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

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

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

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Here's a badly recorded gameplay video showing off the features (and bugs) in the already-out-of-date version 3.0 (one of the bugs in the video is already fixed!)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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

superllama
Protege
Yeah, press pause. I guess I forgot to put that in the post with the download, editing now
EDIT: also, I actually hadn't heard of MGE XE until you mentioned it a few posts back. The way I wrote my code, it's primarily self-contained with a few macro-based connections to the wrapperclasses file, so it might actually be possible to rebuild it to run XE as well sometime in the future when it's better optimized and working properly.

superllama
Protege
Since enthusiasm for this project seems to have vanished, I decided to instead write an all-purpose DLL wrapper from scratch that will implement all the features currently promised and more, only for every game instead of just morrowind. It'll be profile based and feature hacking tools for locating render values in each game and riftifying them without writing any code-- and for anyone who's too afraid to hack their games themselves using the wrapper, they can just download someone else's game profile. I'll probably put up a webpage where everyone can share their game profiles and eventually make everything compatible. It's currently a d3d9.dll but I'm planning on making builds for other renderers too (d3d7/8/10/11 and opengl--possibly even SDL so I can play dwarf fortress and dosbox games)

The new wrapper will feature a multithreaded headtracking frame smoother, so even if the game runs at 20 fps, the headtracking should update faster. I'm not completely sure if this will work yet, but it's looking like it will. Plus, I've already managed to use it to separate 2D draw calls (the hud, menus) out onto a 3D plane so they don't get out of sync with one another (fixing the cursor bug currently seen in morrowrift). Until the new wrapper works, just use the test dll if you really need to play morrowind on the rift-- I will likely not be updating it due to the existence of the promising new wrapper.

Also, I'm testing the new wrapper with MGE XE instead of just regular MGE-- and it's very likely that it will support Oblivion and Skyrim too before too long. I've also tested it on Audiosurf since it was a simple d3d9 game, and it worked about as well as it did in Morrowind. I'm also planning on testing it on Natural Selection 2.

I'll have a topic up for the new wrapper at some point after it's presentable -- I'm calling it "LlamaWrap" right now, but I might change the name if I think of a better one. Just wanted to tell anyone who might still be reading this topic that I'm still planning to finish making morrowind work flawlessly on the rift (even with XE)-- I just decided to expand to other games instead of just this one.

virror
Explorer
"Since enthusiasm for this project seems to have vanished"

Not true! We are just awaiting updates : D

superllama
Protege
Well, I posted a beta download and got almost no response, then got buried somewhere on page 3... so I assumed everyone forgot about it. Either way though, the new wrapper will be way better.

Ananas
Explorer
Cool, sounds great. Waiting to see how it turns out.

superllama
Protege
I've managed to get the FPS smoother semi-functional (it's an extra high-priority thread that tries to predict pixel changes based on its own updated knowledge of headtracking separate from the main game thread, though it only works in windowed mode)-- there's still some issues with distortion if you move your head too fast, but I'm still trying to fix them. The new wrapper doesn't truly render stereo yet though, it just uses the same view twice, and it also doesn't hack the view frustum or fov yet (except for menus). Since it's meant to be an all-purpose wrapper I'll have to give it some programmability for those features to be included. I tried launching it with skyrim today but it didn't start-- though that might be because my installation is broken after using a bunch of weird mods to try to get it working with vireio perception (which didn't work out so well, lol). I'm redownloading it and I'll debug the wrapper using both games fairly soon.

Koshinator
Honored Guest
Indeed, enthusiasm for the project has not vanished - I'm still quite excited. I completely missed the beta download update, as I don't check this forum out too often, and I'm looking forward to it getting "completed" (or at least abandoned in the best possible state ^_^)

superllama
Protege
Like I said, the "Morrowrift" version of the project has been discontinued (that is, my direct hack of MGE). However, I'm reusing most of the same code to make a general purpose wrapper which will be easier to adapt to other games in addition to morrowind (though making this new wrapper support MGE and MGE XE is the first thing I'm going to do). Until this wrapper supports something besides morrowind, however, I'm just going to post updates in this thread. I've actually been testing with MGE XE from the beginning with this one and already it's looking like it'll be better than what I could have done with a d3d8 replacement -- with XE it looks like water reflection and shadows will be fully supported in addition to just distantland. Right now it already has a new approach to rendering menus which will keep them magnified but also in the same field of view as the world, fixing the crosshair problem and probably loading screens too, plus the multithreaded frame tweening system which allows headtracking to have an effect even when the main process is frozen or lagging. In order to catch up to where the beta dll was, I'll need to add a right-eye view and a ram hack system to fix the frustum and game fov, then it'll pretty much be ready to adapt to other games, especially skyrim.

davidjc
Honored Guest
I have been waiting realy for this, I tried to get Morrowind working with tridef but the vertical tracking is all messed up so I bascially gave up.

Joshgatti
Honored Guest
Im going to try the beta even though it was discontinued, Morrowind is one of my old favorites. How is the wrapper going? is there a site where you have posted any betas? I hope to hear some good news, my rift is gonna be here in a few days, and I would love to have the option to play morrowind with a different view.