I'm running Morrowind on a 7-year-old laptop and I'm finally at a point where I can play for hours at a stretch without crashing or overheating. I still get some pop-in and slowdown in big cities, but it's friggin' Morrowind; I can live with some graphical weirdness if the game still runs. This MGE XE fork helps a lot, and so does Dynamic FPS Optimization. The biggest thing, and the one I recommend if you're experiencing the kind of problems described downthread, is optimizing your textures. Optimizer Textures (Ordenador) by apipino has awful documentation, but it works. Also your Distant Land textures don't really gain anything by being larger than 512, so you may as well make those as small as you can stand (but use a high- or ultra-high-detail world mesh).
Yup! If you have the needed GPU specs (newer than the Nvidia 10 series), I also strongly recommend trying out DXVK alongside this fork. It was making a significant difference for me, before MGE XE UF was released and the two together are extraordinary. (I suggest version 2.6.2, the current version was a bit graphically glitchy for me) Just to note, if you end up giving this a try, some people find it's better to turn off MGE XE's "Reduce texture Memory" feature if using DXVK, and other people have better success leaving it on. To check, just Ctrl/Alt/Delete your game while it is running and look at your memory usage. In my case, memory consumption actually dropped by about half with "Reduce Texture Memory" ticked in MGE XE settings, but...personal mileage definitely varies.
Seriously though... Between this new MGE XE fork, DXVK, and Reduced Texture Memory... my game has never run so smoothly, and out-of-memory CTDs are a thing of the past. That is with around 450 mods (including grass, high res textures/landscape&city overhauls and added landmasses).
This sounds amazing, but i cannot get it to work. After copying files (data files installed by MO2) it minimises the game at launch when it gets to load MGE XE. I am on Win 10.
Keep in mind i haven't used it to create distant land. Should I?
Edit: When disabled shared memory feature, then this not occur.
Edit 2: When forced to open in window mode it launches. But i don't belive it works. I also noticed it shows mge xe 0.18 meanwhile in gui there is 0.19
Edit 3: Regenerating distand land does not change much. Forcing it into window mode is the only way to prevent minimasing, and there is a host64 process, it only saves 300mb or something with morrowind still having over 1gb. Also, if not forced window mode then in process tab there is still a command prompt process, meanwhile whithout it it is only game and host64 process.
What bothers me that it still shows in upper left corner mge xe 0.18 even tho gui file states 0.19 and it ignores fps limit
Final edit: I tried to use manual route. So i installed everything (entire rar content) manually and launched game using MO2 with newly generated distant land. Nothing changed. I give it a pass for now and leave this here for future references. Who knows, maybe future implementations of this in new version of mgxe will work for me.
Just download manually, extract. Back up your Morrowind folder. And then throw the extract files from this fork of MGE XE straight into your Morrowind folder to replace the old one.
I've been using it for a week now (Win 10, am on the developer's discord) and that's what I did.
Does it happen if you regen distant land with the new MGE? I've heard that it doesn't require regeneration but I always do it when I update something major anyway, so...
My game also collapses when launched via MO2, if I enable the game to launch in a window, everything works - the memory is redistributed to another process as in the screenshot.
Don't install MGE XE (any version) through MO2. Just apply it on your morrowind folder directly by extracting the zip file directly on your morrowind folder (the one with the morrowind.exe in it).
Overwrite all files if you have an earlier install. Make sure you have code patch applied as well.
"Don't install MGE XE (any version) through MO2. Just apply it on your morrowind folder directly by extracting the zip file directly on your morrowind folder (the one with the morrowind.exe in it).
Overwrite all files if you have an earlier install. Make sure you have code patch applied as well.
Open MGE XE from MO2 and generate distant land
See if it works after that."
I did it this exact way and I'm having the same issue as the others. As Pirate443 said I can get it to work in windowed mode, but not fullscreen.
I'm running it in fullscreen with zero issues. In general, with any type of addition like this (across Bethesda games), it is usually better to manually paste the files into your main game directory (it isn't difficult). Make backups if you feel nervous, obviously, but trying to install anything like this with a mod manager can be...unpredictable. For the record, my actual mod manager (which I did NOT use for this) is Wrye Mash. I'm not sure if this makes any difference, but I figured it could be worth mentioning, at least. It's possible, maybe, that MO2's virtual file system causes complications? However, that is pure speculation on my part.
I manually extracted it, and it will work from the exe in my morrowind install location, and in windowed mode through MO2....I can not get it to work in full screen mode through MO2 however. I imagine it is a setting somewhere in MO2 that is messing with it, but I can't figure it out.
I did create a backup of my entire install before adding this, but I want to keep this as I'm tired of crashes with my heavily modded game. For now I'm playing in windowed mode, but i doubled the screen resolution so that the window takes up my entire screen which is great, but my onscreen icons and text boxes are all small in comparison now lol. I can still make everything out, so I can live with it, but obviously would prefer to be able to play with this in actual full screen mode through MO2.
I use MO2 and don't use root builder - I don't understand how people are having these problems. Maybe people are using root builder and it's causing a mess?
I simply copied it straight to the Morrowind installation folder just like I did when I originally installed MGE XE when I made my modlist, but this time overwriting what was already there. It's nothing more than simply updating MGE XE.
I opened up MGE XE gui config via MO2 just like I always have and selected the checkbox for the new Use Shared Memory feature. That was it.
I use windowed mode, borderless with d3d9, no vulkan. I use reshade and I use the lossless scaling program for framegen.
For all the folks who need to use it in windowed mode: this might sound obvious and I'm sorry if everyone's done this, but have you tried borderless window mode and if that works for you?
I've been playing games on borderless windows whenever I am able for a while because they play nicer with G-sync that way, it became a habit, and one of those things that I set things to without thinking. Seeing your complaints, I'm reminded that I don't run MGE XE on true fullscreen mode.
Yeah, later builds of Windows consider "borderless windowed" to be fullscreen. They completely changed the way they process it and "borderless windowed" is not the windowed mode of a decade+ ago. Most overhead is gone and it's processed by the OS as if it were fullscreen.
The oldschool "fullscreen" is now known as "exclusive fullscreen" and is deprecated because it interferes with alt+tabbing, multi-display setups and variable refresh rate monitors (G-sync) while "borderless windowed" today has the same performance with none of those drawbacks. In fact, most modern games that say fullscreen in their settings are actually just setting borderless windowed.
Also for small UI: You can change the UI scaling in the MGE XE mcm settings in game. I have 1440p, and I play with UI scale at 1.5 to have it nice looking for me.
I also play with borderless window as it works better with DXVK for me.
This modding community is going to stay split between the two forever, isn't it?
It's more than probable... I mean, I was starting to (very) slowly contemplate a switch to OpenMW sometime this year, but two things were holding me back:
(a) I'm just not in the right headspace, right now, to learn a whole new modding process (b) There are still so many amazing MWSE mods that don't have equivalents in OpenMW
At present? Well, I'd still like to get around to trying out OpenMW at some point, but it would simply be as a separate installation, just to test out that platform's exclusive mods. I'd merely treat it as a separate profile. I mean, this updated version of MGE XE has just negated what had been OG Morrowind's biggest hurdle. I wasn't exactly intent on rushing off to OpenMW before, and I'm definitely not now. Not to mention, I've just spent around three months perfecting my newest load order, and thanks to the devs of this Unofficial Fork it has suddenly become that much better.
Well I think the following statement posted during the recent Modathon has pretty much sealed the fate for MGE/MWSE, "spearheaded by OpenMW mods, which, for the first time in the decade plus history of the Modathons, surpassed MWSE for most mod releases"
Possibly. However, that statement was made BEFORE MGE XE UF was released, and my sense is that the team is continuing to work on the project, so who knows what might be feasible, given the scope and implications of this miracle alone. Moreover, while OpenMW has introduced various cool improvements, the memory issue was its biggest draw over MGE XE, and many people who switched were reluctant to leave their favourite MWSE mods behind (as well as certain features in the Code Patch). This new version of MGE XE has 100% negated the memory problem and this will have an impact. I consider it entirely possible that MGE XE and OpenMW will continue to co-exist side by side, and roughly at parity. And this is a positive; choices should be celebrated.
The only thing that Openmw has over to vanilla for me is the goddamn levitation animation. I would pay half my life settings for someone to port that over to MWSE.
They both offer exclusive features that make it extremely difficult to settle on one or the other. When playing on Steam Deck in particular, loading OpenMW with 300 + mods I go from pressing play to being in-game in under 20 seconds with a draw distance that would be comparable to 14 using MGE XE. With MGE XE using the original game it takes almost 5 minutes to reach even the main menu. The original game has an abundance of extremely awesome mods that don't work for OpenMW, in particular UI mods, while OpenMW has the Full Body Awareness, the animated Levitation, Dynamic Camera, and ReAnimation for some examples of mods I have a very hard time now playing without. OpenMW still runs remarkably better and never crashes for me on Windows or Steam Deck, but with this update to MGE XE the crashing issue appears so far from my testing to be no longer a concern, which is massive. If it were only a matter of performance I would remain with the original game, but now that OpenMW has a few mods for which nothing comparable exists for MGE XE and MWSE I am right back to the ultimate dilemma, haha. I maintain and regularly update a modded setup of both on my Steam Deck and PC and admittedly have been favoring OpenMW for those newer mods and for performance, but this new update has got me remembering why it took me so long to sincerely try OpenMW in the first place, so many great MWSE mods I sorely missed. Honestly it is a privilege to enjoy to be so frustrated by this choice!
OpenMW handles some things differently that the original engine does not. This is why vegetation mods look worst in OpenMW because it handles alpha properties different (groundcover is also more grainy in OpenMW). The water shader is also pretty bad where it looks like a flat texture and refractions takes a bunch of performance away. OpenMW also still struggles with scenes that have more objects, which is something a modern engine can handle. Lastly OpenMW does not even fully utilize modern hardware or modern methods for performance to allow for more detailed scenes in-game without FPS being very low (this includes having a further draw distance).
As far as I know, OpenMW uses double precision (64bit) floats to address exactly this issue (just to be clear, that basically means numbers can have twice as many digits, 15 vs 7, which means land cannot just be twice as big before issues occur, but much, much bigger).
Edit: I now saw that you wrote MWSE, not OpenMW. Well, MWSE is still the original engine, and that uses 32-bit floats which causes these precision issues. As I understand it it, they are already noticeable in Skyrim: Home of the Nords and Project Cyrodiil. Tammie Rebuilt (the Morrowind mainland) is fine, though. It is kind of a shame that 0,0 lies in the middle of Vvardenfell because there is not much north and east of it, but that's just what it is. And as I said, OpenMW doesn't have this problem.
This sounds unreal 0.0 For the first time I'm sad to still have to run a Win7 rig. Going over the documentation it seems Descawed had some ideas to still get an approximation of this breakthrough running on older systems, will there be any chance of that making it into MGE XE at a later stage?
Does basically the same thing, it transfers texture memory to a separate 64Bit process.
New Vegas Tick Fix also has an option to keep textures only on VRAM, similar to the "Reduce Texture Memory Use" option of MGE XE (however, in my Experience, DXVK is better for this, though this new option, which I haven't tried out yet, is likely even better).
Edit: Tried this new MGE XE option out, and it basically halved memory usage for Morrowind.exe, likely even more if I played for some time. I'm not currently playing Morrowind, I probably won't for a while, and I really want to give OpenMW a try next time, but this is really a great thing to have. Now, if there only was real normal map support...
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If you have the needed GPU specs (newer than the Nvidia 10 series), I also strongly recommend trying out DXVK alongside this fork. It was making a significant difference for me, before MGE XE UF was released and the two together are extraordinary. (I suggest version 2.6.2, the current version was a bit graphically glitchy for me)
Just to note, if you end up giving this a try, some people find it's better to turn off MGE XE's "Reduce texture Memory" feature if using DXVK, and other people have better success leaving it on. To check, just Ctrl/Alt/Delete your game while it is running and look at your memory usage. In my case, memory consumption actually dropped by about half with "Reduce Texture Memory" ticked in MGE XE settings, but...personal mileage definitely varies.
Seriously though... Between this new MGE XE fork, DXVK, and Reduced Texture Memory... my game has never run so smoothly, and out-of-memory CTDs are a thing of the past. That is with around 450 mods (including grass, high res textures/landscape&city overhauls and added landmasses).
Thank you so much. You get all the cake. All of it.
Keep in mind i haven't used it to create distant land. Should I?
Edit: When disabled shared memory feature, then this not occur.
Edit 2: When forced to open in window mode it launches. But i don't belive it works. I also noticed it shows mge xe 0.18 meanwhile in gui there is 0.19
Edit 3: Regenerating distand land does not change much. Forcing it into window mode is the only way to prevent minimasing, and there is a host64 process, it only saves 300mb or something with morrowind still having over 1gb. Also, if not forced window mode then in process tab there is still a command prompt process, meanwhile whithout it it is only game and host64 process.
What bothers me that it still shows in upper left corner mge xe 0.18 even tho gui file states 0.19 and it ignores fps limit
Final edit: I tried to use manual route. So i installed everything (entire rar content) manually and launched game using MO2 with newly generated distant land. Nothing changed. I give it a pass for now and leave this here for future references. Who knows, maybe future implementations of this in new version of mgxe will work for me.
Just download manually, extract. Back up your Morrowind folder. And then throw the extract files from this fork of MGE XE straight into your Morrowind folder to replace the old one.
I've been using it for a week now (Win 10, am on the developer's discord) and that's what I did.
Overwrite all files if you have an earlier install. Make sure you have code patch applied as well.
Open MGE XE from MO2 and generate distant land
See if it works after that.
morrowind folder (the one with the morrowind.exe in it).
Overwrite all files if you have an earlier install. Make sure you have code patch applied as well.
Open MGE XE from MO2 and generate distant land
See if it works after that."
I did it this exact way and I'm having the same issue as the others. As Pirate443 said I can get it to work in windowed mode, but not fullscreen.
For the record, my actual mod manager (which I did NOT use for this) is Wrye Mash. I'm not sure if this makes any difference, but I figured it could be worth mentioning, at least. It's possible, maybe, that MO2's virtual file system causes complications? However, that is pure speculation on my part.
I did create a backup of my entire install before adding this, but I want to keep this as I'm tired of crashes with my heavily modded game. For now I'm playing in windowed mode, but i doubled the screen resolution so that the window takes up my entire screen which is great, but my onscreen icons and text boxes are all small in comparison now lol. I can still make everything out, so I can live with it, but obviously would prefer to be able to play with this in actual full screen mode through MO2.
I simply copied it straight to the Morrowind installation folder just like I did when I originally installed MGE XE when I made my modlist, but this time overwriting what was already there. It's nothing more than simply updating MGE XE.
I opened up MGE XE gui config via MO2 just like I always have and selected the checkbox for the new Use Shared Memory feature. That was it.
I use windowed mode, borderless with d3d9, no vulkan. I use reshade and I use the lossless scaling program for framegen.
I've been playing games on borderless windows whenever I am able for a while because they play nicer with G-sync that way, it became a habit, and one of those things that I set things to without thinking. Seeing your complaints, I'm reminded that I don't run MGE XE on true fullscreen mode.
The oldschool "fullscreen" is now known as "exclusive fullscreen" and is deprecated because it interferes with alt+tabbing, multi-display setups and variable refresh rate monitors (G-sync) while "borderless windowed" today has the same performance with none of those drawbacks. In fact, most modern games that say fullscreen in their settings are actually just setting borderless windowed.
I also play with borderless window as it works better with DXVK for me.
lol. lmao.
This modding community is going to stay split between the two forever, isn't it?
It's more than probable...
(a) I'm just not in the right headspace, right now, to learn a whole new modding process
(b) There are still so many amazing MWSE mods that don't have equivalents in OpenMW
At present? Well, I'd still like to get around to trying out OpenMW at some point, but it would simply be as a separate installation, just to test out that platform's exclusive mods. I'd merely treat it as a separate profile. I mean, this updated version of MGE XE has just negated what had been OG Morrowind's biggest hurdle. I wasn't exactly intent on rushing off to OpenMW before, and I'm definitely not now. Not to mention, I've just spent around three months perfecting my newest load order, and thanks to the devs of this Unofficial Fork it has suddenly become that much better.
EDIT
@ dgleison,
Possibly. However, that statement was made BEFORE MGE XE UF was released, and my sense is that the team is continuing to work on the project, so who knows what might be feasible, given the scope and implications of this miracle alone. Moreover, while OpenMW has introduced various cool improvements, the memory issue was its biggest draw over MGE XE, and many people who switched were reluctant to leave their favourite MWSE mods behind (as well as certain features in the Code Patch). This new version of MGE XE has 100% negated the memory problem and this will have an impact. I consider it entirely possible that MGE XE and OpenMW will continue to co-exist side by side, and roughly at parity. And this is a positive; choices should be celebrated.
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenMW/comments/192hfxk/comment/kh6voux/
Edit: I now saw that you wrote MWSE, not OpenMW. Well, MWSE is still the original engine, and that uses 32-bit floats which causes these precision issues. As I understand it it, they are already noticeable in Skyrim: Home of the Nords and Project Cyrodiil. Tammie Rebuilt (the Morrowind mainland) is fine, though. It is kind of a shame that 0,0 lies in the middle of Vvardenfell because there is not much north and east of it, but that's just what it is. And as I said, OpenMW doesn't have this problem.
Does basically the same thing, it transfers texture memory to a separate 64Bit process.
New Vegas Tick Fix also has an option to keep textures only on VRAM, similar to the "Reduce Texture Memory Use" option of MGE XE (however, in my Experience, DXVK is better for this, though this new option, which I haven't tried out yet, is likely even better).
Edit: Tried this new MGE XE option out, and it basically halved memory usage for Morrowind.exe, likely even more if I played for some time. I'm not currently playing Morrowind, I probably won't for a while, and I really want to give OpenMW a try next time, but this is really a great thing to have. Now, if there only was real normal map support...