Cuirass, Some Glass armor pieces as well as an hourglass in Uvirith's Legacy.) Now, I did a search for those textures in the files and they appear to be there? Are they just in the wrong directory? What would be the right directory?

Sky Shadowing
Feb 13, 2012

At least we're not the Thalmor (yet)

Gyshall posted:

Anyone know what the latest/best/compatible versions of the Great house/Sixth House/House telavani/etc mods are? I basically want to play Morrowind modded to the tits with those giant lore friendly quest/faction mods, and there seems to be a number of them that are either compatible or need patches to be compatible, and I'm kind of lost.

I'm using Darknut's Greater Ruins and TR, for what that is worth.

Great House Dagoth has, or at least had, a compatibility patch that made it work with GDR. I remember there was some stupid drama over it, though, because it disabled the GDR additions to the Dagoth Ur fight when you followed the GHD storyline (because the new ending no longer made sense if you followed that storyline)- and granted, I remember some people claiming it broke the ending even if you didn't follow the GHD storyline. A compromise was eventually reached, but a quick google search is turning up nothing, so I'm guessing the drama came back.

As for Great House mods, the ones I'd recommend are LGNPC Pax Redoran and Indarys Manor for Redoran, Grandmaster of Hlaalu for Hlaalu, and Stuporstar's Uvirith's Legacy, Rise of House Telvanni, LGNPC Tel Uvirith, and Building Up Uvirith's Legacy (the UL compatible version of Building Up Uvirith's Grave). I'd also recommend TR if you weren't already using it, since if playing Telvanni, you get access to the 'mainland' version of House Telvanni and the low-level quests that come with it (the high level quests are not yet implemented).

Mix and match to taste and enjoy.

Agents are GO!
Dec 29, 2004

Sky Shadowing posted:

Great House Dagoth has, or at least had, a compatibility patch that made it work with GDR. I remember there was some stupid drama over it, though, because it disabled the GDR additions to the Dagoth Ur fight when you followed the GHD storyline (because the new ending no longer made sense if you followed that storyline)- and granted, I remember some people claiming it broke the ending even if you didn't follow the GHD storyline. A compromise was eventually reached, but a quick google search is turning up nothing, so I'm guessing the drama came back.

As for Great House mods, the ones I'd recommend are LGNPC Pax Redoran and Indarys Manor for Redoran, Grandmaster of Hlaalu for Hlaalu, and Stuporstar's Uvirith's Legacy, Rise of House Telvanni, LGNPC Tel Uvirith, and Building Up Uvirith's Legacy (the UL compatible version of Building Up Uvirith's Grave). I'd also recommend TR if you weren't already using it, since if playing Telvanni, you get access to the 'mainland' version of House Telvanni and the low-level quests that come with it (the high level quests are not yet implemented).

Mix and match to taste and enjoy.

Thanks a ton for that list, I've been looking for a list of expanded content mods. Speaking of mods, I've made two (minor) ones of my own, I've been waiting for the thread to bump so I could post them! :)

Anyhow, the first is merely a patch for a few missing textures in the MGSO, I figured out how to open them in nifskope and point them at the correct textures (one of them was pointing at a .bmp as opposed to a .dds!) Anyhow, here's that one. I fixed:
  • The Glass Boots ground model
  • The female Daedric Cuirass
  • An hourglass

I know people have mentioned other missing textures/meshes, if people could post screenshots of the error messages, I'd try to fix those too! :)

Secondly, I noticed that the journal/book interface looked pretty bad. There's a limit to what I could fix, because from what I can tell MGE just scales up the journal to screensize from a fairly tiny background, but I did tinker with the graphics to make them look a bit better (IMHO):



Anyhow, this pack is available here. I think it looks better, especially with the better font pack I created, available here.

To use the fonts,unzip them into your morrowind/data files/fonts directory, and then you'll have to edit the [FONTS] section of your morrowind.ini to this:

code:
[Fonts]
Font 0=Arial_Narrow_Bold_AA_17
Font 1=Courier_New_Bold_18
Font 2=Oblivion_Bold_AA_36
Anyhow, enjoy, do whatever you want with this stuff.

Gyshall
Feb 24, 2009

Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.

Sky Shadowing posted:

Great House Dagoth has, or at least had, a compatibility patch that made it work with GDR. I remember there was some stupid drama over it, though, because it disabled the GDR additions to the Dagoth Ur fight when you followed the GHD storyline (because the new ending no longer made sense if you followed that storyline)- and granted, I remember some people claiming it broke the ending even if you didn't follow the GHD storyline. A compromise was eventually reached, but a quick google search is turning up nothing, so I'm guessing the drama came back.

As for Great House mods, the ones I'd recommend are LGNPC Pax Redoran and Indarys Manor for Redoran, Grandmaster of Hlaalu for Hlaalu, and Stuporstar's Uvirith's Legacy, Rise of House Telvanni, LGNPC Tel Uvirith, and Building Up Uvirith's Legacy (the UL compatible version of Building Up Uvirith's Grave). I'd also recommend TR if you weren't already using it, since if playing Telvanni, you get access to the 'mainland' version of House Telvanni and the low-level quests that come with it (the high level quests are not yet implemented).

Mix and match to taste and enjoy.

Awesome man, thank you. These are all compatible with eachother?

Morrowind is the poo poo.

Sky Shadowing
Feb 13, 2012

At least we're not the Thalmor (yet)
The four Telvanni mods are definitely compatible with one another natively or have compatibility patches (BUUL is BUUG with no interior changes so it's compatible with UL, use the Uvirith Inside patch for LGNPC TU, and I believe RoHT has patches with the other mods or vice-versa. UL also has a addon plugin for use with TR). The two Redoran mods are both LGNPC, so they're guaranteed to be compatible, and it's been so long since I played a Hlaalu character that I'm unsure about Grandmaster of Hlaalu, but I can't see why not.

Pikestaff
Feb 17, 2013

Came here to bark at you




Well I was about to say "I just reinstalled Morrowind" but actually no, I never uninstall it to begin with.

However I did just start replaying it after not touching it for several months and I love the fact that it sucks me right back in just as it does every time. With all my MGE mods and whatnot installed I keep coming across beautiful sunsets/sunrises and as such I think my Morrowind screenshot folder is filled with like a hundred "scenery" screenshots because I'm a terrible person like that. :v:

God I'm really bad at trying to branch out and do different stuff though. Every time I start a new Morrowind game I think "YEAH, can't wait to go full roleplay and be a dickass thief/get to the top of the Temple/whatever guild/etc." and every single time I end up rolling the same type of character and then just rocketing through the Main Quest one quest after another because I love the Main Quest too much. :shobon:

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!
Okay, I'm trying to get started with Morrowind for the first time, largely because a friend of mine told me to after I told him why exactly I liked Oblivion better than Skyrim (he pointed out that, excluding Oblivion gates-dragon comparisons, all of my complaints were identical to people who thought Oblivion was a step down when that came out). And I'm really excited... except for the fact that the game is only running at 10 FPS, and nothing I change as advised by the second post seems to improve that.

The only mods I'm running are MGSO, because running mods further than graphical/performance improvements and bugfixes on a first run is just wrong. Some extra info:
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium, SP1
Processor: Intel i7
RAM: 8GB
Version: CD

According to the FPS counter that I think is there because of MGE-XE, when the game is unpaused and operating it goes at about 7-10 FPS. On the main menu it reports an FPS in the 60s, while bringing up the pause menu brings it to ~30 (EDIT: Although it should benoted that the mouse cursor is clearly stuttering in the menus too, at a consistent rate no matter what the FPS counter shows). I'd go about toggling MGE options to see if it improves anything, but shutting it all off didn't help at all (although it did make Jiub's textures look a lot less blurry; if anyone knows what part of MGE caused the loss in texture quality that'd be awesome) so I'm going to assume it's not MGE at fault.

Cleretic fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Dec 13, 2013

Gyshall
Feb 24, 2009

Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.
What kind of Graphics Card do you have?

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

Gyshall posted:

What kind of Graphics Card do you have?

Oh yeah, forgot that part. NVidia GeForce GT 540M.

LtSmash
Dec 18, 2005

Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind.

-Sister Miriam Godwinson,
"We Must Dissent"

MGSO includes enough stuff to bring pretty much any computer to its knees if you enable it all, but sometimes old games have funky conflicts anyway. I'd start with a totally vanilla install and see how it works. Then at least you'll know where to start. If vanilla is fine try MGSO on the minimal install with MGE-XE's bells and whistles disabled.

Cream-of-Plenty
Apr 21, 2010

"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."

Cleretic posted:

Okay, I'm trying to get started with Morrowind for the first time, largely because a friend of mine told me to after I told him why exactly I liked Oblivion better than Skyrim (he pointed out that, excluding Oblivion gates-dragon comparisons, all of my complaints were identical to people who thought Oblivion was a step down when that came out). And I'm really excited... except for the fact that the game is only running at 10 FPS, and nothing I change as advised by the second post seems to improve that.

The only mods I'm running are MGSO, because running mods further than graphical/performance improvements and bugfixes on a first run is just wrong. Some extra info:
OS: Windows 7 Home Premium, SP1
Processor: Intel i7
RAM: 8GB
Version: CD

According to the FPS counter that I think is there because of MGE-XE, when the game is unpaused and operating it goes at about 7-10 FPS. On the main menu it reports an FPS in the 60s, while bringing up the pause menu brings it to ~30 (EDIT: Although it should benoted that the mouse cursor is clearly stuttering in the menus too, at a consistent rate no matter what the FPS counter shows). I'd go about toggling MGE options to see if it improves anything, but shutting it all off didn't help at all (although it did make Jiub's textures look a lot less blurry; if anyone knows what part of MGE caused the loss in texture quality that'd be awesome) so I'm going to assume it's not MGE at fault.

I should preface this by saying that I've never used MGSO. That being said, I've always installed a collection of mods that basically do the same thing: New trees and grass, textures, item meshes, NPC heads and bodies, MGE-XE shaders, etc. I tried to get this fully-modded game running on a computer almost identical to yours (an Asus with a 2nd-gen i7, 8GB RAM, and a 550M GPU) and found that I had to do a lot of tweaking to get things to a satisfactory framerate. The 540/550M is just overtaxed by the graphics overhaul.

I found that several things had a disproportionate effect on the game:
1. Shadows. I'm not sure what version of MGE-XE MGSO uses (or if it even used MGE-XE, rather than MGE), but the later versions of MGE-XE draw a lot of shadows. I set a hotkey to toggle MGE-XE shadows on/off, and my framerate doubled--especially in areas with heavy foliage. You might also get MGE-XE to re-draw distant land/meshes/statics, and have it only draw shadows for larger objects (I think it's set to a size of "150" by default, but you'd probably want something like "350" or "400" so the objects would have to be considerably bigger before it got a dynamic shadow).

2. Lighting model. Same thing as above, newer versions of MGE-XE may have an experimental "per-pixel" lighting model enabled by default. On a laptop like yours or mine, this is very demanding. Hell, on a decent desktop it can be demanding. There is an option to disable this in the latest version of MGE-XE, but you may have to do the same thing as with shadows: Set a hotkey to toggle between the "old" lighting model and "new" lighting.

3. Shaders. Kind of obvious. SSAO/HDR/Depth of Field. Bloom will probably create input lag for some reason, since your laptop is really similar to mine. The fewer shaders you use, the better off you'll be performance-wise. Some of the shaders, like HDR-eye adapt and SSAO light don't have nearly as much of an impact on FPS as I would have expected.

4. Foliage density. Again, I don't know how MGSO does this, but I imagine it can go balls-to-the-wall with grass density and it probably uses something like Vurt's Groundcover which, at 90%-100% density, can kill performance--especially when combined with aforementioned shaders like SSAO, which will try to add depth to every single grass mesh. I found that the sweet-spot density on my laptop was 50-55%. Also, the trees that MGSO uses may be really high-poly. For example, I found that Vurt's most popular tree mods really hurt performance in the Ascadian Isles. Eventually, I went into the folder and replaced the highest poly meshes with simpler trees from other mods, and this helped significantly.

5. Distant land drawing distance. Has less of an effect than I would have expected, but still very prominent. You're not going to be able to draw 10+ cells while using shaders and high-poly grass and trees, etc. I ended up setting mine to a pretty humble 5 or 6 cells.

If you don't know how to do some of these things, there's information on a lot of them in the OP. Look at my post history and you'll be able to find older posts where I explained how to do a lot of this, (as well as some other performance tips that may be relevant).

LtSmash
Dec 18, 2005

Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind.

-Sister Miriam Godwinson,
"We Must Dissent"

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

5. Distant land drawing distance. Has less of an effect than I would have expected, but still very prominent. You're not going to be able to draw 10+ cells while using shaders and high-poly grass and trees, etc. I ended up setting mine to a pretty humble 5 or 6 cells.

Distant land is pretty neat. The biggest fps drain is that you have to have the vanilla morrowwind view distance maxed out which for me was the biggest single fps drain in my whole install last time. Morrowwind has a horrible engine that struggles with the small number of polys in vanilla but distant land sits between the morrowwind renderer and what you see and replaces all the fog pixels with distant land. It uses a modern optimized system for rendering so cranking what it draws is much less of a hit than anything the morrowwind engine touches.

I tried tearing the distant lander renderer apart to get it to work with lower vanilla draw distances but my gfx skills are non-existant. Cutting the vanilla draw distance like 1/4 gave a huge fps boost but I couldn't get the distant land to fill closer so I had a gap between the two worlds.

Cream-of-Plenty
Apr 21, 2010

"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."
Yeah, and it doesn't help that there's no kind of occlusion culling, so this wide open world is constantly being drawn despite you not being able to see 4/5ths of it at any given moment.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

I should preface this by saying that I've never used MGSO. That being said, I've always installed a collection of mods that basically do the same thing: New trees and grass, textures, item meshes, NPC heads and bodies, MGE-XE shaders, etc. I tried to get this fully-modded game running on a computer almost identical to yours (an Asus with a 2nd-gen i7, 8GB RAM, and a 550M GPU) and found that I had to do a lot of tweaking to get things to a satisfactory framerate. The 540/550M is just overtaxed by the graphics overhaul.

I found that several things had a disproportionate effect on the game:
1. Shadows. I'm not sure what version of MGE-XE MGSO uses (or if it even used MGE-XE, rather than MGE), but the later versions of MGE-XE draw a lot of shadows. I set a hotkey to toggle MGE-XE shadows on/off, and my framerate doubled--especially in areas with heavy foliage. You might also get MGE-XE to re-draw distant land/meshes/statics, and have it only draw shadows for larger objects (I think it's set to a size of "150" by default, but you'd probably want something like "350" or "400" so the objects would have to be considerably bigger before it got a dynamic shadow).

2. Lighting model. Same thing as above, newer versions of MGE-XE may have an experimental "per-pixel" lighting model enabled by default. On a laptop like yours or mine, this is very demanding. Hell, on a decent desktop it can be demanding. There is an option to disable this in the latest version of MGE-XE, but you may have to do the same thing as with shadows: Set a hotkey to toggle between the "old" lighting model and "new" lighting.

3. Shaders. Kind of obvious. SSAO/HDR/Depth of Field. Bloom will probably create input lag for some reason, since your laptop is really similar to mine. The fewer shaders you use, the better off you'll be performance-wise. Some of the shaders, like HDR-eye adapt and SSAO light don't have nearly as much of an impact on FPS as I would have expected.

4. Foliage density. Again, I don't know how MGSO does this, but I imagine it can go balls-to-the-wall with grass density and it probably uses something like Vurt's Groundcover which, at 90%-100% density, can kill performance--especially when combined with aforementioned shaders like SSAO, which will try to add depth to every single grass mesh. I found that the sweet-spot density on my laptop was 50-55%. Also, the trees that MGSO uses may be really high-poly. For example, I found that Vurt's most popular tree mods really hurt performance in the Ascadian Isles. Eventually, I went into the folder and replaced the highest poly meshes with simpler trees from other mods, and this helped significantly.

5. Distant land drawing distance. Has less of an effect than I would have expected, but still very prominent. You're not going to be able to draw 10+ cells while using shaders and high-poly grass and trees, etc. I ended up setting mine to a pretty humble 5 or 6 cells.

If you don't know how to do some of these things, there's information on a lot of them in the OP. Look at my post history and you'll be able to find older posts where I explained how to do a lot of this, (as well as some other performance tips that may be relevant).

Okay, I messed with all of these things (MGSO does indeed use Vurt, as an aside) and messing with the shading got me up from 7-10 to 15-22. Better, still not great.

This might be colliding with the stuttering issue I mentioned. The game seems to be noticeably stuttering, judging by NPC movements and my mouse cursor; this might be independent of the low framerate, because I get entirely different FPS readings when in menus, but solving one might solve the other.

Also, again something about MGE-XE is causing character textures to become blurry. This is low-priority compared to getting the game to be playable in the first place, but if anyone knows what's doing that it's probably a simple fix.

LtSmash
Dec 18, 2005

Will we next create false gods to rule over us? How proud we have become, and how blind.

-Sister Miriam Godwinson,
"We Must Dissent"

Cleretic posted:

Also, again something about MGE-XE is causing character textures to become blurry. This is low-priority compared to getting the game to be playable in the first place, but if anyone knows what's doing that it's probably a simple fix.

Do you have a DoF shader enabled? If you are up close to an npc but looking past them DoF will make them blurry. Try putting your crosshair right on their face and if they come into focus its DoF.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

LtSmash posted:

Do you have a DoF shader enabled? If you are up close to an npc but looking past them DoF will make them blurry. Try putting your crosshair right on their face and if they come into focus its DoF.

Well, that's that problem solved. It's weird, but now that I know what's doing it I kinda like it.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!
Sorry for the double post, but some progress was made:

-Testing with a completely fresh install reveals that it runs much smoother without MGSO, but there's still noticeable stutter in moving things. You guys would know better than me if that's something that can be fixed or if Morrowind's just inherently slightly janky.

-Combining shutting off the shaders and solar shadows brought FPS into the 20s, which might be the 'theoretically playable' range. I'm going to keep trying to get it up further, since I'm sure there is something I can do for that, I just don't know what it is.

If there's anything else I can try I'd love to hear it, because I'm getting a bit tired of personally fighting a ten-year-old game to run smoothly on a computer that, otherwise, has only had framerate issues with Bioshock Infinite. You'd think I would've learned that lesson when I tried to play VtM: Bloodlines, but apparently not.

Gyshall
Feb 24, 2009

Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.
Sounds like maybe a problem with your computer? Not sure what to tell you. Vanilla Morrowind should be pretty stable even on new hardware.

Sky Shadowing
Feb 13, 2012

At least we're not the Thalmor (yet)
Drivers, maybe? That's the only thing I can think of.

Cream-of-Plenty
Apr 21, 2010

"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."

Cleretic posted:

Sorry for the double post, but some progress was made:

-Testing with a completely fresh install reveals that it runs much smoother without MGSO, but there's still noticeable stutter in moving things. You guys would know better than me if that's something that can be fixed or if Morrowind's just inherently slightly janky.

-Combining shutting off the shaders and solar shadows brought FPS into the 20s, which might be the 'theoretically playable' range. I'm going to keep trying to get it up further, since I'm sure there is something I can do for that, I just don't know what it is.

If there's anything else I can try I'd love to hear it, because I'm getting a bit tired of personally fighting a ten-year-old game to run smoothly on a computer that, otherwise, has only had framerate issues with Bioshock Infinite. You'd think I would've learned that lesson when I tried to play VtM: Bloodlines, but apparently not.

Besides drivers, the thing I would check for on your laptop is whether or not Nvidia Optimus is running when you try to play the game, especially with MGSO/MWSE/MGE-XE etc. Optimus has a lot of older games set to run on the integrated GPU (and not the dedicated 540M) in order to save battery life. For example, my game had terrible performance issues because the driver had Morrowind flagged as using the "integrated" card, by default. It might also be seeing a lot of these other applications running in the background (like MGE-XE and MWSE) and I'm not sure if those should be flagged as using the 540M or not, but I ended up reflagging them for the dedicated GPU.

Otherwise, I think it may simply be hardware. I never got the game to run on my laptop as well as I wanted, and it has a slightly better GPU than yours. The problem isn't just that you're wrestling with a 10 year old game (that was never known for being efficient), it's that you're wrestling with a ten year old game that's been modified to possess a lot of the demanding graphics features of modern games. So, in a sense, you have the worst of both worlds: You have a base engine that wasn't even written to take advantage of modern features like multi-threaded 64-bit CPUs or tons of RAM, and it's got a shell that's running all sorts of intensive graphics features. Even running the game on a decent desktop (that can run the Witcher 2 or Far Cry 3 or whatever) can yield a lower FPS than you might expect.

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

Otherwise, I think it may simply be hardware. I never got the game to run on my laptop as well as I wanted, and it has a slightly better GPU than yours. The problem isn't just that you're wrestling with a 10 year old game (that was never known for being efficient), it's that you're wrestling with a ten year old game that's been modified to possess a lot of the demanding graphics features of modern games. So, in a sense, you have the worst of both worlds: You have a base engine that wasn't even written to take advantage of modern features like multi-threaded 64-bit CPUs or tons of RAM, and it's got a shell that's running all sorts of intensive graphics features. Even running the game on a decent desktop (that can run the Witcher 2 or Far Cry 3 or whatever) can yield a lower FPS than you might expect.

I suppose that makes sense, since even when grappling with Bloodlines it was primarily bugfixes that everyone had to deal with. Here it's not quite so consistent; I'm just trying to get it to look and play slightly better, and extra problems are arising because of it.

I'll have to see if I can't systematically go through MGSO and disable everything but what's always going to be noticeable; texture packs, increased FoV, and such. I'm sure I could scratch out an extra few FPS from scaling down the water...

EDIT: Through a lot of googling, I've found one single guy that has this same problem. And naturally, he was the one that didn't get any responses. It resembles the 'music at zero' stuttering, but the music isn't actually at zero.

Cleretic fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Dec 15, 2013

Fortuitous Bumble
Jan 5, 2007

Is everything about vampires in Morrowind supposed to be extremely vague? The hint for how to cure vampires is pretty obvious is you're obsessive about collecting books, but I couldn't find anyone in the game (including other vampires) who could tell me things like where the vampire clans are.

Guildenstern Mother
Mar 31, 2010

Why walk when you can ride?
I know the temple sends you on a quest to the Berne headquarters, but yeah, other than that its pretty vague.

Stuporstar
May 5, 2008

Where do fists come from?
Ok, Uvirith's Legacy is now updated to version 3.2, just in time for Christmas.

I've also updated CDC's Propylons if anyone's interested. It's an alternative to the official Master Index Plug-in. My version is uploaded here: http://download.fliggerty.com/download-90-973

Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!
So I actually did manage to get my game working at a good pace; perplexingly, when I turned the music volume to zero to see how bad two stuttering bugs would be, I wound upfixing it. So I guess whatever causes that stuttering bug is reversed on my computer. Oh well.

I decided to play the character I initially wanted to go into Skyrim with, befre finding out they nixed the class system: A mage character focusing heavily on every single magic skill except Destruction, because I found myself leaning on it too much in Oblivion. And it works well enough so far, except for one thing the game's thrown at me that requires me to crack out the lightning spells. Unfortunately, that one thing's not going to go away anytime soon.

Do cliff racers get stronger as I go along? Because they're a nightmare right now, but I figure once I'm able to reliably shoot them out of the sky it'll be much less of an issue.

Krowley
Feb 15, 2008

You should just install a mod that either pacifies or outright removes cliff racers.

They really add nothing to the game except annoyance and despair.

Shima Honnou
Dec 1, 2010

The Once And Future King Of Dicetroit

College Slice
Cliff racers are one of the icons of the game. A Morrowind without sudden combat music and one of those horrible monsters coming down at you glitchily isn't a Morrowind I want to play.

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Cleretic
Feb 3, 2010


Ignore my posts!
I'm aggressively wrong about everything!

Krowley posted:

You should just install a mod that either pacifies or outright removes cliff racers.

They really add nothing to the game except annoyance and despair.

I tried. It didn't work.

So instead, I'm just going to have to train so hard in Destruction that I eventually get a spell that one-shots them, and take glee in blasting themout of the sky, preferably in groups.

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