Is openmw compatible with MGSO

[mkborregaard]

Oh by the way I know my problem is more related to MGSO than openMW - merely reporting my experiences.

[darkbasic]

I suggest you to mod your Morrowind as you prefer instead of using old and outdated MGSO:
http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:Morrowind
http://pastebin.com/7gF2VLaf

[mkborregaard]

EDIT: post deleted by OP

[mkborregaard]

@darkbasic I just had a look at the step guide, and I see it is in fact a recommended list - I naively thought it was an overview of all mods!
Hey, I appreciate that, it should be possible to download all those over a good evening and play with it. Thanks a bunch, I will look forward to it! And sorry for responding too quickly.

[Whimby]

@Whimby: That sounds like the fake bump-mapping vs. real bump mapping problem I've been hearing about (some mods did some clever/hacky things to get an effect like bump-mapping, but that relied on irregular properties of the original engine, so doesn't work here), although I'd need to see a screenshot to know for sure.

As Nivim said, it's because of the fake bump-mapping. It was a hackish way of doing it before, but it is a poor way of doing it when you can do it the real way. Those old techniques don't work anymore, and, IMO, if scrawl would be re-implementing that "feature", then it would only result in people releasing new mods using this bad way of making bump maps.

Yeah I've read about the fake bump-mapping, and I'm guessing that's the issue. If you set the armors to reflective in the MGSOO then you get insanely shiny and bright armors too.

I suggest you to mod your Morrowind as you prefer instead of using old and outdated MGSO:
http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:Morrowind
http://pastebin.com/7gF2VLaf

Hey I didn't know there was a STEP for morrowind. I did it for Skyrim so this is right up my alley.

[Pherim]

The results were a little disappointing. I also get the 'shiny rocks' error, but otherwise cannot really tell the difference apart from a 25% drop in FPS (which is abysmal already on my system: from 20 to 15 fps outside on an i3 3.3Ghz with 8GB and a 2GB Nvidia GT 730 at 1680x1050). Notably, I had thought there would be grass and fancy tropical trees and better faces on NPCs, but that did not seem to be the case. Checking the Data Files folder I could not see the "Grass" or "Better faces" or any "trees" mod (I mean the .esm files) either.

I had also tested MGSO with an earlier version and discovered a number of problems with some of the mods, but I believe several of them should be fixed by now. I should try it again and see if they are some time.

As I have explained already in a different thread, the "shiny rocks" are no error of OpenMW, but the result of a workaround in vanilla Morrowind that is no longer necessary with OpenMW. The Morrowind Code Patch introduced a feature which allowed the use of fake normal mapping in Morrowind by using environment maps (basically, some kind of simple reflection), which are present in Morrowind but used only very sparingly. MCP changed them to adjust brightness to the current lighting conditions, so they could be used to make normal maps work without making them appear shiny, as they are now in OpenMW. As this method required editing of every single mesh that was supposed to have normal mapping, it was very impractical. OpenMW natively supports normal mapping, so this workaround is no longer necessary. Replicating this MCP feature would not be wise, as OpenMW's real normal mapping looks much better and it should not be too difficult to make these mods compatible with it.

Trees should be working, though. However, it depends on how the mod works. If it is just a replacer, it only needs meshes and textures to work and does not need an esm/esp file. But it may be that it adds trees to the game world or changes the model paths of the trees, in which case it does need one.

Grass in Morrowind usually works with MGE, though the grass plugins can theoretically be used with vanilla Morrowind and probably also OpenMW- it is probably not recommended, though, as this would probably be quite performance-heavy (MGE does it in a more performance-friendly way), and the grasses would be unmoving and possibly have collision.

The Trees and Grass mods you are looking for are probably not in the Data Files but in the MGSOO (Options) folder, if you extracted the Data.exe and did not use the installer, because there are several options to choose from, including no grass. Many other optional mods will also be there.

[mkborregaard]

Thanks, that is extremely useful advice. I guess the take home is that some mods are not and should not be compatible, but when openmw matures more someone may edit the mods to take advantage of this more modern engine. For some reason I love grass mods, but oh well, you cannot have everything

[Pherim]

Well, grass is another thing OpenMW will possibly support natively in the future and much better than MGE does now. The way it works now is that every single grass object has to be placed in the game (though I believe there are tools which can place them automatically according to the ground texture) and then, MGE distant land needs to be generated with the grass mod enabled (it should not be enabled in the actual game!). This works reasonably well as long as the landscape is unchanged, but as the grass objects are fixed in position, they might be found floating or submerged in the ground if a mod changes the terrain, and adjusting them is tedious.

For OpenMW, a dynamic system like in Oblivion and Skyrim is conceivable, where the grass is dynamically placed on certain ground textures. Of course, this will most certainly be a post-1.0 feature.

[mkborregaard]

Awesome!

[GreyFox]

Was any one able to run the MGSO installer options with Wine on Linux? I could get the extractor to work, but I suspect it installs the most performence friendly version by default.