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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Here's a badly recorded gameplay video showing off the features (and bugs) in the already-out-of-date version 3.0 (one of the bugs in the video is already fixed!)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

superllama
Protege
"LordJuanlo" wrote:
Just tried the new version, still crashing on my computer with MGE XE. As far as I can tell, MGE is working because the game accepts the custom resolutions I enter on MGEgui. However I'm not sure if distant land is working, apparently there is no difference with it enabled or disabled, although I'm at the very start of the game.

When you run the game without my d3d9/d3d9x dll's, do you see this in the top left corner right after it starts?

If not, then MGE probably isn't working. MGEgui can set Morrowind's resolution by editing the ini files, it doesn't necessarily mean it's working.

I am eventually planning on including mouse emulation based on head movement-- but for now, if the crosshair is giving you trouble there could very well be an IPD issue that I'm not aware of since it's intended to render the crosshair several feet away from your face. I'm guessing there's probably a bug with my code that places the rendertargets into the headset... what resolution are you running morrowind in and what's your IPD? I'll see if I can set mine to those values and reproduce the problem.

As for the greying out and stretching textures... I'm not really sure what could be causing those since mine doesn't do that at all anymore since 2.4. I'm posting my settings on the Render state tab below, I suppose you could try matching those and if that fixes it then we know it's something to do with how you had it configured before. If that does turn out to be the case see if you can reproduce it and I'll see if I can fix it.

EDIT: here's my global graphics tab


EDIT: The differerence actually appears to be... you'll never guess... the FPS counter. If it's on, the game works perfectly. If it's off, you get weird texture stretching bugs. Based on that I realized there was a SamplerState I was setting for the menu that I forgot to restore... it'll be fixed in the next release. For now just turn on your FPS counters in MGEgui on the morrowind.ini tab 😛

LordJuanlo
Protege
"superllama" wrote:
When you run the game without my d3d9/d3d9x dll's, do you see this in the top left corner right after it starts?

If not, then MGE probably isn't working. MGEgui can set Morrowind's resolution by editing the ini files, it doesn't necessarily mean it's working.


Thanks for this info... I can't see that picture, so I have to find out why MGE XE works but normal MGE doesn't.
Comunidad española de RV / Spanish VR Community

superllama
Protege
Does your Morrowind directory have a "mwse-mge log.txt" in it? If so, it might have some hints about why MGE isn't running.

Also, I decided to go ahead and release the patch that fixes texture stretching:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9o_WD ... sp=sharing

It's just 2.4.2 since 2.5 is going to either be config files or distantland, but I don't have time right now to make those work since I have a paper to write for class >_< lol

A couple more features I thought of that I might implement at some point:
1) make the insert/pause keys also move the mouse to center the crosshair where you're looking without changing the angle of the game world-- this way if you bound insert to a controller key you could easily jump your crosshair to where you're looking
2) some sort of polygon counter for menus that determines whether you've got the full menu up or just the HUD, which could be used to display the HUD elements closer to the center of the virtual screen without sacrificing screen space for the menus
3) using #2, detect if the game is paused and stop #1 from moving the cursor in menus

These will most likely all be settings in the config file once we have one of those.

LordJuanlo
Protege
I finally got it working. Apparently I had to run it as administrator (not needed on MGE XE). Now it works! It crashes on exit by the way, but at least I can wander around.
Comunidad española de RV / Spanish VR Community

superllama
Protege
Yeah, it crashes on exit for me too... I haven't taken the time to figure out why since it doesn't really affect anything.

Anonymous
Not applicable
well done OP works fine with your suggested settings on win 7 64bit ovr 0.8 with your 2.4.2 dll fresh morrowind install + mge 3.8.0

dem graphics man :mrgreen:

superllama
Protege
I've made a little bit of progress with DistantLand but it's still completely broken. I've at least managed to find and manpiulate most of the effect's matrices, it's just a matter of manipulating them correctly now 😛 because DistantLand is MGE and not vanilla Morrowind it's quite a bit different to mess with. I had to make some exported functions in my fake d3d9 that my fake d3d9x would load and use to communicate between the two DLL's... fun stuff. I may have made XE work a little better during all this effect/shader hacking I've had to do with regular MGE's distantland but I'm not sure. I'll probably test it in a little bit and see. No new releases yet until it works correctly though.

EDIT: nope, XE is even worse now >_< well I'll keep messing with it I guess

LordJuanlo
Protege
Take your time, what you are doing is really hard to achieve and I salute you for your efforts.
Comunidad española de RV / Spanish VR Community

JonathanVB
Honored Guest
I'm getting a pretty huge framerate drop (somewhere around 1/4), which I assume is due to FOV and stereo. I also seem to still have pretty bad judder in spite of the async timewarp.

Would there be any way to enable a doubled microscopic view to boost framerates?

superllama
Protege
Weird, I just tried running my copy again and suddenly I have really bad judder too... it's acting just like it did before async timewarp was working at all! I have no idea what could've changed... I even closed steam in case it was a steam update, but that wasn't it. I'll see if I can figure it out. The framerate drop is unfortunately not something I can really fix though, the fov and double render takes a toll on the framerate, plus the only way I could get it to correctly render everything in the game was to switch between left/right rendertargets every time anything is drawn, so there's a lot of unnecessary communication between the cpu/gpu that I can't really optimize out. The timewarp made it not that bad for me even though it was running as low as 17 fps sometimes, but now that's suddenly not working... the only thing that did happen was my computer crashed and restarted yesterday.

EDIT: I think either a windows 10 or nvidia update caused the judder to come back for me. Seems like it could be a problem with setting GPU thread priority, since timewarp is still active but the rift isn't even close to rendering at maximum fps. Also, what do you mean by "doubled microscopic"?

EDIT 2: Apparently it's just the main menu for me, when I actually go into the game the judder goes away mostly. Most perplexing.