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Morrowrift - Morrowind VR (CV1/1.3 alpha! v. 3.0.2)

superllama
Protege
6/6/16 - I finally rewrote the OP... editing this literally gave me a migraine but it's finally cleaned up! If you want to look at the old one for some reason, I archived it here pastebin.com/VDfZgTvB
*ahem* anyway.

DISCLAIMER
- Tested with Disk (GOTY) and Steam copies-- should theoretically work with other versions like the GOG version but this is untested (if someone can confirm that it works I'll remove this disclaimer)

WHAT THIS IS
This is a program that hooks into Morrowind + MGE 3.8.0 and, with certain settings disabled, adds fully playable (except character creation) support for the Oculus Rift.
This is different from configurations for vireio and vorpx because it actually decouples the view from the menu and draws the menu as a 3D projection, meaning you can look around separately from where you're aiming and lean forward to zoom in on game text, and it automatically levels your view pitch so you can play it standing up without getting dizzy.
It's written from scratch in C, so there are no dependencies other than Morrowind + MGE 3.8.0 and the Oculus Runtimes.
Here's a badly recorded gameplay video showing off the features (and bugs) in the already-out-of-date version 3.0 (one of the bugs in the video is already fixed!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIMBYREr9yg
(NOTE: if somebody with a decent GPU and recording program wants to take a video of their game window running the latest version of Morrowrift, I'll put it here-- right now all my videos are laggy and ugly because my GPU is old and I don't know how to use OBS)

WHY 3.x?
You might be wondering how this is version 3 when it's so basic... short answer: this one is (theoretically) way more stable and optimized than before due to it using an entirely different structure and coding scheme. Long answer: the first one was DK1 only and was a direct fork of MGE, meaning you had to actually replace MGE with my DLL. Version 2 added DK2 support, and was an extra layer on top of MGE that worked the same way-- that is, by pretending to be DirectX. This version is a standalone program that injects a DLL directly into Morrowind much like VorpX or Vireio, except this program is specifically made for Morrowind/MGE and doesn't have any other dependencies.

WHY ALPHA? (BUGS)
There are still a multitude of bugs present in this version, some of which were even fixed in an older version, but as I've abstracted the code more and more in an attempt to make my edits more portable to other games, certain things got harder to fix. Here's a list of all known bugs that I can think of right now:

  • Overlay ZOrder Bug - Any game overlays (or at least steam) come up behind the main menu or HUD. If you're playing with a steam controller and you can't move the mouse on the main menu, try pressing Shift+Tab to see if you accidentally invisibly opened the steam overlay. Luckily it's completely usable in-game since the menu is transparent there.
  • Native Aspect Loss - The game is currently forced into a Rift-shaped aspect ratio, which applies to in-game menus too. I'd like it to obey the game's starting aspect ratio when it comes to drawing in-game menus eventually but that might not be possible if I want the mirror window to show both viewports correctly.
  • Race Selection Bug - The race selection menu is effectively unusable-- I recommend creating your character outside of VR mode and then running Morrowrift afterward and loading a save.
  • NPC Shadow Bug - You have to set Real-Time Shadows to None in-game or else NPC's will flicker like a banned pokemon episode if you're not staring straight at them. I think they use their own clipping planes and I'll have to locate those to transform them.
  • Weapon Clipping - Weapon/hand models have messed up clipping. Probably a similar cause as above.
  • Water Clipping - Water sometimes disappears when you're not aiming at it, and also looks pretty terrible with reflections and shaders turned off which is still required for the hack to work. Also, if you have Pixel Shaders turned on, water reflections don't look right and sometimes draws twice with incorrect headtracking.
  • Sky Movement - Positional headtracking affects clouds and stuff in the sky, which isn't really that big of a deal but looks stupid and can be a bit disorienting if you try to breakdance ingame (or anything else requiring a lot of positional movement). Also, the sun is rotated based on player aim instead of camera position.
  • Loading Freeze - Since the game renders the progress bar during frozen loading screens, the background freezes but still moves with your head which feels really weird. I honestly have no idea how to fix this.
  • Tracking Asymptotes - If you're looking straight up or down, the headtracking gets pretty weird and overdoes roll. This is because of some really old code I wrote back when I didn't understand quaternions, I'll fix it eventually.
  • Elusive Crosshair - The in-game crosshair is hard to see on most backgrounds, and since headtracking is decoupled from the menu it's easy to lose it. In the future I'll probably add a custom crosshair that renders on top of it and is easier to see.
  • Annoying Menu Placement - Not exactly a bug but a side effect of view auto-levelling still transforming the menu so the crosshair lines up correctly: if you're trying to loot something on the ground the menu will come up down there, which is a pain to read or use and also suffers from the trackign asymptote bug. In the future I'll probably fix this by leaving the game menu level and only transforming the aforementioned extra crosshair and weapon model based on in-game aim. I'm also planning on implementing a system eventually where recentering the view actually moves the crosshair to where you're looking, instead of the other way around, which will make it easier to find it.

Even aside from all that, I'm not 100% sure how well this will run on varying systems, so until a few people test it and confirm that it works, it'll be an alpha. Once enough people are able to run it (which may entail some bugfixing) and I improve the launcher a bit, I'll call it a Beta again.

DOWNLOAD
You can download 3.0.2 Here-- Google was yelling at me for uploading an EXE or something so I had to encrypt it so it wouldn't try to scan it. The password is simply "uh" because that was my reaction to Google taking my first upload down. (Just ask this scientician)

If you have a DK2 and you'd rather run the old unstable 0.8 version for some reason, you can still get it Here. There are instructions for using it somewhere in this old archived post.

SETUP
I recommend starting with vanilla morrowind (goty is fine) since I don't know how different mods (especially MGE and MWSE mods) will affect this. Once you've got it working you can start adding things in and making sure they don't break it.
The first thing you'll need to do is install and set up MGE 3.8.0.
Eventually I want to try to add support for MGE XE and some of the more popular shader mods, but that's a long way off.
Make sure your game has this message in the top left corner before proceeding.
If you're running the Steam copy of the game you'll need to set Morrowind.exe, Morrowind Launcher.exe, and MGEgui.exe to all run as Administrator before this will work.
Next, since this version is still a bit finicky, you have to make sure you run it with the right settings or it will probably just sit there and not draw anything, or render everything totally wrong. Unless you want your game to look that way (or like nothing), you'll need to disable the following MGE features in MGEgui:

  • Distant Land
  • Anti-Aliasing
  • Probably any mods adding shaders

I'm working on getting these features supported but it's very very difficult to do unless I actually modify MGE, and I'm trying to avoid doing that in this version in anticipation of someday retrofitting other games (yes, including skyrim) that don't have open source graphics extenders that I can just rewrite. That's the only reason the ancient DK1 beta version seen on my youtube channel had Distant Land-- I actually modified MGE to add support for it.
If the font size is too small for you, you can choose a lower resolution like 1024x768 and the in-game text will be bigger, but you may get extra aliasing if you do that. Some resolutions render incorrectly right now though like 1600x960.

RUNNING
Just make sure Morrowrift.exe and Morrowrift.dll are in the folder with Morrowind, and run Morrowrift.exe (not Morrowind or Morrowind Launcher). If you're running a Steam copy of the game, you need to make sure Morrowrift.exe is set to Run as Administrator.
If you need the Steam Overlay for any reason (for instance if you use a Steam Controller) You should be able to add Morrowrift.exe to steam as a non-steam game too and still have steam inject its overlay, and if you want to do it with an actual Steam copy of the game you may have to Steam itself as Administrator before it will let you do this (and you still have to add Morrowrift as a non-steam game and run it that way). This may not work for everyone but I was able to run both steam and non-steam copies of Morrowind with Rift support and Overlay support simultaneously.
One caveat with the Steam Overlay though-- for some reason it draws underneath the Morrowind menu right now, so if you accidentally open it on the main menu or during a cinematic, you won't be able to see it. If you can't move the mouse on the main menu try hitting Shift+Tab and see if steam overlay was open invisibly behind the menu.

COMMAND LINE ARGUMENTS
If you run Morrowrift.exe with -nolevel you can disable the auto pitch levelling, but I don't really recommend it since it can make you dizzy. However if you absolutely cannot stand the menu moving up and down all the time when you aim independent of your head position, this feature can be disabled.

This is currently the only command line argument but I'll probably add more options as time goes on, depending on what needs to be customized.

DONATE
If you love my project and want to throw in some motivation for me to continue to add new features, new hardware support, and maybe even new games someday, you could make a Paypal Donation and give me a great excuse to work on this project instead of other stuff 😛

PLANS
First things first, I need to fix bugs. If I can get distant land, anti-aliasing, shaders, and MGE XE working well, I'll consider it a major, major victory. Once I have at least MGE working perfectly I may also try to tackle Oblivion and Skyrim support alongside of MGE XE, since they'll have similar shader setups. MGE XE has the benefit of being open source so I can actually look directly at how it works, which may help me structure the code so it works with newer games.
As a side goal, I'd also like to implement SteamVR support instead of just Oculus support to my codebase. Right now I'm saving up for a GTX 1070 and HTC Vive so I can do this, so that's probably what any donation money will go towards. My current GPU is an old GTX 770 which can barely even run things on the DK2, so if I'm going to get a Vive which has no Async Timewarp I'll definitely need a better GPU to go with it.
If I do get a Vive, another pie in the sky goal would be to hack the game so much that your hands and weapon are drawn based on motion controls, and one of the four weapon moves is performed depending on how you move your hands. This would be so insanely awesome I'm kind of afraid to even mention that I'm planning to try it, since it's probably nearly impossible, but hey, I can dream.
299 REPLIES 299

Ananas
Explorer
Yeah ask ETS2 devs, they seem to be in good connection with the community and might be happy to help

superllama
Protege
So I made some progress with a D3D9->D3D9Ex wrapper (which would then be able to share textures with D3D11 and render to the rift) but it crashes when the game tries to call D3DXCreateSprite. I'm guessing there's some internal thing baked into d3dx that I'm not doing right so I'll either have to make a D3DX wrapper too, or debug the disassembly... or find some other way, I don't know.

EDIT: Turns out it was really easy to just make a fake d3dx9 passthrough that returns 1 on CreateSprite and CreateFont which tells MGE to just not use them. For now that'll work but eventually I'll have to actually make my own replacements for D3DXSprite and D3DXFont in order to have full MGE support, though luckily those classes aren't all that complicated.

EDIT 2: It's working! Well, sort of. The menu works, it's loading the game, drawing the first frame, then it crashes on D3DXCreateTextureFromFileEx because it's not designed to work with D3D9Ex. So I'll just have to replace it again like I did CreateSprite and CreateFont.

EDIT 3: YES!!! Managed to wrap d3d9.dll and d3d9x_43.dll so that MGE AND MGE XE are now creating D3D9Ex devices instead of D3D9 devices and rendering everything correctly! 😄
What this means is, if all else goes well, I should be able to replace the game's RenderTarget with a texture that's shared into D3D11, and we'll have true DK2 support!

SputnikKaputtni
Explorer
Glad I could help. 🙂 And yes, now that you mention it I think the aforementioned DX9 guys wrote somewhere that they rendered the whole frame to a texture in order to hand it over to DX11.
i7-4790K @4.00 GHz, EVGA GTX 980 SC, 16 GB RAM, Win 8.1 64 Bit

superllama
Protege
Made a ridiculous amount of progress today (sadly at the expense of homework that I should've done... heh)-- I'm about where I was on the project when I made the very first post in this thread two years ago, only this time with the DK2, and with support for both MGE and MGE XE.

Currently my wrapper is:
getting rotation/position data and applying it to the game's camera
rendering stereo on the DK2 in direct mode with distortion (via d3d9ex->d3d11 texture sharing)
supporting MGE XE's shadows, water, fog, distantland etc all fairly well

But not yet:
using the correct FOV EDIT: this works now
transforming the clipping planes
handling menus correctly
scaled properly to morrowind's units

Everything on the "not yet working" list is basically just a repeat of what I had to do with the first DLL so hopefully it'll come fairly easily! Thank you all so much for the support and pretty soon we'll all be running around Vvardenfell in VR again 😄

UPDATE: Got the FOV working. I noticed there are actually a ton of issues with stereo rendering of XE's shadows and shaders etc-- might just have to target regular MGE until I can figure out a scheme to make those work too. Additionally, Timewarp doesn't seem to be doing much since I'm getting some really bad judder outside (it works great in the room with Jiub but when I go out on deck it starts lagging). Also, I haven't written the menu projector yet so menus are drawn kind of funny, and for some reason the view behind the menu freezes and doesn't obey head tracking while the menu is up.

If anybody knows how to troubleshoot timewarp I'd love to hear about that, I tried forking off submitFrame to a second thread so the compositor would have more cpu time, but that didn't do anything. I don't know if I was supposed to update it somehow. Plus I can't get the dx9 zbuffer over to dx11 very easily so positional timewarp wouldn't be that great anyway... but really rotational is what matters the most.

If anybody wants to test it and see how it runs on their setup, send me a PM and I'll let you try the WIP DLL-- again, it doesn't handle menus correctly yet (although they are usable, they mess with your eyes a bit), and the clipping planes aren't working yet so if you turn all the way around it won't render objects behind you... other than that it's working, albeit with some lag.

Ananas
Explorer
Awesome news! I could test the dll but I'll only have the DK1.

I'm not sure but Oculus team might help with the timewarp?

doneyrussell12
Honored Guest
hi i have a DK1 and am on SDK v8.0 and I am getting the issue of it not showing up in oculus mode after changing the .dll file. I am also trying to get skyrim to work and it is unable to track my hmd (i think because my graphics card is out of date) but it also has an overlapped view. your videos do not have the overlapped view, unlike the skyrim videos, but I am wondering if the issue is related to it not tracking the hmd. cant think of what else it could be since it seems to work on other DK1s

Anonymous
Not applicable
I would like to try the WIP DLL please on my dk2, pm sent.

superllama
Protege
Hey guys. Sorry for the inexcusably long absence, nobody died or anything (except my cat) but I've been busier than I ever would've expected at my new job and haven't really had any time to do anything on my own time except sleep. I'm hoping to dedicate some time tomorrow (saturday) to this project and see if I can make any headway. However I do want to mention I'm probably going to get a Vive instead of a Rift this year, though that depends on how the prices end up and stuff... however I will definitely not abandon rift support for Morrowind, if anything I'll be adding Vive support additionally at some point... but like I said my life is so busy it's tough to find any time to do anything. I'll keep you all posted about how tomorrow goes, I'm hoping to at least get the frustum transforms working again and maybe make some progress on menus so you can all start using the DLL to actually play the game.

Peteo
Expert Protege
Man this would be awesome! Where are you with dk2 support?

Graylord
Honored Guest
Just thought I'd give my 2 cents about that guy who got it working on the DK2, I just tried his and it did indeed work.

But! Then I replaced the dll with the original MGE one, and guess what? It still works with that resolution. (I found your DK1 DLL did nothing for the DK2 after all, sorry, I could tell your DLL was doing something, as it changed a lot of graphical settings)
Turns out that specific resolution is displaced on the oculus dk2 in such a way that it looks 3d by making you go cross-eyed, it's super painful for more than a few minutes, and obviously a lot of the interface is obscured by the missing corners. But it's an interesting trick that could be useful for a quick work around if you manage to find just the perfect setting.

Good luck with the project, just got my DK2, and ordered the virtuix omni over a year ago in hopes of one day being able to walk across Morrowind with my own feet. 😄