Morrowind Graphics Extender

This is a utility to add oblivion style distant land and HDR to morrowind, as well as many other graphical and input related tweaks. It is also a required utility for some mods which make use of the additional scripting functions it provides.

Mostly complete feature list:

• Adds an oblivion style distant land feature. (Reflective water and distant statics are 3.3.2 only)
• Adds a fake HDR effect. (DX9 only)
• Allows morrowind to make use of the graphics drivers ‘application preference’ setting for antialiasing, anisotropic filtering and vWait, mipmap detail, refresh rate, etc.
• Allows global render state changes, such as disabling or enabling fog, dithering, specular highlighting etc.
• Lets you change morrowinds screen resolution to non 4:3 values.
• Fixes the white loading screens you get when trying to use antialiasing.
• Provides a partial fix for morrowinds checkerboard lighting problem. (Rather buggy, and 3.0.3 only)
• Lets you run morrowind in 16 bit colour mode
• Lets you run morrowind on graphics cards which do not support 16 bit colour, as long as they support all other DX8 features.
• Adds fullscreen, customizable hardware and software shaders, up to 32 of which can be run at once.
• Some performance enhancements such as changing depth buffer format and disabling multithreaded DX.
• Lets you take screenshots even when antialiasing is enabled, and in any of 6 different formats; bmp, jpeg, gif, tiff, dds and png. (gif and tiff are 3.0.3 only)
• Lets you use different fogging modes. (Including the more accurate ranged vertex mode)

• 14 different types of macro that can be attached to any key, including entering console commands, changing MGE graphics settings on the fly, and remapping any normally unmappable morrowind controls.
• Time based triggers, which can be set to push keys after set periods of time. Useful for automatic saving.
• All macros can also use up to 8 mouse buttons as if they were keyboard keys. Macros can also be bound to the mouse wheel.
• Lets you skip the opening movie and disable the console.
• Lets you use daggerfall style combat controls, where you move the mouse back and for to swing your weapon.

• Lets you completely disable sound, and even run morrowind without any sound hardware installed. (3.0.3 only)

• Allows scripts to change global graphics settings, including specular highlighting, fogging, shading model etc.
• Allows scripts to load and set fullscreen shaders
• Allows scripts to change fog density, zoom, screen rotation etc.
• Allows scripts to load .x files, and then position, texture, and apply vertex/pixel shaders to the loaded mesh.
• Gives scripts control over the players input. You can disable individual keys, force key presses etc.
• Lets scripts add extra bits of HUD.
• Gives scripts control over the colour of fog, the background, sky, sunlight and a few other global colours.
• Lets modders attach shaders to ingame morrowind objects, so that effects such as bump mapping can be applied.

• Provides an inbuilt shader editor to aid in writing your own fullscreen shaders, as well as many example shaders.
• Provides a height map to normal map converter, a mesh format converter and a normal/tangent/binormal calculator.
• Includes a feature to prevent morrowind hogging 100% of your cpu time.
• Priveds a utility to generate heightmaps and low details textures and meshes of your installed plugins, for use with the distant land feature.

Download

This utility is not user friendly. Please do not attempt to use it unless you have some level of computer literacy and are prepared to spend some time experimenting with what options work best for you. It may prove incompatible with your graphics card or some other system component; Intel integrated cards especially suffer from problems with distant land.

• 3.3.2
  Requires bloodmoon and a DX9 graphics card supporting at least sm1.4. (sm2.0 is required for distant statics or reflective water) Has some compatibility issues with all external versions of MWSE. A fully compatible version of MWSE 0.9.3 is included. Doesn't require GDI+.
• 3.0.3
  Doesn't require bloodmoon or a high end graphics card. Works with external versions of MWSE up to 0.9.2a. Doesn't support distant statics or reflective water. Also requires GDI+, which is a default part of windows XP SP2, but which may need to be downloaded on older versions of windows.
• source code
  Only needed if you want to modify MGE in some way and compile your own custom version. Only download this if you like making your eye's bleed; it is a complete an utter mess, due to it being one of the first C++ programs I ever wrote.

FAQ

Why have pixel shaded water and/or shadows been disabled?
MGE's distant land is not compatible with morrowinds shadows or pixel shaded water, and so they are automatically disabled. If you have a sm2 graphics card MGE can replace morrowinds water with its own, but nothing can be done about shadows. MGE may not automatically reenable them when distant land is disabled, so make sure you double check.

Why can't I take screenshots
Some of MGE's features are incompatible with the method morrowind uses for taking screenshots. MGE has it's own screenshot function which you can use instead; open the macro editor and assign the 'take screenshot' function to a key of your choice.

Why does the distant land generator crash when I try to generate the files
MGE's nif file parser isn't perfect, and if it comes across a nif it can't read it tends to crash. All default meshes are known to work, so you can sidestep this problem by only generating statics for morrowind.esm and bloodmoon.esm, otherwise you will need to retry repeatedly until you find the problem mod. One known problem which isn't related to nif's is Ald-Vendras, which contains a corrupt texture file. To fix this, download this and extract it to morrowinds \data\textures folder before running the distant land generator.

I'm using windows vista. Why does MGE [insert just about any weird problem you can think of here]
Because you're using windows vista. If possible, replace it with an operating system that actually works. If not, make sure UAC is disabled.