Brain Loop trying to get groundcovers working as intended

[Triviad]

I'm having trouble getting anywhere with the last couple steps of a short modlist.

I've decided to go with Beautiful Cities of Morrowind and I've also decided on Ramiro's groundcovers. I have these mods installed through MO2. I have confusing instructions though:

The Ramiro's page at Nexus repeatedly tells us (with a pretty rude post stickied, so it must be an irritating reoccurring issue) not to activate the .esp's so I am not doing that. For OpenMW though the instructions say only to add groundcover lines to settings.cfg. They say nothing about the groundcover= list item that goes in openmw.cfg. Does this mean that this mod is deployed differently than other grass mods, or do I still need to use groundcover= entries in the config to define the esp's?

Also, in case it might help to get a response, this is what my openmw.cfg looks like now, but I notice a lot of "unknown grass" lines in the log file.

groundcover=Rem_AI.esp
groundcover=Rem_BC.esp
groundcover=Rem_WG.esp
groundcover=Rem_AL.esp
groundcover=Rem_GL.esp
groundcover=Rem_Solstheim.esp
groundcover=REM_AC_No_Sheogorad.ESP
...
data="D:/UserGames/Mod Assets/MO2-Morrowind/mods/Remiros' Groundcover"
...


PS Hi Sir Herrbatka! If it is you okaying this post. ty for getting to it, I understand man is not machine!

[AnyOldName3]

The Ramiro's page at Nexus repeatedly tells us (with a pretty rude post stickied, so it must be an irritating reoccurring issue) not to activate the .esp's so I am not doing that.

With MGE XE, you leave the ESPs inactive, but let the MGE XE distant land generator see them.

For OpenMW though the instructions say only to add groundcover lines to settings.cfg. They say nothing about the groundcover= list item that goes in openmw.cfg.

In OpenMW, you leave the ESPs inactive in the content= list, but you need to activate them in the groundcover list because we don't have a separate distant land generator and can do everything at runtime. That list is in openmw.cfg. There are different settings in settings.cfg that control things like what percentage of groundcover actually gets drawn and how far away it can be seen.

but I notice a lot of "unknown grass" lines in the log file.

There's an issue with the mod that MGE XE's distant land generator doesn't notice, but OpenMW does. It doesn't have any symptoms, but there's a patched version of the mod available on the Nexus from another author.

[Triviad]

Ok, thank you. I was using Ramiro's groundcovers though, not Vurt's, but it's a moot point now since I've done away with the mod. Also, the instruction to add groundcover lines to the cfg is right on the description page. Either it changed recently or I missed it while staring directly at it. Oh well, patience goes a long way but mostly in that direction toward me it seems, sigh. At least I seem to warrant it by all accounts.

I have a better question now though: is OpenMW planning on adding native groundcover? Your comment on the Vurt's mod page makes me wonder since you describe the mod at a temporary measure.

This would really be welcome - this groundcover thing has been holding up any actual game playing for about three days now, I think I'm ok with just ground at this point, I don't plan on adding any kind of groundcover mod after beating myself up over the feature. A shame, Ozzy's especially looks really great in the screenshots.

[AnyOldName3]

We were, but most of the discussion dried up as soon as the handling for legacy groundcover was implemented (presumably as people no longer thought the need was quite as pressing). It's still on the roadmap, but no one's working on it.

[Triviad]

Well no problem there; there are so many cool features at this point that I doubt I'll ever think about groundcover again. I'm creating a new post about HRTF stuff, thank you for the help with this side of things