openmw.org

AnyOldName3 wrote: ↑08 Sep 2019, 20:27 Lots of the water's goodness in the vanilla engine is due to the shaders being fed other data that OpenMW isn't feeding its shader. There are improvements to be made that can be done in the shader itself, but to replicate vanilla or most MGE XE shaders perfectly, you'd need a chunk of extra work on the engine side.

I was not aware of what was or was not exposed to the OpenMW shader, and assumed, perhaps wrongly, what I'm used to being exposed in shaders. I apologize. What isn't currently exposed, and why? I believe it'd be a very good solution to expose more information to shaders so that we can cover more functionality that MGE covers.

It's mentioned earlier in the thread. Morrowind used dynamically generated textures for its pixel-shaded water, as showcased in Nvidia's GDC2002 presentation.

I think you misunderstand. I knew that Morrowind used dynamically generated textures for it's water. I was not aware of what was or was not exposed to the shader currently in use for OpenMW and assumed it had the necessary information exposed to facilitate things like dynamic normal creation, and such. Apparently, this isn't true.

The shader that actually draws the water is fed the dynamic normal map as an input as it's generated in its own rendering pass. As we don't have that pass, we can't feed its output as an input to anything else.