Liam Mello WIPs

[raw skiff]

Yeah, I can run with absolutely no PBR whatsoever. That's how I was able to get a screenshot without everything being dark and shiny.

Raf's has the option to estimate PBR from specular, which is what I usually use.

[plain shore]

I see I see, so Wareya estimates only from diffuse whereas Rafael can do either

There's some thing I am unaware of exactly what it is but I like about wareyas

I almost wanna say the fresnel is different?

Like roughish surfaces get a pretty Fresnel sometimes, but without the thing I do where I turn specular off for stuff with SSS the leaves with bad normals get fucked as hell

Which turning the Fresnel off is a bs ass correction for but I imagine if there was a good one Wareya would've solved it lol

[raw skiff]

Side-by-side, the contrast is lower

But not across the board. It's like someone hit the screenshot with a Levels or Curves tool.

[raw skiff]

@plain shore I think it's all just tone mapping differences...

That's Raf's PBR with curves and exposure changes

Do not ask how many points I needed to add to the curves tool to get it to match wareya's PBR...

I'm not sure how you go from curves to shader, though.

I wonder if I can convert this into a LUT...

My version of Photoshop is too old to export LUTs 😭

[plain shore]

Oh I'm busy RN but you can download a neutral lut. Apply that curve to it and save it and then load it in multi lut if you want

You could just copy and rename it if you still want both luts or just use one of the two for the correction.

I've never saved a proper lutb

[plain shore]

Look at ground with a sunset and strong grazing angle and I swear Wareya's as will be more white/reflective

But that's mostly a memory of other people's screenshots

[raw skiff]

No worries. I'm just throwing out what I'm currently messing with.

It's interesting how close you can get with a LUT change.

[raw skiff]

Giving that a try...

[plain shore]

Don't remember the res I used for multi lut but this is where the files came from https://github.com/DAPTYX/Neutral-LUT-png

It's either 18 or 52 8bit

[meager helm]

this depends on how you set up the various PBR expensiveness options

in particular, the "shittyBRDF" has brighter grazing angle behavior

[meager helm]

yeah, possible. the likely main issue is that i use the standard fresnel function that ignores roughness

however, the standard BRDFs are designed for this fresnel function

to do better Correctly, you need a combined BRDF+Diffuse model, which PBR experts haven't done yet

[raw skiff]

Hmm, yeah, so something's not right about raf's soft shadows. If you set any filter size higher than 1 you get weird angle-dependent shadows at specific distances from the camera. The pop-in isn't great.

[plain shore]

I wouldn't call it an issue I think it's like part of why I think it looks better

[formal viper]

Naw the way light creates highlights in wareya is different for sure

It has these beautiful bright fresnel highlights, its a bot 2000s cgi and prob not very realistic but its beautiful af

Raf is just dull in comparison

I think there actually was some easily tweakable number in wareya in regards to the way things are lit, and tweaking that was making it essentially look identical to raf, but i dont remember what that variable was :/

[lusty sparrow]

this is such a nice picture though

[raw skiff]

It's also accidentally a cross-eye stereograph! Lol

[plain shore]

Never been able to do that

Got full rgba normals and spec buffers working. Unfortunately it requires changing the blendfunc and pre-multiplying alpha in the shader fragments instead, which I'm not sure if it's too much of a change to alter something like that.

Alternatively doing just RGB spec works fine without blendfunc changes, or doing rgba and just not passing through terrain. For PBR doing RGB is totally fine. Because I can just hijack the AO which I don't have a great use for in post, or compress metallicity into fewer bits and pack a 1 bit SSS map and shadowmaps into it as well. However for vanilla some textures allegedly use the alpha map for magnitude if speculars which means it would be useful for doing SSR on shiny stuff without PBR. So ideally after more testing I'll see if the rgba is too much of a change and ideally it won't be, otherwise I'll aim for just the spec rgb which impact literally nothing until it's called in post

Functionally that means other than envmaps all the experimental post shaders could be usable in regular builds with a custom PBR edit instead of me maintaining a fork.

[next wolf]

Is there a way to simply flip the direction of POM shadows? I just realized it's all facing the wrong way in my setup, like opposite to where the sunlight is coming from

[next wolf]

Could never get those either haha

[plain shore]

Yes but I forget how off the top of my head

Are you using the parallax.glsl with Rafael's or the wareya edits? I know in Wareyas I have an issue on the older dev builds where the direction the parallax shadows warp is backwards, instead of matching a large bump it curves as if that bump was a hole

[next wolf]

yeah wareya's, im on .51 i think a few builds old. yeah some rocks almost look like their lit from underneath

[plain shore]

For anyone using Rafael's shaders could you test this on 0.49/0.50, I updated it to adjust for Rafael's changes and make sure height AO is only calculated for terrain. This is the newest version based on 2.0b.

Also if anyone has used Vanilla Rafael PBR do you agree the parallax shadow casting is messed up? It seems on rafael's version the angle of the surface doesn't properly effect shadows eg shadows will cast uphill and won't be longer downhill if the sun is low in the sky (Eg: mostly perpendicular to what I'm calling uphill but mostly grazing to downhill)

[plain shore]

@leapo I was totally backwards, what I sent you is some random edited version of Rafael's shaders and not my updated wareya ones I think lol.

[plain shore]

@raw skiff here's the actual wareya shaders with my tweaks. I know you don't use PBR but it will make heads glow if you have SSS on stuff that isn't like a flat plane. Its setup to use a different SSS calc for things with darkmaps (my goal was to separate skin SSS from leaves etc) but that requires custom meshes I've never bothered to share.

[dawn stratus]

sorry if this is a bother but do you know what might be causing this? i've noticed certain mesh creases get this static-y surface on them for a while now, and it flickers. seems to have only cropped in recent POM implementations but i'm probably doing something wrong, maybe texture related?

i've only noticed it on character/npc meshes, nothing else, and virtually everything else looks perfect

[plain shore]

Wait are you sure it's from recent POM implantations? I've noticed that too but I assumed it was borked normals and UV mapping from the original meshes

[dawn stratus]

unfortunately I can't say how recent but I think it definitely showed up around the last month or so, at some point or another. for instance the initial versions of both the raf and wareya POM didn't have it (or I didn't notice it, which could be possible since it is quite subtle).

I am certain it was never present before I got POM in the first place though, that's for sure

and I do think it wasn't there in the pre-nexus implementations you posted here though again I can't be 100%

I know very little about this stuff lol so I'm out of my depth here but when I first noticed it I assumed it was something to do with the AO/shadowing parts of the POM

[plain shore]

Can you ori the texture? I'm not even sure why a texture like that would have an _nh map

I'm guessing that it's some horrifying UV mapping that normally maps that entire polygon to like a tiny area so the POM is freaking out trying to extrude it and spilling all over as the view angle changes

[dawn stratus]

oh gosh i'm not sure how to tell which texture it even is

i can tell you the first example is from the dras companion mod though

let me dig a little in the files, it'll be something for the shoulder piece

[plain shore]

If any of the armor files end in _nh that'll give the most insight

[dawn stratus]

here we go..

[plain shore]

Cause POM shouldn't touch anything else

Okay sweet ty

[plain shore]

Yeah it's definitely the terrible UV mapping going crazy with the _nh which also there shouldn't be both an _n and _nh that's weird (I must've messed it up)

You can just delete the my or rename .ddsbackup or something

[dawn stratus]

thinking back it's probably my messup, I recall when I got the maps for vurt's textures I threw in some of yours and the other guy on nexus who did maps for that texture pack

has to be, they're completely different sizes

well in that case either A, delete all the _nh ones? or b, delete every _n and _nh and start fresh

thanks for the insight haha 🥲

yep, that was it! now it's just back to the flat texture strech lol

[plain shore]

No I have this issue in my game without nobody else's textures hahaha I just had certain textures I made only normals for an some that I had nh for that i tried to optimize to n if that didn't have aggressive parallax but some must've slipped through and doubled up

[dawn stratus]

ahh I see, well in any case it appears to be only a sparse amount of armor/clothing textures

[plain shore]

yeah I think it is only if something really poorly uv mapped gets hit with POM it bugs out.

[lusty sparrow]

what is _nh?

[plain shore]

it's normal with heightmap packed in to alpha

[plain shore]

Okay I lied the parallax I posted the other day was for Rafael's 2.0a because I mixed up the files on my computer. This now supports 2.0B

[dawn stratus]

do you have a recent 0.51 compatible wareya version of the shaders folder by any chance?

[plain shore]

Do not should have time to update tomorrow most likely

[crisp tangle]

Hey Liam what's the license on your shaders?

[plain shore]

Which one's in particular? The stuff I've posted here as wips is kind of a mess and I was just hoping they never got enough traction for me to get in trouble for not formalizing a license. POM is a mix of stuff from Wareya (under MIT maybe I forget), Rafael (says do whatever with attribution) and this contact refinement refinement thing that's linked in the shader code and up top iirc that's MIT.

Anything I have made without it being cited to other stuff you can do literally whatever with, really have zero preference for attribution or anything.

[crisp tangle]

I just like for the license to be explicit, since if you don't say anything about it then I can't actually do anything with it. The default is I can't do anything

[plain shore]

Oh sure then officially anything I haven't cited as from a source with a stricter license is CC0! Lmk if there's anything in particular you wanna use and I can double check for you and clarify what exactly I did and what came from elsewhere.

(that's the one that means I forgo like any control or claims on it right?)

I can GitHub this stuff and add full licensing info at some point as well if you wanna be able to like point somewhere to show you're allowed to use it

[crisp tangle]

Oh I would love to have a GitHub link to grab the latest version all the time 💖 🙏

[plain shore]

Sweet I'll do that when I have a chance

[raw skiff]

Github would also let you allow contributors. I'd be happy to help where I can ❤️

[raw skiff]

@plain shore I'm trying to update to Raf's latest core shaders (v2.0b). They don't seem to play nice with your modified parallax.glsl

Have you re-based or should I roll back for now?

[plain shore]

I'm p sure the one I posted like 5 messages up should work, I tested it on 0.51 and someone else on the nexus said it worked.

If I somehow uploaded the wrong file there 2 people said this works fine https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/58303?tab=files

[raw skiff]

I guess my question is, which version of Raf's PBR is it based on now? He just overhauled a bunch of stuff.

[plain shore]

yeah its for 2.0b

#1445658776198840491 message

[rocky remnant]

liammellofarley

Okay I lied the parallax I posted the other day was for Rafael's 2.0a because I mixed up the files on my computer. This now supports 2.0B

Attachment(s)

parallax.glsl

Linked by @​liammellofarley from #Liam Mello WIPs · Apr 13, 2026, 9:13 PM

[raw skiff]

Much appreciated!

I'm working on updating Wetworld, so I want to be sure I'm on latest-everything so I can be sure it looks correct.

[plain shore]

Great! exciting

[plain shore]

Currently re-factoring and tweaking some of the stuff for the dynamic NPC framework then I think I'm going to try and finally build out some sort of inter-cell movement system instead of trying to hook on to go-home.

I also need to remember to recompile the textureswapper injector to work with 0.50 since the textures are flipped rn and then I can share that if anyone wants to use it.

Actually hmm maybe I'll stop working on any of this and focus on setting up githubs for all these mods

[plain shore]

@formal viper been resuming work on the dynamic NPC stuff. Have managed to get them to go to the tavern in the evening. Still working on making sure they leave lol.

I'll try and commit to git again once I've worked that out, still nightmarishly buggy but like with the bidirectionality implemented it'll at least be interesting

The thing I need to figure out is where I cut corners on immersion for the sake of scope. Ideally I want it to if you enter a cell before the NPCs they will trickle in after but that seems complicated. There's a gap between stuff that is kind of engaging (having people already in the bar in the evening), and true immersion (I can watch someone leave the bar and walk home afterwards and go to bed).

[plain shore]

God it's hilarious to see screenshots from my PC where I had Rafael's tonemap on when I'm on my phone why is it radioactive orange

I have Rafaels shaders enabled from testing with incompatible body/head mods so everyone glows red too

[formal viper]

Look at them chillin there

Id like to help with and figure out that whole artist friendly interactions pipeline, and all the schedule statemachine (if youre not already using those)

And prob make some anims for it as well

But my amount of free time and desire to sleep often think otherwise :/

But i hope to get to it within a week or two!

[plain shore]

Yes no rush at all! Just realized is should keep you updated to make sure we don't end up separately working on the same thing.

The schedule state machine is really rough right now because I'm slowly getting a grasp on how to transition NPCs to and from cells. Feel free to shoot me ideas if stuff pops in your head that you don't have the energy to implement.

Oh and something that shouldn't be too crazy on the animation side would be just editing the eating/drinking animation. Right now it only triggers while sitting bc the animation is kind of slumped over, and both play in sequence. If I mask to just arms the head doesn't tilt back when drinking. A version of it for just drinking and just eating with an upright spine would be useful down the line so bar patrons can all stand around drinking.

But I have plenty to crack in bug fixing and making everything interact right before the final anims really matter

[steel musk]

drinking while standing is important so you can do this

except someone would have to do a bardcore arrangement of the themesong

[remote gale]

Raf's "HDR" part of the tonemap do be like that. I kinda like it, if it's tuned a bit. But when I first installed it - it was weird

[formal viper]

I was thinking about this - i guess my idea wouldve been that schedule itselff is not a state machine - just a kind of maps time to a schedule activity, those activities in turn are state machines of e.g states such as travel to cell -> do something -> travel to cell -> do something else, now those "do something" are also state machines with states like "request global for an interesting unoccupied thing to do in a cell" -> "process the interesting thing"(figure out which anim to play and where, do raycasts etc) -> "do the thing for some amount of time" -> "restart the activity machine'.
Where raycast should be a kind of async callback-based thing that uses centralised global queue to ration amount of raycasts per frame, i.e character asks global to allow it to raycast, global puts request in a queue and eventually allows char to raycast

Amd of also each timeslot can have multiple machines like that among which one randomly can be picked, or whatever other means of picking can be used

And the separation to "travel to cell" state and "find stuff to do in a cell" will allow to easily track if char reach the cell and avoid doing anything before that

Then only extremely important thing that all those states should have a proper abort method when they cleanup and stop everything that needs to be stopped, since schedule system should be able to abort activity at any moment

With time skipping though some wuestions are certainly there, can we force load npcs in all bordering cells to check their schedules and teleport them into this cell if its time? Is that a "bad" approach? Not sure here

Maybe scripts cant even be loaded on npcs in cells which are nott loaded

In that case probably most of the state machine and scheduling logic can be kept in global, as a wrapper class around each npc, although that sounds a bit evil

So thats my slightly overengineered idea of the ehole extendable system

[plain shore]

Yeah that makes sense I think (as in I think I understand it). Because of the feature creep right now for the stuff to do it's like concurrently running things that check who is doing nothing and randomly assign NPCs stuff if they're not busy. Instead of it really managing an NPC it just occasionally triggers a scan that find unoccupied NPCs and send them an activity or a conversation to engage with. The NPCs currenly have states like Busy/Sitting/Travelling etc that block certain things from happening.

The hardest part of dealing with schedules is definitely tracking where NPCs should be. If I recall into someone's house at night its better if they're already there than needing to walk into Seyda Neen and watch them walk home for them to be there. This requires some sort of fancy management though. For stuff within a cell it's easy to schedule times where an NPC will walk and times they'll teleport. I just made it so during a specific window NPCs will always walk to bed until its too late where they teleport to bed instantly. So if you wait or enter the cell at night they appear to be already sleeping. All I can imagine is just religously logging the dynamic stuff after the initial instance, eg: bed time hits, it scans for a door with their name on it, they enter the house -> this data is saved. Then if you ever enter the house by teleportation or something or enter it and wait to when they'd be home the script reads the saved schedule and sends them there automatically.

I wonder how they're doing it for this "https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/58635?tab=posts" they added non-service NPCs going to the market recently so it's gotten more complex than just going indoors at night.

Although it doesn't seem to be built to be super framework-y which is my overall goal for this.

[steel musk]

dumb mod idea: just fully port the npc behavior model from morrowind's most enduring netimmerse-based contemporary: the sims 2

[raw skiff]

@steel musk ...do not tempt me to implement Simlish into OpenMW...

I have a half-finished text-to-speech mod still cooking. lol

[plain shore]

Wait that's actually kind of smart, I wonder if I can give procedural speech the animal crossing type nonsense voices so that I can release the mod with demo sounds but not make anybody offput on using it because of AI voices lol

I was thinking of just doing it myself and pitching my voice around purely as a demo so people could see how it works

[raw skiff]

Confirming this worked perfectly ❤️

[plain shore]

Nice yay

[raw skiff]

I've been meaning to ask, what exactly is the visual/performance difference for the two AO modes?

LOD-based AO vs Raf's original radial AO

[crisp tangle]

With SAM and Rubicon it's basically already done 🤔

Or maybe SAM can just be ported

[plain shore]

Uhm Rafael's AO is more aggressive sometimes it's a bit much imo. Performance wise it's within a frame on my end

Lod based ao looks at height then at a mipmap and says if this is lower than surrounding pixels darken (based on the average from the mipmap)

Rafael's AO looks at 4 positions around the pixel and compares and decides to darken it based on that

It's better at detecting small crevices and areas where slopes aren't even on all sides

[raw skiff]

Gotcha. Thanks for the explainer.

I had the general sense that LOD-based looked better, but couldn't quite place why

[plain shore]

Oh wait it's worth mentioning I disabled the AO on non-terrain surfaces because in a regular PBR setup its baked in to the spec. If you're using PBR textures without the spec maps they'll be missing. Like the MVR PBR v2 textures assume the presence of AO although I keep it mild

I think SaintJ's older ones all bake AO in

[plain shore]

I've been thinking about the best way to approach making more complex NPC schedules and I'm sort of leaning towards baking it all into the code instead of doing it dynamically. Like if I can define when people are all supposed to be places I could just check against the list of stuff for that cell and see okay it's midnight in Balmora everyone's at home, or if you recall into a tavern at night everyone is there without having to see the NPCs walk there.

Which is feasible dynamically for a couple of things but if you want complex or unique schedules it becomes much harder

And I think it's doable with json parsing. Just find all the NPCs that aren't important to quests, if they have quests run some lightweight local VLM to classify the quest as involving specific behavior or not and then generate schedules for people based on having lists of stuff in each area for them to do. Fall back to just going home or to taverns for non vanilla NPCs so modded NPCs and TR don't lack immersion

Like I assume that's sort of what the later games do to a degree anyways all the NPCs have consistent schedules

It's really funny the percentage of the morrowind population in certain towns that just walks in circles

[next wolf]

They do it with such purposeful strides too

[next wolf]

@plain shore do you have a list of animations that you need for your schedule mod? You mentioned standing and drinking, is there more minor actions that you would like to have? Like basic emotes or tasks. If you make a wishlist of what's not available I can start working through it. Will take some time of course but it would be good to know what's needed at least

[plain shore]

That's great, I currently have all the animated Morrowind stuff and a little bit more but it's a bit rough. Super basic stuff I could probably crack myself on the mesh side is needing to swap the props to not use armor slots now that OpenMW handles that fine, add new food props (only meat rn, so bread/chicken leg,would be nice, maybe a chalice/wine prop?). Appropriate animations for eating a chicken leg, a fruit, or maybe even holding and eating a bowl of stew would be nice, mostly just making sure they're tweaked to accommodate slightly different meshes. Maybe a scroll reading animation would be cool? I'm not super sure what else but I'll keep thinking about it. I've thought about injecting animations into the chat system too in which case really basic idles with like laughs, nods and head shakes would work.

[next wolf]

cool yeah i get the vibe, just curious what you got going on because i had been thinking it might be fun to make some basic morrowindy emotes anyway, for tes3mp and just some general immersion

[plain shore]

I really should refactor this at some point the feature bloat has resulted in weird structures. Sleeping and sitting should probably be consolidated into a single system that then filters which objects are active in the search.

I've gotten people nicely sitting on benches and facing their tables while home in the evening although bc it still uses the multi slot bench setup they sit off to the side from the plate set on the table

[edgy sequoia]

I located and deleted the file already so its sitting in my recycle bin

[plain shore]

perf ty

[gusty sphinx]

let me know if you want me to test those normals, liam. i'd be happy to help out

[plain shore]

yes I am tweaking the script than can pass it to you,

[gusty sphinx]

sick

[plain shore]

I am making it so you paste openmw.cfg and it checks all your textures and fills in empty specs and normals

[gusty sphinx]

woaah fancy

[plain shore]

I should've done it so long ago lol

I've been getting complaints about this for watercolor and MVR since the day I posted it

[gusty sphinx]

hah. better late than never!

[plain shore]

It's wild to me I've been making morrowind mods for a year now and haven't played the game that whole time

[gusty sphinx]

it's like when you spend a lot of time cooking a big meal and you feel less hungry after lol

[plain shore]

I just genuinely enjoy modding as much as I do playing I think I'm truly an academia brained nerd

this seems to be working I'm gonna watch an episode of TV while it runs then if the files look right I'll upload it here and you can lmk if it all runs without issues for you

[gusty sphinx]

i need to get into modding lmao

i'll probably be asleep but i'll lyk when i look

it's 2am in the states

[plain shore]

I am also an east coaster I just have zero sleep schedule responsibility

yeah just lmk if there's any issues whenever you get around to testing it

[gusty sphinx]

so real. I say i'll be asleep but maybe i'll actually be awake lmaooo

[plain shore]

here ya go

OpenMW.cfg in the same directory as the bat/py file and it should work? it scans either the directory above or the current one for openmw.cfg. Copies whatever needed files from the actual vfs directories matching load order. It might have blank stuff if your texture mods don't replace every texture covered, MET + Watercolor should do that if watercolor doesn't by itself. Inserts blank PBR maps for anything lacking PBR maps. (max roughness, no AO, no metal, flat normals, flat height)

copy the ATL folder to a textures directory of any mod or make a new textures directory and append that .

[gusty sphinx]

It works!

Woot.

Good job!

[plain shore]

Awesome!

[gusty sphinx]

Hey @plain shore, how did you make the watercolor textures?

[plain shore]

Been a while. I think it's a mix of Kuwahara filters, full texture replacements I made, GAN upscaling from here https://github.com/Kim2091/PBRify_Remix run through an open source diffusion model that was tuned on old paintings iirc. The depth/normal maps were made with a DepthAnything V2 model trained on this CC0/CC-BY texture collection. https://huggingface.co/datasets/gvecchio/MatSynth

https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/43375 this is just an algorithmic Kuwahara filter, this is an updated one with Kuwahara that has AI stuff but it's in a separate download https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/56992?tab=files.

[gusty sphinx]

ethical AI use? so fuggin' based

[plain shore]

there's still 100% stuff in the original model for the watercolor stuff that comes from ambiguous internet scraping, afaik it learns from a huge amount of images then someone like hones it in using a smaller dataset of paintings that aren't like copyrighted anymore. I keep donation points off and avoid ever using anything that isn't free/open source/locally run because I don't really mind AI automating stuff or replacing algorithmic methods (you can make normal maps without AI it's just worse), but only if nobody is profiting. I also tend to use smaller/older models when possible to avoid stuff that took fuck tons of energy and datacenter use to train.

[raw skiff]

Will this wind up being a full replacement for Animated Morrowind? I'd love to replace it with something less janky.

My "favorite" issue with Animated Morrowind is that it adds its own chairs, which can result in this happening.

[plain shore]

Yeah that's the goal

[steel musk]

sup dawg, i heard u like chairs / so we put a chair in yo chair so u can sit while u sit

[plain shore]

Pretty sure I've gotten NPC smooth travel working. The idea is this, we check two things for active cells every in game hour (and additionally trying to make this happen in an optimized way on cell load) what the schedules of all active actors in the cell are, and what actors are expected to be in those cells at what time. Then based on that we admit NPCs into the cell or evict them from the cell. If the schedule event that's supposed to have them be entering or leaving the cell shares the integer time with the current time (so if it's currently within a +/- 30 min window) the NPCs relocate in real time. They get assigned to walk to a door they're entering if you're in the same cell then disappear, or they spawn in front of the door and walk to their new destination. If you're outside of the time window it happens instantly. This means if you have an NPC start walking somewhere then wait an hour, they'll have arrived after that waiting is done. If you show up to a new town in the middle of the night you won't see the NPCs out walking (assuming your active NPC distance is far enough that they don't appear and instantly despawn as you approach). I'm sure there are really weird ways you can break it so I'll have to find failsafes for everything but at least for now doing my tests with 1 npc so I can debug every step with a clean log, he will behave just fine over a 24hr schedule that involves sitting, sleeping, activities, and 3 different interior locations + exterior.

[plain shore]

Gonna play around with screen-space displacement mapping. I think on higher resolution I could feasibly have it run ssdm and then have a separate shader at the end that configurable crops your edges and runs FSR upscale. If it's only at 10-20% resolution reduction it should have a huge quality loss above 1080p. This would be optional but would help reduce edge issues in for ssdm which is a big problem and why nobody uses it, but can also fix pop in for screen-space lighting effects cause you'd have stuff slightly off screen rendered fine

In my test fork I wanna expose full motion vectors for moving meshes which would mean we can do a full FSR3 pass and get much better reprojection for all the temporal shaders

[next wolf]

Would it be easy to package your PBR landscape textures separately? I like to use them combined with smaller textures for everything else but Its tricky to find them all as I don't know what I'm looking for specifically. Even just a list would be sweet so I could double check what I have

[plain shore]

oh all the landscape textures have a texture named *_diffusespec.dds you can manually see the names for the files and copy or if you're familiar with bat/ps1/sh scripting write a script that iterates over every imagename_diffusespec.dds images, strips to imagename, then copies imagename_diffusespec.dds, imagename.dds, imagename_nh.dds and imagename_spec.dds to a subfolder.

It would certainly be easy for me to do but I would probably just run and write the exact script I'm describing above, so if you're on windows once I have the chance I can make a .bat file that does that and you can just run it yourself, it'll be tiny compared to reuploading and downloading actual textures

[next wolf]

i've used bat/sh a few times but only copy pasta from a readme etc. so i dont really know what i'm doing there, i don't want to put you out though, you seem to have a bunch going on lol, it would certainly save some download if you can be bothered though

[plain shore]

I can make one for you later if you're on windows, I probably have that exact file somewhere. If you're on linux though then I'm not totally sure.

[next wolf]

yeah im on windows, twould be much appreciated sera 🙇

i had fun messing around with a python script arrean and anthony made for me until i almost deleted my directory with it 😅

[plain shore]

here ya go

[next wolf]

Legend

Do I put this in the folder with the textures?

[plain shore]

yeah wherever the dds files are

it'll copy them into a subfolder not move them.

[plain shore]

Okay new crackpot idea is getting full skinned motion vector and confidence maps to do FSR3 upscaling and have better temporal effects for post processing. It's part of my long running crackpot fork that I shove whatever is feasible into, but if it works well I can try to get it merged into the "free fps" branch since that's already popular. It could let us really abuse performant settings on certain post shaders + upscaling in general drastically reduces the cost of post processing since it's all gpu stuff.

I also think my dynamic envmaps might be performant enough that if I can use them to replace the water RTT decently it could both give us performance benefits on water reflections while also enabling much better reflections for PBR

Frame gen and true temporal neural networks off the table without vulkan and I am not obsessive enough to figure out how to resurrect the vsg branch that got abandoned a few years ago

[keen isle]

Sorry if I'm dumb, but is this to generate atlas textures? Does it work per mod or does it merge from your whole load order?

[plain shore]

You have to copy your OpenMW.cfg and reads your whole load order and generates atlases for all PBR textures

[raw skiff]

@plain shore There's an OpenGL fork of FSR3?

The last OpenGL implementation of FSR I'd seen was either FSR1 or FSR2

[plain shore]

Turns out FSR3 upscaling is the same as FSR2 they just renamed it because of the frame gen which yea doesn't work on OpenGL

[cerulean wasp]

Hey o/
@plain shore
I've been trying to install your Parallax and Normals for MVR, but not PBR.
I saw you have a v2 "beta performance", so I downloaded that, but folder structure doesn't match the "usage" instructions on the mod page :

• If you're using vanilla OpenMW you only need 00.
• If you use Wareya's or Rafael's PBR than you can also use 01.

I'm guessing those instructions are for the previous version? Is there a way to get the "performance" v2 without the pbr files? How do I recognise them so I can take them out?

[plain shore]

oh just delete anything named _spec or _diffusespec

they'll look kinda weird without PBR though, all the assets were designed for stuff like parallax self-shadowing and POM

[cerulean wasp]

parallax self-shadowing? (sorry, I'm a noob when it comes to using shaders)

[plain shore]

It lets stuff with heightmaps cast shadows on itself, so like if you have parallax self shadowing a wall with a brick sticking out of it will cast a shadow down from that brick.

It's mostly noticeable on stuff like mud/sand because the main texture is basically like a flat gray / sand colored surface then the parallax and parallax shadowing give it the look of like mounds and stuff

You might be able to get away with using the _n and _nh maps with Vurt's MVR and skipping the diffuse textures also, they're like probably close enough

[cerulean wasp]

I thought parallax was different from PBR? That you could use one without the other?

[plain shore]

Wait it depends, if you're using Rafael's PBR core shaders and have the thing where it reads spec files turned off yeah it'll work. There's no like parallax occlusion mapping or parallax self shadowing for the vanilla game.

actually wait I lied you can use the iterative parallax with self shadows shader here https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/58358?tab=files

that doesn't require PBR

[cerulean wasp]

Yeah I've seen this one, but I prefer MVR to MET.

I do have Rafael's main shader pack, though I hadn't downloaded the "enhanced PBR lightning" optional files

[plain shore]

There's two separate files there, the shader itself and the MET textures

you can install the shaders and use that with the MVR v2 textures if you just search *spec.dds and delete everything that it shows in the folder

[cerulean wasp]

Cheers ❤️

[austere linden]

Posting so I can follow

[plain shore]

100s of damn atlases and 100s of masks to fix and tweak almost done with foliage for TD PBR

[next wolf]

absolute legend

[plain shore]

what's really gonna kill me is finishing sorting/editing every metal mask for all the armor and weapons. I did TR but the PT portions are like nowhere near done. I trained a model for making masks but it's only like decent it's not great.

[glass trellis]

You'll have the TD pbr monopoly 😉

[keen isle]

What textures will it use? MET? MVR v2?

[river egret]

This is going to be awesome though! I wonder if your work could be adapted as a standard for PT/TR moving forward so they can just make normals/pbr at the same time

[plain shore]

they're a mix of new textures I've assembled to replace low res stuff and then some of the HD assets are good enough that I can like re-light them without needing to remake it entirely.

[plain shore]

Making PBR assets is so different than regular textures and it's a fraction of the player base I don't think they have any real reason to do that. They non-HD Tamriel Data is still like vanilla resolution.

[willow bloom]

can you release wip stuff

I am greedyt

[next wolf]

Would there be any benefit in doing PBR for vanilla textures? Or the uncompressed vanilla, just for aesthetic preference. Would it look weird on lower res stuff?

[willow bloom]

it's like polishing a turd

[next wolf]

Hard disagree but I understand why no one would bother as well 😅

[steel musk]

TD has a repo for any time an asset contributor makes normal/spec/PBR maps "the right way", i.e. baking down a high-poly sculpt, because those can only be made by someone with access to the original sculpt files and that data would just be lost otherwise. but it's a conscious decision not to ship their own pack of PBR textures that were just machine-generated from old diffuse textures. third parties like Liam are always going to push the state of the art on that stuff a lot faster than PTR updates.

also, adopting Liam's workflow as a standard for PTR asset production would mean that you have to be as good as Liam at using all these specialized tools in order to contribute assets to PTR. we currently have 0 people like that, so this standard means nobody can make assets anymore

[plain shore]

I think if you only make one tile set or something you're much better off building stuff from scratch in blender or substance designers and then baking it all down for the non-PBR textures anyways.

The whole point of this is just to be a fallback so an ancient 64x64 asset isn't jumping out.

Proper bespoke assets should always be the standard and it's what I want to work on after this but I wanted some rough baseline to build on.

This also is like a kind of slog to do unfortunately it's not like a script that just makes them I'd say like 70% require some sort of tweaking after

[plain shore]

Wareya's been working on that, they've made deepbump height/normals for their waifu2x of vanilla tetures and also made some wip PBR maps. It looks quite nice in a specific early 2ks render way. I like the watercolor style I originally did more than vanilla but I definitely think low-fidelity textures can look nice

[crisp tangle]

I love the 2xed she did but I think she was going to redo them or something

I ran POM with Demake and it was so weird

That banner is cracked

[river egret]

That’s fair - I wasn’t sure how much easier it would be for someone who has the raw sculpt files to just follow a process to have uniform PBR

[chrome quail]

Is there much visual difference between your performance and full size textures? If it’s at least like 80% of the visual quality I think it might be worth it on a 1080p monitor

[plain shore]

It's probably irrelevant on most things with high texel density by default (small armor pieces etc) and more noticeable on big world meshes.

[chrome quail]

If in the future whenever the texture pack gets updated. Could you post a couple side by side comparisons where it would be most notable by any chance?

No big deal if not, but that might have some use for some people

[plain shore]

If you wanna do it I'll approve the uploads I just made the performance version bc someone requested it there's too many textures for me to really worry about before and afters

[chrome quail]

That makes sense

[chrome quail]

Probably a stupid question, but since the mod ‘Solstheim - Tomb of the Snow Prince’ has oaab data as a requirement, does your texture pack apply to it or does it do it’s own thing with bespoke textures?

[plain shore]

I don't think I covered the totsp separate textures or at least not in a released way

I think it was on my list of stuff to do before I got distracted making actual PBR textures when Rafael's shaders got more popular

[chrome quail]

I know you said your shaders and textures can affect clouds, but whatever order I just used makes zesterer’s volumetric clouds look gorgeous and painterly

Thats a terrible photo

Or is it just the kuwahara filter doing it

Might have been that haha

[plain shore]

yeah you can run zesterers on top or below its the kuwahara

[plain shore]

Finished up testing seasons stuff, then got distracted working on PTR upscales so I can hint at its release in my shader and seasons mods. Made the shaders for vanilla with seasons support all working well on RC2. Installed both the PBR edits and edited vanilla shaders from fresh install without issues. PTR upscale is actually almost in a like beta-able place. Too much for me to ever really verify lol but I have the overwhelming vast majority of non head/body textures done, it's just some scattered metal masks for armor/weapons that are left for the end of the first round.

[chrome quail]

Is getting pbr textures to work in openmw portably possible? Like just having the normals, diffuse, and specular in a texture folder in the data files?

I don’t have any pbr shaders or anything installed, but the pbr textures are like half working just having them in a textures folder

Like the ground looks like it’s working, but some other objects and walls are light blue

[hollow lynx]

what you're seeing isn't PBR it's just specular maps, PBR textures on objects and on terrain look a lot different for one, the values occupy different rgba channels respectively, and PBR textures are usually a vivid light blue green orange or pink color on objects, this color data is interpreted as the different PBR values (roughness, metalness, ambient occlusion) whereas specular shaders interpret this data as alpha being the intensity and rgb being the color of the specular highlight. if you wanna use PBR textures you HAVE to us PBR shaders

I imagine you can probably install PBR shaders portably

[chrome quail]

Ah figures. I wonder if in the future openmw will be able to interpret it without editing game files

[hollow lynx]

jsut need to be one 0.48-0.49+

[chrome quail]

Oh, I must have been looking at outdated info!

[hollow lynx]

probably at some stage we will have inbuilt PBR

[chrome quail]

So I can add something to the data directory that will allow pbr?

[hollow lynx]

if the device you are using supports OpenMW 0.48-0.51, and you can access it's files you can probably use PBR shaders

you just (backup your Openmw/resources before you do this) paste the shaders folder from whatever PBR shader you downloaded into your OpenMW/resources folder (it should have a shaders folder) and let it overwrite everything

as I said backup your files because this isn't guaranteed to work on every GPU and or you could mess up the installation

[chrome quail]

Gotcha, thanks!

[chrome quail]

I don’t know if I’ll be able to use it for now since I’m using openmw as a flatpak and can’t really edit flatpak files I believe

[plain shore]

Yeah afaik that might not be possible if you're on flatpack

[remote gale]

It is possible, but a touch annoying, you can't edit appimage files, but flatpak is very much there

[chrome quail]

Yeah I figured out how to do it. I think it will reset every time the app updates, but that’s not a huge issue since it’s easy to re-do and updates aren’t too frequent

[plain shore]

Well that's sort of true on regular windows installs too

[plain shore]

It occured to me that there's no real reason to prebake schedules the way I do, I can simply have NPCs bake schedules into a table of some sort in lua live. Should allow for the deterministic knowledge of where NPCs are while being flexible with mods.

[steel musk]

lua mod which reimplements the entire object-interaction-outcome model used by The Sims engine, but it's for morrowind npcs

oh whoops, i thought i was in #1408674801131847702

[plain shore]

Just you wait by the time I finish that every single separate component I've worked on will be released by another modder who's smart enough to recognize feature creep

[plain shore]

Within like a couple hours of me making this joke someone posted dynamic NPC conversations for mwse (TBF they posted a demo video like 2 years ago that gave me the idea in the first place)

[steel musk]

i'm sure they'll be relieved to stop getting comments asking about openmw support whenever you finish your thing :)

[plain shore]

It seems if I make a compatibility layer for their dialogue system I get more free assets for my mod so that's fun

[plain shore]

Here's my updated PBR with all the stuff I've added over the months. If you test it and like it I'd appreciate an endorsement when I upload to nexus but don't really care lol.

[raw skiff]

@plain shore Tried the shadow core shader from your kitbash and... it's doing weird things to grass.

That said, these appear to be for 0.51, and I'm on 0.50

[plain shore]

Wait like by itself or with the whole thing

Oh did I not upload a version with both?

The parallax offset code has a flip somewhere I think

It shouldn't just be grass if the shadow offset is broken it should artefact like crazy everywhere ime

[plain shore]

this has the 0.50 version lmk if that fixes it

[chrome quail]

Woah you dropped a bunch of stuff on nexus

[plain shore]

Yeah hahaha

Its a bunch of intertwined WIPs I had. The seasons and Galleos heads and TD PBR were all built around the shaders.

I probably should've posted the shaders a while back but so it goes

[chrome quail]

Did I install the pbr thing wrong? Haha

Got it working now

Looks pretty nice

Since the reflections in the water are wavy (which looks great imo), you can have the in game reflection to groundcover, but have the texture quality set to low with basically no discernible difference from high

It’s probably hard to tell from the photo, but it almost becomes a little noisy at the furthest part of the water when having the game reflect up to groundcover (but it’s really not an issue)

[plain shore]

Oh yes I've only used it with the sseasons hook in that makes distant water reflect flat sky color like in real life so I've never paid much attention to the distant water without that.

[willow bloom]

looks a bit too rough>?

invisible?

[plain shore]

Oh I see that mesh has a non standard alpha test value.

All my custom masks are binary I believe (well with anti-aliasing)

No I lied

the scaling is just wrong lmao

The second one is an atlas that seems to be missing half the textures.

I'd just delete them for now till I have a chance to fix

[willow bloom]

should I just delete flora and tree and save any headaches?

[plain shore]

You could delete the flora and tree normals/diffuse and keep the spec files for SSS. I would say though that upwards of 95% of the flora I checked, the leaves made it through because the textures look right when you're not looking side by side.

[willow bloom]

I see

[plain shore]

If anything you should keep them so you can keep reporting bad ones to me lol

[willow bloom]

well

I would love to but, I have already fixed too many texture issues from another mods for my next playthrough lol

[plain shore]

You can get away with deleting everything named "flora" if you need to. Non-TR TD assets don't really live in a folder structure like TR ones do. I looked at all the skyrim pine textures in game so they're worth keeping because one of them was like 256 or something iirc.

sorry idk how discord text works that's underscore flora underscore

[willow bloom]

ok nice

[chrome quail]

Are your watercolor textures compressed? I noticed that the file size is a lot bigger than the some other texture packs I’ve seen

(Although maybe they don’t cover as many textures maybe?)

[plain shore]

Like the actual texture files or the entire pack?

The zip is 1.2gb for the main textures and the performance TD which is close to TDs a actual resolution is 1.9GB

[chrome quail]

The files like bc5 bc7

[plain shore]

They're all compressed yeah

With dxt1 and dxt5 where appropriate

[chrome quail]

Dang there is simply a ton of textures then haha

Ahh you also have specular and normals which some packs probably dont

[meager plaza]

@plain shore I hate you, I now need to pass to 0.51 and ditch my UI, all because of you 😛

[plain shore]

I don't think anything strictly requires 0.51 you should be fine

[meager plaza]

wel..I am still on 0.49 🤣

[plain shore]

oh hahaha yes sorry

[plain shore]

MVR PBR v2 with all of the normals/spec is ~7-8gb MVR HD by itself is 2.3gb. I upscaled a few things in MVR PBR v2 and then every texture also has a spec and normal map where normals tend to be bigger overall and spec smaller so ~ 3.5 times is a reasonable size difference.

[chrome quail]

Yeah makes sense and the pbr is worth it

[plain shore]

This mod is like 20gb https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/54947

[chrome quail]

Once I found ur watercolor one, no other texture pack seemed interesting

They are in a weird middle ground of realism on top of the morrowind meshes

I think the stylized look suits the game way more

[plain shore]

Hahahaha eventually I want to redo the TD pack built off the current upscale in some places. A lot of the TD textures were too low res for the watercolor to look like anything

[chrome quail]

This will be morrowind in 2030

[plain shore]

I still have a folder of like 100s of much nicer watercolor textures for vanilla I made and didn't finish

[chrome quail]

Looking forward for whenever that drops

I don’t know how hard it would be, but a texture pack that dynamically chose what size the texture is would be sweet. Like the faces don’t need to be as large as the side of a house for instance.

Unless it does that already

[plain shore]

The original creators do that, the textures scales are all relative to what is in TD with stuff that's already a high res not upscaled

Although faces in particular do benefit from high detail because you're often close to them

But yeah rings etc don't need to be high res

But if you think about it if a ring was 64x64 and becomes 256x256 it's like nearly 200 of those add up to one 4096x4096 file being shrunk to 2048x2048 lol

[chrome quail]

I don’t know if I have it set up incorrectly, but your water isn’t reacting to rain drops or moving when I wade through it

[plain shore]

huh I forgot to test that I can look into it I must've screwed up the ripples.

I wonder if the version of Rafael's I ported was old and didn't have that.

[chrome quail]

Its very possible that I messed up when installing it

All I needed from rafael’s water edits was the glsl right?

[plain shore]

no I think I must've failed to include ripple stuff and just never tested it.

yeah

[hollow lynx]

edited one in case you want it @plain shore

I gota sleep

[edgy sequoia]

tried using Kart's soft performance shadows to overwrite yours
it doesn't completely break anything but the shadows do end up looking like this for anything not static, tiny blocks

[plain shore]

It will break the parallax shadow offset I believe I can make a version with karts soft shadows I have it in my openMW fork

Which functionally had like some nice totally functional features I was gonna release for modathon and then I went insane trying to add motion vectors kind of succeeded and then just forgot about it

[edgy sequoia]

It really helps with performance and I actually prefer the softer look anyway so would be great if you did 😅

[lusty sparrow]

hey Liam - installed your Tamriel data pbr - huge work - haven't seen any of it - just wanted your thoughts on these Ayleid windows - did you remove the transparency or am I missing something?

[next wolf]

Trying to install seasons but my game crashes on startup once I put in Rubicon. the install instructions seem simple enough, right? Is it expected to be a bit bumpy when loading up the first time?
Im doing it on a fresh install of RC2 with your new shader pack (which is gorgeous btw) it all works until I drop in that dll so I figure I must be missing a step

For reference I have a monster cfg so it wouldn't be surprising if it was tripping up on something 🤷 also been scattered this month so I might have just messed something up

[keen isle]

Liam, do you have a POM compatible with Wareya's shader, for 0.51 ?

Is it your kitbashed PBR on the nexus ? I'm kinda lost sorry

[vagrant yoke]

It doesn’t seem kitbashed PBR works on Mac, if anyone gets it working lmk haha

[river egret]

Oh that would be awesome - did the issues ever get figured out with soft shadows?

[plain shore]

Oh were they transparent? I'll fix that

[plain shore]

Does it work fine with just Rubic0n and the mod not active

In the openMW.exe folder there's a log file for texture swapper. It's possible the huge cfg is doing something or there's something that was specifically working on my PC. You can test it without the cfg also it won't do the texture swapping but it will still run the shader stuff so it might help reveal the failure point

[plain shore]

Yes

[plain shore]

I have absolutely no memory of what doesn't work on Mac I can look into it if someone fills me in I just remember there's something quite broken about their opengl

[steel musk]

they talk about it here: https://wikis.khronos.org/opengl/OpenGL_Context

[patent hinge]

Rubic0n and therefore Dynamic Seasons for OpenMW is not compatible with InventoryExtender. After installing Rubic0n, the inventory won't open, displaying the following errors:

[vagrant yoke]

Yeah, there was a lot wonky, I don’t know the details. IIRC Rafael’s stuff in general isn’t Mac friendly so that’s probably why it was. Part of me kinda wants to make a Mac friendly fork or edit, but who knows if I’ll get to it.

[hollow lynx]

I have some kind of strange extra parallax shadowing (the parallax shadowing itself works)

I am on the free fps occlusion build but I don't use its soft shadows

and when removing terrain shadows they disappear so they are being cast by the terrain parallax I think

[river egret]

@plain shore with your SSGI interior would you suggest using HBAO?

[plain shore]

The normals and parallax strength are going crazy there and it's breaking the parallax offset shadows. Happens at grazing angles sometimes.

[hollow lynx]

this was happening even with the default parallax settings on textures that arent crazy

[plain shore]

Only at grazing angles when you're really close to the ground? I've never noticed it under other conditions but I also was never testing it on something so steep

I can figure out an easy define somewhere to toggle the parallax shadow offset

Yeah I only see it at grazing angles but I can try and fix it the offset feature is kind of shoehorned in.Maybe I can make it just not apply the offset at grazing angles or something and make that sacrifice.

[plain shore]

I do use it but often at lower than default settings. The SSGI is largely scale hbao still looks good for like NPC armor pieces and smaller thing

[hollow lynx]

how is the code different form your POM for rafael's shader?

that one didn't have this at all from what I remember

[plain shore]

Yeah the shadow offset is one of Wareyas experiments and it doesn't live purely in parallax.glsl so it's not in that one.

[hollow lynx]

what does it actually do?

shadow offset?

[plain shore]

It offsets shadows cast on parallaxed surface so they don't awkardly float on top or inside them

[hollow lynx]

ohhh

[plain shore]

like if you look at a shadow cast on a parallax surfaces without it, it breaks the illusion because the shadow is flat.

[hollow lynx]

yeah same with wetworld and stuff

[plain shore]

I think it must be sampling the surfaces own shadows at grazing angles

because some clamp/bias is messed up.

[hollow lynx]

@plain shore what is it exactly that that one shader tried to do for distant land terrain normals in the past?

[plain shore]

It's not a shader I think it's literally baking normals into the distant terrain map in some way.

I can find the MR

[hollow lynx]

is it done within the confines of the resources folder?

I wanna work with claude to make distant terrain not look like shit

[plain shore]

Oh also, @edgy sequoia here's the soft shadows with the parallax offset removed. I'll update it later on the nexus I'm too lazy to go edit the non soft-shadow version to have my specular changes that are in here. If you don't use the rubic0n extension you likely want to go into lighting_pbr.glsl and turn #define PBR_SPECULAR_AMBIENT 1 to 0. What that does is make the fresnel reflections use the env ambient guess. By default it's limited in how well it approximates the lighting, with the seasons extension it actually gets the sky color so it's better will make fresnel blue. This also makes the fresnel effected by linear roughness attenuating the fresnel strength a bit.

https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/work_items/7800

[hollow lynx]

thanks

what tamriel heightmap is that in the previews

[plain shore]

requires an engine edit unfortunately

that's just TR and base game I think

[hollow lynx]

no thats the imperial city

with the jerall mountains

and they're looking way more eroded than my jerall mountains

[plain shore]

oh that one

[hollow lynx]

afaik vality7 also had access to something like this and he textured it and stuff

[plain shore]

no clue

maybe they took it from oblivion?

[hollow lynx]

oh yeah maybe

thats ture

yeah they did

claude says this is done fully outside of shaders

[plain shore]

Yeah it's an engine edit

[hollow lynx]

yeah I understand now

maybe in the future

[plain shore]

Still intensely bug hunting and adding more and more failsafes for stuff (previously waiting during various things would bug out now activities/conversations all get wrapped and clean up when waiting to avoid weird things where NPCs resume walking around or change cells and continue talking. What has worked succesfully is completely deterministic (per save not across people's games) runtime schedule generation. So now there will be compatibility with new cities mods etc without requiring me to bake schedules. It basically assigns a full schedule to an npc based on some patterns with randomness then as more NPCs are loaded they get added to the schedule with certain rules that allow them to supplant other NPCs in specific cases.

[soft oriole]

Installed your PBR shader. Skin SSS with no SSS textures still illuminates them really bad

[frank patio]

https://jcgt.org/published/0015/01/03/ Ultra-fast Screen-Space Refractions and Caustics via Newton’s Method

[steel musk]

i think Rafael and Wareya are the people you'll want to show that to

[river egret]

can this be used to also just replace the shadows in openmw?

[plain shore]

That's because those meshes aren't setup for skin SSS.

If you add darkmaps to the meshes it'll fix it

[cerulean wasp]

What are darkmaps? Google only points me to dark places or dark web related stuff

[hollow lynx]

can I disable fog on this shader?

[soft oriole]

No clue myself. I'm just a lua baby. I still struggle to remember that diffuse maps are your actual textures

[cerulean wasp]

I have no idea what all the different "maps" are tbh, I understand the concept behind some of them, but mostly, I look it up for tutorials since some maps have pretty easy ways to create one for your texture when required.

...other don't

[plain shore]

Presumably there's some code you can comment out

[plain shore]

Normally it's a multiply layer texture you can apply in nifs. Eg you could have one wood texture and then different darkmaps to simulate AO baked into different objects. In this case when SSS is present if the shader sees a darkmap it knows to use the skin SSS shader instead of the regular translucency one that's really just meant for leaves and cloth

What's cool about them in general is they can override stuff with their alpha map. So you could have like a tapestry and load it with different darkmaps that have different edge frays in alpha and add like folding pattern in the darkmap and make a bunch of different combos

[steel musk]

we just did that for a set of damaged tapestries in one of the PT projects

it makes each tapestry a tiny bit more expensive to draw, but saves memory any time there are two taps in a cell with different base fabric patterns but the same darkmap

you could save even more memory if A8L8 dds didn't make morrowind.exe crash

[plain shore]

Hahaha yeah I learned that from like the TR tutorials or something I think so that adds up

[steel musk]

oh. yeah, that's in the wiki from those exact taps lmao

you come up with anything clever that repurposes detailmaps yet?

[plain shore]

No I feel like those are used for normal stuff

Like I never saw darkmaps really used for stuff with SSS except for tapestries

[meager helm]

the shadow parallax offset has to pretend all triangles have flat normals because otherwise it looks extremely distorted, but this causes it to parallax offset the shadow depth test in ways that don't match the openmw normal bias nudge, so you get phantom shadows in some divots or around some peaks in pom textures. the "real fix" is to enable shadow backface culling but that's terrible for various reasons. the second-realest fix is to increase your shadow bias settings. the third-realest fix is to use tessellation instead of POM

[plain shore]

Yeah I was noodling and it seemed it was always either grainy or it would occasionally artefact. Mostly at grazing angles. I'll probably just set some flag to turn it on/off and play with the bias

[steel musk]

yeah, fair. they would have seen more use if tes3 vernacular wasn't already vertex colors on everything

[plain shore]

They definitely have uses but they work perfectly normally for anything without SSS. I could clean it up and make only red darkmaps trigger skin shaders so like grayscale ones would would normally

[meager helm]

what are the methods that people making SSS assets use to say "hi this gets SSS" anyway

alpha channel? additional texture?

if you hook me up with a mod that has a canonical example of an SSS asset i can put a (probably default-disabled) SSS bodge implementation in my pbr shaders

[vagrant yoke]

There’s a messed up texture on the equipment the ugh…. Redguard who greets you on the intro ship wears with some mod with the Tamriel data upscale. I need to find what texture name.

The chest armor

[plain shore]

Word if you can ori it just let me know

[plain shore]

The way I'm doing it is that spec alpha is SSS (this is what Rafael does) and then if the spec has alpha the darkmap color feeds into SSs color. If there's no darkmaps it uses diffuse color. I've really tuned it just for my own mod though were the darkmap color contribution is a 5% tint or something. Honestly most NPC models are jank enough that fake SSS there barely matters it's mostly nice to have the translucent leaf look for foliage. This has some textures for it but you can literally just give any spec like 80% transparency (0.2 as the alpha channel value). https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/57320

If you wanna see the skin stuff it's this https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/59118

[meager helm]

so low spec alpha roughly means more SSS

[plain shore]

If you wanna see the skin stuff it's this https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/59118

[plain shore]

Yup! 0 is max 255 is no SSS

[vagrant yoke]

I think it's tr_a_chain_cuirass_06

actually, looking at OG I guess it looks like that

nvmmmm

[edgy sequoia]

think u mean from this one?

https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/56733

[vagrant yoke]

No, I’m guessing it’s interesting outfits imperial, which is irrelevant as the texture is from Tamriel data…. Or maybe it’s some guard diversity thing. Idk. It’s a Tamriel data chain cuirass

[plain shore]

send me a screenshot if it looks ugly I can fix it even if the regular TD one looks similar

[chrome quail]

I think I’m getting close to settling on my modlist. Do I remember you asking for input about patches for textures to include for mods people are using?

For your watercolor pack?

[plain shore]

yes but I'm very distracted with other stuff atm, if you wanna give recs leave them in the comments there so I can find them cause I'll lose them in this chat

[chrome quail]

I’m trying to keep most of my mods pulling from oaab data and tamriel data for convenience, but there might be a few mods that have their own textures

[plain shore]

White Suran and TOTSP def deserve them.

[chrome quail]

Those are on my list haha

[steel musk]

oh btw Liam, G7 updated the Blender plugin (ver. 0.8.119) so we can fix those weird black triangles along UV mirror seams just by importing and re-exporting any affected meshes. so people should just report those to TD/OAAB/etc like any other mesh issue now. "[filename].nif has UV mirror seam, needs to be re-exported to support shaders" or smth

any other batch import/export process that people do going forward will also fix it as a side effect, but i expect there will be occasional lingering bad meshes for years

[chrome quail]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ARw6SG92QFU&ra=m&t=734
This might not apply, but are transparent textures for openmw made like this?

[steel musk]

yes, what he says in that section of the video applies to morrowind and openmw. i fixed that exact issue for all of the vanilla alpha textures in Morrowind Optimization Patch's optional "better vanilla textures" subfolder

modmakers and upscaled texture pack creators frequently reintroduce the black backgrounds because photoshop and a lot of batch image processing tools will happily black out an image's transparent pixels at the drop of a hat

[plain shore]

Most of TD upscale is like that I don't think I remembered to do all of MVR PBR that way

[vagrant yoke]

I think when I first saw it, I think I expected something to be rotated or mirrored wrong to create the look, but it does look like that in the original. So...IDK.

I mean, I was only comparing the dds files in my file browser, not trying in the game, tho

[plain shore]

I did accidentally make the leather pieces on the belt metal because when looking at the texture I thought it was bronze plates not leather lol

otherwise yeah it does look exactly like that.

[austere linden]

Can't wait for that radiant AI drop I'll be looking out for it over in mod discussion

And nexus ofc

[median cave]

Does the radiant ai involve activities like sit down please or other animated Morrowind things?

[plain shore]

What's in sitdown please activity wise? I do not have any of the set-pieces that just got added (like the speaking at the pulpit. Right now NPCs mostly drink and eat and occasionally read a book. Publicans are supposed to sweep but don't for a reason I've been to lazy to figure out. Eventually I'll have servants sweep too but haven't mapped that out. I have like all the animated Morrowind animations and props rekeyed and sitting around so eventually I'll have people pray at shrines when they visit temples and have farmers farm random ingredients etc, if I can figure out the right offsets I can probably have people set on the edges of bridges and fish too.

Longer term the structured set pieces from sitdownplease look sick. If you could have like an imperial cult priest give a voice sermon on sundays and have the people coming in and out and sitting down to watch him I think that would feel amazing. Going on a heist while everyone's at church and stalking people's schedules and stuff.

[plain shore]

If there's other stuff you can think of please feel free to let me know, it'll take a while to do but people can get creative. At some point some sort of crowd management system will probably be necessary and then shit can really open up. Eventually I wanna have holiday overrides too, like have just fucking everyone out drinking in the street on a holiday, even all the normally inside NPCs, or maybe Arena visits.

[median cave]

I thought it was just sitting and eating, but tbh I’ve only tested it a couple mins

I guess I’m just asking if radiant and SDP are doing the same thing w/r/t NPCs sitting

[plain shore]

Yes they sit and stand to go see other NPCs occasionally and can drink and eat and shit

[remote gale]

So you're adding bathrooms too?

[median cave]

Finally realistic defecation simulation

Suns Dusk coffee interop

[plain shore]

Lmao never considered that the aren't any latrines anywhere or outhouses in the base game afaik

[fiery canopy]

This radiant AI mod is insane, I love the dynamic conversations but I'm not a fan of AI voices. I like that you can have text boxes, but the silence feels imperfect, so I had an idea of cutting up the audio in the game to make some Banjo Kazooie-esque gibberish, here's my attempt at the Nord Male. Feels like it could be a good middle-ground.

[plain shore]

I'd need them for each race/gender with versions between like say 1,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20 seconds then would def be doable.

There's gotta be some like timbre matching vocaloid that can just make nonsense and have it follow the envelopes of like a regular old style tts. Like animal crossing gotta be doing something of that nature right.

[edgy sequoia]

@plain shore Any major differences between the archived and current versions of these?
I just discovered these compile absolutely fine with wabbajack so I'm gonna use those for now

[median cave]

Simlish

[crisp tangle]

Could port SAM into lua maybe. You'd need to pre-bake the phonemes. I've been thinking about maybe giving it a try, but haven't had a real use yet

[chrome quail]

What’s the difference(s) between .esp’s and .omwaddon besides .omwaddon’s being strictly for OpenMW?

[steel musk]

any mwscripts in an .omwaddon created by OpenMW-CS won't work in Morrowind.exe until someone renames the plugin to .esp, loads it in TESCS, selects each of the scripts, and clicks save as or recompile or something. this is because Morrowind.exe only runs the script bytecode compiled by TESCS, whereas OpenMW interprets the script text at runtime, and OpenMW-CS will probably never ever have bytecode compilation support

i'm not sure if there are any other practical differences between the file formats right now. i think there's a bug where OpenMW-CS allows you to give records IDs which are longer than the esp format was designed for, which probably causes problems in Morrowind.exe. that's supposed to get fixed at some point.

[plain shore]

they're completely busted in a ton of places please do not lol

Nexus is just a terrible website that doesn't let you delete uploaded files even if you upload the wrong file.

[plain shore]

I'll reupload the files later today so you can use the actual ones

[glacial radish]

Congrats on the launch, Liam! Exciting stuff. I was looking at it and I may actually be able to make a patch that would allow SDP to work with Dynamic Conversations, is that something I'd have your blessing to do and upload for 3.5 if I ever get to it? It might also make full integration of SDP into your mod easier down-the-line when free time begins to escape me again

I guess rather than saying a patch, I should instead say I think I can add some SDP-side compatibility hooks to allow it to layer more cleanly with Dynamic Conversations

[edgy sequoia]

thanks and I saw your reply just as I was posting it lol, I took it out for now

[plain shore]

Sure! You can see what I'm doing regarding sitting and standing and do whatever you want to work around it. I'm fine just fiddling with scheduling and other stuff for a while and letting all the sleeping and sitting run on your end if it works. I can see if I can integrate some of the state reads I use to manage sitting in the conversation manager to work with sitting in my mod turned off. Like a fall back that does the forcing the animation masking to upper body and reading the NPCs as static

I mean really all that will actually be important for final integration when you wrap up is making sure the state hooks work and that seat rotation on stools work, all other positioning stuff I can gut and replace

[earnest void]

BTW the name of "Dynamic NPC Conversations Scheduling and Behavior (Procedural Chatter)" mod makes it seem very focused on NPC conversations, but looking at the list of features, conversations may actually be the least exciting part of the mod IMO =>.

No video showcase? At least not on Nexus.

[mint tangle]

Personally the scheduling part interests me more than the conversations 😁

[earnest void]

https://tenor.com/view/jim-carrey-smile-happy-gif-16653971636788853276

[next wolf]

the conversation part is new and shiny

i already have mods that add schedules and sitting so now i'm forced to choose

i'm looking forward to modders adding convos in with follower and quest mods. i'm dreaming of some of the skilled morrowind writers like vonjdango having some fun with it

[plain shore]

The conversation part works reliably

[plain shore]

https://youtu.be/Cmicv_mPvnA?si=9eM9bH3CnkA4FG4Y

It probably won't cause any apocalyptic problems to have lua NPC schedule on if the scheduling in this is off

[plain shore]

I'll try to figure out how to read from the luanpc mod to ban this from starting conversations with people that are en route from that. Something similar is feasible with sit down please.

[willow bloom]

have you heard of the high elves?

[next wolf]

Seen any elves?

[willow bloom]

goodbye

[next wolf]

That would e cool. It's also not unreasonable if their are not compatible 👍

[plain shore]

Lol there's some bug in that conversation because an audio file was missing so I deleted like an option

[next wolf]

Infinite feedback loop

[plain shore]

Like there was an orthogonal branching based on race so I think now it skips a response and goes straight up the next topic

Iirc it might be human races laughing at the joke

But yes in more detail other than one bug I can patch today with followers not being blacklisted if they don't also have unique companion dialogue I would say you could probably run through a full campaign with dialogue on without anything breaking (other than immersion when NPCs who deserve to be blacklisted from generic conversations walk around and make jokes). Sitting likely is fine with minor aesthetic issues, the activity system I doubt has any real problems it's simple, but sleeping and scheduling do carry some risk of an NPC getting stuck outside the walls (sleeping) or never making it back to where they belong

[earnest void]

Ok. Impressice work overall. I will def not be using these convos as they remind me of Oblivion/Skyrim too much (- I saw a mudcrab the other day...), but it seems you have dynamic schedules handled with animations and all in one package.

[plain shore]

I can separate out the default conversations if you want to just use some of the unique converted stuff from dynamic conversations. And yes they are the oblivion rumors uesp page rephrased into Morrowind hahahaha

[steel musk]

conversation between two nords where one says the first half of (their gender's version of) the joke and the other says the laughter

[earnest void]

conversation where it's only HAHAHHAHAHHAHA

[steel musk]

"…elves?"
"HAHAHAHAHAHA!"

[balmy river]

sniffs

[brittle meteor]

Speak, outlander

[plain shore]

Oh hey fancy seeing you here, I was curious how bad the save bloat for GoHome loading cells actually is because I was considering returning to that system instead of FoxUnder's grace tables because it would make NPC management easier. Like eventually people are likely to visit a lot of interiors right so it just sort of jump starts the save file to a city being fully explored?

[glacial radish]

just weeds out the riff-raff. Wanna play Morrowind? You need 37tb of storage, at a minimum

[plain shore]

Thinking about it I forgot that I'd be simultaneously loading way more cells than GoHome nearly all the time that schedule events trigger so even regardless of saves that'd probably be a nightmare

Teleporting away a bunch of NPCs into grace tables already causes a huge lag spike on waiting

[chrome quail]

Are there any mods here that would interfere/overlap with your new mod? I took out lua npc schedules and sit down please which were previously included

Also does your mod include the npc’s sheltering from weather like lua npc schedules?

[plain shore]

I'm not sure I haven't had a lot of time to test mod compatibility. Working on getting LNPCschedules compatible. All combat related stuff and guard related stuff should be fine as this doesn't really touch guards much (Dynamic Conversations adds guard banter but I think I'm failing to properly allow it in right now).

[balmy river]

Howdy! Just wanted to say I used your MVR PBR set on my "Just Beautiful Morrowind" setup (Steam Deck) and it was fantastic. So thanks for your work there! My first full PBR experience.

Re: loading cells for Go Home - I think that it's interesting they somehow managed to avoid that. When I initially made Go Home I did benchmark the size and deemed it to be not that big of a deal in the big picture. As you said, outside of TR there aren't so many cells that the player might not otherwise enter that it's not really a huge deal.

Now that I know there's a way to not need to do that, I'm still keeping that pattern because: not doing so would probably make having interior NPCs come out and have a schedule be tricky (but then again I've yet to look at FoxUnder's code so I could be wrong about that! Seeing that it's a parlor mod and all I probably won't look at their source as a reference, just to stay legit), and that's definitely something I'd like to add in the very near future.

... some day when the API has better ways to access unloaded actors, it won't be needed ofc 🙏

[plain shore]

Thanks glad you enjoyed it! If you ever get around to playing the TD PBR and find it's still too performance heavy on the deck I can try some even further downscaled optimizations hahaha. Likewise I Go Home! was like the mod that originally made me think it would be possible to like do literally anything interesting with NPCs, there wasn't much else at the time I started first working on the conversations so like I frequently referenced that and a few other mods to understand what was possible.

I have played with the idea of having interior NPCs come out and be scheduled and it seemed to work, but requires visiting the NPC once to log their default behavior and stuff. You can just do a regular instant teleport outside since the exteriors always loaded. In the vaguest terms to avoid spoliing you on the source it basically just disables NPCs in exteriors and then when you fully load the interior by entering, it resolves that to an actual position indoors. I think what's most useful is that for waiting across multiple schedule events it just has to update where it says the NPC should appear if you enter instead of actually moving them.

It's very tempting to consider the Go Home method just because of it being a bit easier to sequence stuff out if I can just truly dump an NPC somewhere and not worry about them. My only real concern is if I'm like in Narsis and sending NPCs to like a bunch of different taverns and markets and bringing them back from other places all at once if that many interior cells being handled will grind the game to a halt, although I'm sure if I really though about it I could do something to distribute it.

[balmy river]

Thanks glad you enjoyed it! If you ever get around to playing the TD PBR and find it's still too performance heavy on the deck I can try some even further downscaled optimizations hahaha.
I will take you up on this! TBH, performance was pretty good. I was sort of worried how it'd be given you had based your work on Vurt's HQ files but tbh it was fine.

In the vaguest terms to avoid spoliing you on the source it basically just disables NPCs in exteriors and then when you fully load the interior by entering, it resolves that to an actual position indoors.
I see! This is kinda how I envisioned it. Personally I don't think the complexity is worth it given my earlier save file benchmarks.

[plain shore]

Okay cool I'll have to try to benchmark a busy location with both methods and see what the difference is

I think the half res TD should be fine it's like an average resolution of 1k for bigger things similar to TD HD but I'm sure there's lots of small things that really could be scaled down

[balmy river]

Definitely tag me after you do, I'm interested to know the results!

[balmy river]

Cool it'd be great to have that option! Just for lower spec machines/devices.

[chrome quail]

Would adding a slight reflectivity to the eyes of npc’s be something that would help immersion or is it not possible/would look bad?

(Through the pbr textures)

[plain shore]

You can look at my recent Galleos mod, it does that but kind of poorly (eyelids look sopping wet)

From talking to kartoffels the secret is you need to like make hemispherical normals for just the pupil/iris and that makes it catch light better

[keen isle]

How far can custom schedules send a npc? Like can it make traveling merchant for exemple?

[plain shore]

I think with some adjustments it's possible

Right now it default to their native position in the exterior cell they came from

There's no reason I couldn't make it use a different exterior cell and position if it's manually declared

[plain shore]

@edgy sequoia deleted a few broken texures and reuploaded everything if you wanna test it with the mod thing

[plain shore]

Huh I just realized I didn't know what "parlor mod" meant and found the original article and it's quite fascinating to me. I very much have never cared what anyone does with anything I make but I didn't realize there were like established categories for that.

[next wolf]

I coild guess from the inference but I've never heard the term before. What's the article?

[plain shore]

https://wryemusings.com/Cathedral vs. Parlor.html

[next wolf]

Yeah I much prefer the idea of the mods I make now at least making less work for someone in the future who has better ideas. There is definitely more of a "cathedral" mindset these days, probably helped by openmw existing in its open-source glory. Fox is far from cagey about their work too tbf but I understand the desire to make your own stamp on the scene

[steel musk]

idk if i would even say "these days". morrowind's modding scene has always had a lot of cathedral modders, all the way back to Tamriel Rebuilt planning starting before the game was even out

[plain shore]

Yeah I mean they said I could use whatever stuff from their implementation but I think that was likely in part due to how much it drew on GoHome in turn

[crisp tangle]

This is why all my stuff is AGPL 💖

[remote gale]

That honestly reads like "should we be open source "

[willow bloom]

@plain shore is it safe to use now?

the pbr mod

[plain shore]

I deleted the textures you told me were broken and two other bugs reported. Haven't like remade them they'll just be default textures

[willow bloom]

I see

[plain shore]

So there might be broken stuff that nobody's found but if it was found it should be fixed? It's possible on texture on mushrooms will be weird. I rotated it but it's an atlas and I'm not sure if maybe it should've been restitched instead of just rotated.

[willow bloom]

[ivory meadow]

this doom mod https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-ce/downloads/doom-64-ce-3111-full-download has an optional addon with handmade vanilla-res PBR materials and with Nearest Neighbor, pixelated low res PBR looks quite good

[ivory meadow]

LMAO. "Cathedral" was exactly the concept they'd been pushing hard in Skyrim modding before it went down in flames a few years ago. I'm surprised to learn the language of cathedral vs. parlor originated in Morrowind modding.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyrimModsXbox/comments/1hdcyj1/whats_up_with_all_the_cathedral_mods

broke: cathedral
woke: parlor
bespoke: bathtub ||surgery||

[ivory meadow]

I'm sure there's lots of small things that really could be scaled down
haft vs blade

also some odd armor pieces #screenshots message

[rocky remnant]

mt5s2efp8

Oh it’s not just the fingers it’s the whole palm as compared to the arm (obviously not vanilla but it’s the same there)

Attachment(s)

image.png
image.png
image.png

Linked by @​mt5s2efp8 from #screenshots · Mar 25, 2026, 8:24 PM

[steel musk]

that haft uses a generic rusty metal texture which it shares with a million other meshes with wildly different texel densities. your dream is strictly impossible to realize as a pure texture replacer

[keen isle]

Liam, how does the house detection work? Does it look for the full name, or only for a common part, like the last name? Like, does a npc need to have exact full match?

For your chatter and schedules mods

Oh and second question, does the custom schedule can only admit one possibility or can a npc have "options", like at 4pm can go to Arril or to Fargoth's House?

[plain shore]

It currently sets the same schedules according to patterns where every night npcs with homes will go the tarvern then home

There's nothing inherently stopping a more complicated scheduled generation I just haven't done that

I think it's all just ripped from JohnnyHostiles go home, so it splits up names into chunks then searches for matching stuff so like Ondres Nerano could do Nerano Manor or ondres' house

Oh wait I see what you're saying is can an NPC have a custom defined schedule with chances? Like every day fargoth picks randomly to go home or to Arille's?

A big thing I was trying to get was predictability so I didn't think much about randomization. I wanted to know where NPCs should be as a player and and also to have the script confident about NPC locations. However as long as any randomness is done with some fixed thing (maybe in game date would be the simplest) I could eventually add randomness. That way you could have varying schedules week to week without planning a full scheduled year.

[willow bloom]

liam

there are 2 files (_n_n)

and 2 diffuses with (_n)

in the normals zip

have to delete those 2 diffuses with the same name as (_n_n) and replace the (_n_n) with (_n)

[plain shore]

Sweet thank you I must've fucked up a python script somewhere

[keen isle]

OK cool, so in a hypothetical situation where 2 npcs would share the same last name, they'd go to the same house if said house had this last name? Which is not a lot of npcs lol

[keen isle]

Whatever you have time to do and that you think works the best. If a bit of randomness is possible that is cool. This is also why I was talking about custom schedules for a specific npc, because then the modder is the one who pays attention to not break anything. But yes I was talking about setting fixed options that are randomly chosen. Like having the option to either go to Arril's trade house or Fargoth's house or the lighthouse for example.

[plain shore]

So the way it works is it prioritizes hardcoded schedules that any mod can easily add when it generates schedules there's no structure for automatically editing schedules if you add new hardcoded ones that pass capacity but there's Lua strings you can use to reset schedules.

Right now if you want that I'd add them to the json for different days as it's a full week schedule

I'm so happy to really add a lot over time but right now my priority is really building up stability then once all the core systems work well enough for someone to play a 70h game without breaking it in any way then I'll figure out all the fun stuff to add

But yeah if you want right now you could easily have fargoth visit a different house every day of the week I forget if I included the example schedule where vodonius goes to a random house or not

Unless I fucked it up it should auto load all jsons in the folder for scheduling so you could have a mod that schedules one npc in a different file and it'll work

[brittle meteor]

Yo, Liam

Out of curiosity, you plan on doing the whole pbr and parallax beauty treatment to Oaab_data stuff?

[plain shore]

Yes but so much of it is stuff that doesn't really need it so I've been lazy

Which is counterintuitive

But bc most of it are hd rugs and tapestries and effects that I won't upscale or delight I haven't worried about it

I know it has a few like interior cell kits and armors though

[chrome quail]

Ik ur busy with other projects rn, but I got around to posting the list of mods that would be fire if they could get textures in your watercolor style on ur original watercolor nexus page

Do you want them in here too, or just there?

[plain shore]

Sweet thanks no that's fine

[chrome quail]

It ended up essentially being the modlist ‘just beautiful morrowind’ on openmw, but I had a few extras that I’m also using

[plain shore]

That makes sense

I have the comfyui file for the method used on TD on that mod page if you get impatient

[chrome quail]

Sweet good to know

Does it do pbr and everything or just the diffuse

[plain shore]

It does everything iirc? I can't really remember how good a job I did describing the install process and I know a lot more and have made a bunch of scripts in python for it since then.

The specular maps/roughness are all just arbitrarily high

[keen isle]

Yes it is present

[keen isle]

I think it is understandable

Thanks for the answer 🙂

[hollow lynx]

@plain shore can I somehow tweak water foam brightness?

[plain shore]

Yeah it's the glsl

[lusty sparrow]

the only acceptable form of fast travel

[hollow lynx]

also @plain shore you should animate _nh and _spec maps on moving meshes in objects.frag or whatever the shader is

I forgot it was a part of rafaels

[plain shore]

Wait that can be done in shaders?

I assumed it was a core engine thing

That's nuts of that's real then I can include modded water textures with full specular and parallax for all the TD meshes.

[hollow lynx]

yeah it is in shaders

[willow bloom]

wtf

is this SVNR?

[hollow lynx]

no these are my WIP textures

SVNR doesnt have PBR or parallax for his textures

not OpenMW PBR anyway

[willow bloom]

can

you

erm

share?

👉 👈

[hollow lynx]

they are a part of Morrowind Remastered Project, not ready for release yet

They are subject to changes etc

[willow bloom]

it looks miles better than any other lava replacer in its current state

probably should be its own thing

[hollow lynx]

it wouldn't look as good without the objects.frag animated parallax and PBR found in Rafael's shaders and some other shader files

there was another file way back for wareyas

I dont remember who made it

#making-mods message

[rocky remnant]

apprihensivsoul

Is it this section here? I'm not a shader editor so this is kind of greek to me outside of common code concepts:

void main()
{
#if @particleOcclusion
    applyOcclusionDiscard(orthoDepthMapCoord, texture2D(orthoDepthMap, orthoDepthMapCoord.xy * 0.5 + 0.5).r);
#endif

    // only offset diffuse and normal maps for now, other textures are more likely to be using a completely different UV set
    vec2 offset = vec2(0.0);

#if @parallax || @diffuseParallax
#if @parallax
    float height = texture2D(normalMap, normalMapUV).a;
    float flipY = (passTangent.w > 0.0) ? -1.f : 1.f;
#else
    float height = texture2D(diffuseMap, diffuseMapUV).a;
    // FIXME: shouldn't be necessary, but in this path false-positives are common
    float flipY = -1.f;
#endif
    offset = getParallaxOffset(transpose(normalToViewMatrix) * normalize(-passViewPos), height, flipY);
#endif```

Linked by @​saintj_ from #making-mods · Sep 6, 2025, 4:16 PM

[hollow lynx]

here I was discussing it

it was epoch who made it

[willow bloom]

oh the man who shall not be named

[hollow lynx]

rafael also made his version

[hollow lynx]

sss of doom

same thing on trees

[plain shore]

Whats going on there is it not responding to shadows correctly or is the lighting just off? I've considered turning down SSS I think StingDR said they didn't feel it was too bright but sometimes I feel they're glowing when they shouldn't.

It needs like an exposure curve based on the initial color, white things have substantially brighter SSS than darker colors

If I have time tomorrow I'm happy to add the animations for that and then find some nice animated parallax pbr water texture and replace all the vanilla and TD water with variants of that.

[chrome quail]

Does mistify do anything if I am using shaders

[plain shore]

What's mistify?

[chrome quail]

It seems like a better mist mod

And its on basically all the openmw modlists

[plain shore]

Oh yes it will do what it does but some of the clouds/ fog mods do height dependent fog that adds a similar low fog

If it's doing it with transparent particles or something it's possible they'll look weird with shaders

Like ssao will show though it

[chrome quail]

Gotcha

[next wolf]

Liam, can you see in these shots how everything looks slightly shiny? like too smooth or something. im using your newest textures with your wareya kitbash, everything looks almost spectacular execpt some angles or lighting it s really wierd and i cant put my finger on whaats going wrong

[soft oriole]

it's too reflective, I think

[next wolf]

yeah thats seems like it. to much shine on it

[next wolf]

do you happen to know what setting i would tweak to adjust that

[soft oriole]

no clue, shaders are beyond my comprehension

[next wolf]

fair

[willow bloom]

@plain shore correction

the file names were correct

both normals and diffuse

just remove the diffuse from normals and put in diffuse

[edgy sequoia]

I will say its more noticeable on banners and ship sailcloth
Back then I thought it was the exposure shader making it look a little overblown sometimes

[hollow lynx]

fresnel is not roughness based

• a few other things

I was talking to liam about it earlier in this channel, there are things in the works to change it as far as I know

I myself have made and uploaded here a version that makes fresnel roughness based, but it also makes the stuff that is actually supposed to be smooth a lot rougher than it should, rough materials like rock or dirt look correct though

[plain shore]

Fresnel too strong this is what saintJ and I were talking about somewhere. I've been trying to eyeball and a good attenuation of it.

I also think some of those landscape textures are too smooth

[hollow lynx]

yeah thats also possible, could be the individual textures from MVR having low roughness, but I would doubt that because my landscape textures also had the fresnel problem, all my textures looked like they were covered in a layer of grayish wax

[next wolf]

ok good to know thanks.

[plain shore]

Specifically that mud texture is shiny

[next wolf]

yeah thats the one that catches my eye the most

[willow bloom]

crushed blacks

do these look normal?

broken

semms broken as well

I think it's safe to assume trees need a rework

I would just reupload the diffuse file without any flora edits for now

[plain shore]

what is broken with that tree am I stupid?

oh wait I see it on the orange ones the leaves are too square or something?

cannot for the life of me figure out what that's a picture of in the first one none of the textures I can see look anything like that

[plain shore]

I looked through everything and I have no idea at all what this is

I could not find any ferns or grass or leaves that look like that.

[willow bloom]

lol

[plain shore]

for the trees though is the mask what you're talking about or something I'm missing with the bark?

[willow bloom]

leaves

barks are fine

[plain shore]

sweet I'll bust out the drawing tablet and try to get something much neater

I will selfishly not upload one without flora bc then I have to be the one to look at every tree and grass model in game instead of delegating the work, but if you want I can do it for you and upload it to my one drive lol

[willow bloom]

nah I can do it myself

[plain shore]

Where did you see that stuff on the ground I can go check in my game and try to figure out what it is

I'm not loving the landscape texture either might redo that but I have touch grass installed so I can easily figure out the texture if I know where it is.

[willow bloom]

it's in most TR areas

but try south of vivec

areas outside old ebonheart

[plain shore]

Okay sweet that makes sense I spent far more time in Skyrim and cyrodil recently because most of the TR stuff I did a long time ago! Ty for the help

[edgy sequoia]

something I've noticed is the exterior paper lanterns can look a little overblown when using your PBR, interiors look normal but any paper lanterns outside are just extra glowy for some reason
I'm using EKM Vanilla-Based Paper Lanterns for the textures

[plain shore]

Oh yeah I remember someone talking to Wareya about this there's some setting that can attenuate point lights like torches in the exterior iirc

[plain shore]

I was never able to find this even flying over everything in the southern mainland. couldn't find that green landscape texture nor these ferns. The areas south of vivec look totally different in my game, it's all orange cracked dirt with orange moss groundcover.

[willow bloom]

probably multiple mods then

lol

well, sorry if I wasted your time

I will look for this on my own

[plain shore]

no worries, I needed to go see how some other edits looked in person anyways

it's possible that some groundcover mod might load TD textures and I did something to break that in specific.

[remote gale]

Hey Liam, when you get a moment. Been using your Screenspace shaders.

And noticed that SSGI_Bitmask_Interior is enabled for Exteriors as well. Is that on purpose?

And if it isn't - I'm unfamiliar with omwfx format and couldn't find anything in the file that would obviously limit it to one type of cell or another. Can you point me to what I'd need to change?

[plain shore]

Oh no not at all that's a mistake, it's in the every end it has flags like disable exterior etc. If you check the other ones you can see how they do it

[remote gale]

Oh yeah, see it

Nice, worked. Thank you!

Really like the look of it, but it was tanking exterior performance bad

[lusty sparrow]

where can I find the SSGI_Main and bitmask?

[plain shore]

they're on the nexus in the screenspace lighting shaders

[chrome quail]

If I’m trying to organize my modlist, would I want your watercolor texture pack really high or really low to replace any textures or meshes added by other mods

Like if they both have a file for the same texture for example

[next wolf]

Putting low will replace everything above it

Provided it has a texture for it

[chrome quail]

Gracias

[chrome quail]

What’s the difference between s3ctor’s rubic0n and ownlyme’s lua unleashed?

Would they both work for the seasons mod

[plain shore]

I actually haven't bothered to check, if they use the same lua code to load dlls and break sandbox yes, if not no. To me Rubic0n has a cooler name so I will continue to use it but if the infrastructure is close enough that adjsuting the exact sandbox escape language is like 1 line change I can easily make a patch.

[chrome quail]

Gotcha. Since I don’t know really how any of it works, the description for Rubic0n almost makes it feel like it might be dangerous in some way

The ownlyme one also talks a lot about garbage collection and preventing stuttering, so that also sounded interesting

[plain shore]

It's dangerous in the sense that a dll loaded by the game allows OpenMW to interface with other stuff on your computer, whereas normally the OpenMW.exe can't really touch anything like that via mods.

[chrome quail]

What about if my openmw is a flatpak

Is that kind of contained by nature?

[plain shore]

oh idk I don't even have a seasons build for linux I got distracted and didn't publish the github code for people to build it

[chrome quail]

https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/59245
so this one unlocks sandbox and uses better garbage collection stuff from lua 5.4

https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/58557
this one just unlocks the sandbox and doesn’t specify what version of lua

https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/58367
this one adds some features, but not fully unlocking the sandbox and uses lua 5.2

Is that kind of the main differences?

Do all of them allow openmw to interface with other stuff on the computer?

[plain shore]

pretty sure rubic0n is just the sandbox breaking version of the openresty one. so only rubic0n and the unlocked sanbdbox lua unleashed allow it to break sandbox.

[chrome quail]

Ah gotcha

[next wolf]

LuaJit claims to be compatible with Seasons, as far as i'm aware its essentially the same as rubicon but with added focus on reducing GC stutter.

[plain shore]

Okay sweet

[chrome quail]

I have both the cinematic bokeh omwscript activated in my content files as well as the fuz dof in the in game shader menu

[hollow lynx]

liam do you think it would be possible to improve water ripples on your / rafael's water shader?

they don't look as 3d and nice as the default OpenMW / maybe this is wareya's one

also doesn't seem that editing the foam amount does much, aside from when you set it to 0 or from 0 to any value

as in there seems to be no difference in the amount of foam at 0.1 and 1.0 foam intensity

which essentially means that my odai is now made of milk

[plain shore]

what are you trying to do

wow jesus why is that so bright

lemme go look foam intensity isn't the right value that's like a holdover from rafael's approach

this is what you want to play with "const float FOAM_CONTRAST_LOW = 0.0;
const float FOAM_CONTRAST_HIGH = 0.4;"

or this if you want to edit the depth foam:
" float depthFoam = 0.0;
if (g_waterDepth < 80.0)
{
float shoreFade = smoothstep(0.0, 5.0, g_waterDepth);
float deepFade = 1.0 - smoothstep(5.0, 55.0, g_waterDepth);
float opacity = shoreFade * deepFade;
depthFoam = combinedFoam * opacity;
}"

[plain shore]

I'm 99% sure they're just not working at all on my current one lol

[hollow lynx]

check #1497923211592073308 I encountered some issues with procedural chatter there

[hollow lynx]

noted

[plain shore]

then this is where foam darkening is " {
// Foam dims in shadows and at night
float foamLight = clamp(shadow * sunFade + AMBIENT_INTENSITY, 0.3, 1.5);
vec3 foamColor = vec3(0.9, 0.9, 0.9) * foamLight;
gl_FragData[0].rgb = mix(gl_FragData[0].rgb, foamColor, foamMask);
}" if it's too bright in the shadows, and then the og foam color is what sets overall foam brightness

[chrome quail]

I know you r working on other stuff, but a couple of days ago I was talking about the dof shaders I’ve been messing with and you said you might be able to tinker with it at some point. Were you meaning you could do this with fuzdof, or was it the cinematic bokeh script?

I figured out the one that was visually looking really good and close to something really neat was fuzdof

[plain shore]

Yeah happy to get on that I'll try to remember to test it tomorrow

Presumably you want the blur to ramp slightly faster while having a bigger sharp window in the middle and then to take a median of like a disc in the middle of the screen?

Maybe a median with a bias towards closer points so if you're like half off an NPC it doesn't focus on the background

So that way it kind of broadly focuses on the center and doesn't miss focus but looks similarly blurry in the background

We could probably hook it up to lua so dynamic actors could work without NPCs being centered like force a distant only blur during dialogue

But that's more like if it's a problem after the tweaks we can fix it not a necessary starting point

[plain shore]

Also found a huge huge inefficiency in the scheduling I forgot to consider. I forgot exterior cells by default just give blank as the name so it was treating the exterior as every cell ever and identifying every single exterior NPC as missing

Fixed it by now taking the actual cell coordinates for exterior cells

Missed it bc I did 99% of my testing of the schedules with complex hardcoded schedules in Seyda Neen instead of the dynamic ones

Also if anyone has ideas of cool NPC immersion stuff let me know. As I refactor I want to try to make sure I build a framework I can fluidly add on later and having an understanding of what things I might want to do helps that

One thing I'm thinking is keeping going to meshes, speaking, and playing animations modular and functional outside of the current systems. Like similar to sit down please with the lecterns it would be cool to easily be able to set up an event for an NPC where they walk to a lectern then deliver a speech, or have an NPC walk to a bookshelf then equip a book and read for a second

[chrome quail]

This is super scuffed in trying to show an example lol, but if an npc is within like the middle half of the screen and is like 6 feet away, it would be cool if it autofocuses on them

Even though my pointer isn’t pointing at them directly

But I probably wouldn’t want it to do it if instead of that npc, it was a wooden post for instance, however I still think there should be a small margin of error for objects and terrain

[plain shore]

Okay that is feasible but it would involve a fair bit of lua I think

[chrome quail]

If you are wanting to see how good it feels even while stock, try fuzdof with these settings. Strength can be 600 or 650.

[chrome quail]

Honestly even if there is a less complicated version that necessitates less exact pointer placement that would be a huge improvement

If it’s easier

[plain shore]

I'll have to test what the performance is. You'd want to take like a grid of samples in Lua raycast, if it's an NPC override the normal dof focus distance.

Having a looser central focus that doesn't do NPC detection is trivial you basically just sample more points for the focus then bias it towards an aggregate of some sort

[chrome quail]

If the latter is easier, then that would do a lot by itself

[plain shore]

The NPC detection should be theoretically straightforward with lua

I just have played with lua shader control less

Doing dialogue overrides would also be very easy

[chrome quail]

Would it be easier if instead of using the crosshair to determine what’s in focus, it used a line type of thing and preferred to focus on the closest thing that the line touches?

Something like that? Sorry I don’t know too much about how these things work so I don’t know which ways I’m trying to think of it being implemented would be the easiest to do

[raw skiff]

You can absolutely do that, but I don't think you'll like the results.

Say you want to walk around that corner. The corner will be in focus instead of the open path you're actively walking towards/through

You might be able to mitigate that somewhat by checking everything along that line and then center-weighting the result

That would lead to much smoother changes in focus than doing a single depth check dead-center in the middle of the screen.

But then you get weirdness where, if you have a very close object to your left and a very far object to your right, your camera focuses on the middle distance because it's exactly between the two.

So I guess you'd want to apply center-weight AND depth weight.

[chrome quail]

True I didn’t think of that

What if it was crosshair for the environment and the line only for objects and actors

[raw skiff]

Is there a good way to tell object types apart from a shader?

DoF shaders usually just grab the depth buffer and work from that

[crisp tangle]

Depth buffer doesn't have a lot of accuracy, maybe it's fine enough for stuff close to the camera

Could shoot rays and then put the result part to look at in as a vector input to the shader. If you can live with lag

That will let you do priority based focusing better

[chrome quail]

Things close to the camera are what this would be feasibly fixing because at a certain distance, it doesn’t matter if you are focusing on the table or the apple on the table

But an npc standing right in front of you, you have to be looking exactly at or you will focus on the house way far in the distance if your crosshair moves one pixel off of them

That being said, with the settings I am using for fuzdof, it isn’t even THAT much of an inconvenience because all of the rest of the time that it is working well, the foreground blur looks great

[cerulean wasp]

Sorry if this is a very noob/obvious question but do the PBR textures (Tamriel Data and MVR PBR) require having the "auto-use normal maps" and "auto-use specular maps" enabled in the launcher for both terrain and objects?
(Sorry, I'm a bit lost when it comes to all the different types of "-maps" that now exist in textures, and their relations to the million alphabet shaders that now exist 😅 )

[crisp tangle]

Yeah I think you need to enable those

[cerulean wasp]

you think?

[crisp tangle]

Yes I do

[cerulean wasp]

Sorry, it just sounded like you weren't sure?

[crisp tangle]

Enable them and see

[edgy sequoia]

You need the specular maps for pbr yea

Enable both for the full experience

[cerulean wasp]

Cheers

[edgy sequoia]

Just to be clear by both I mean also the normal maps since those are included in Liam's mods