v0.21.0 beta

Added

• Camera-relative rendering, on by default. Fixes the jittering that was caused by float precision
  loss in areas far from the world origin, primarily in the Project Tamriel mods. (#20)
• Distant statics now stream in and out as you travel instead of all loading at startup, so VRAM
  use no longer scales with the size of your mod list.
• Grass rendering is new enabled in interiors. The interface now auto-detects interior grass mods. (#21)
• The mgeXE.toml file now automatically updates itself to include new settings as they released.

Changed

• Distant statics use about 23% less video memory and disk space.
• Interiors with no name are ignored and no longer add their contents to the exterior world spaces.

Fixed

• Fixed a (MGE XE UF) crash caused by reading one entry past the end of the distant object list.
• Fixed a memory leak when loading textures that caused out-of-memory crashes on large installs.
• Fixed malformed assets causing crashes or render incorrectly with indexed_skinning enabled.
• Fixed distant land generation failing on mods that place cells very far from the world origin.
• Fixed enabling per-pixel lighting not updating light attenuation values to Morrowind.ini.
• Fixed several inherited (MGE XE) bugs related to water ripple logic.

v0.20.3 beta

Fixed

• Fixed some distant objects receiving incorrect vertex colors.

v0.20.2 beta

Fixed

• Fixed distant land generation and loading for non-English interior cell names.
• Fixed handling of grass mods that place statics defined in a master file (such as Tamriel Data).

v0.20.1 beta

Fixed

• Reduced memory use while generating distant land, hopefully preventing crashes with very large mod lists (#3).
• The configuration utility no longer fails to launch when ReShade is installed (#4).
• The configuration utility no longer needs administrator rights to save display settings. (#8)
• The configuration utility now detects groundcover mods that use grass only defined in master files. (#2)
• Fixed sun shadow flickering at the bottom screen corners and at the cascade intersection. (#5)
• Skinned meshes, such as the hanging banners in Vivec, are now included in distant statics (#1).

v0.20.0 beta, G7 fork

First public release of the G7 fork, based on MGE XE 0.19.1. Requirements, installation and feature
detail are in README.md.

Added

• Batched distant land. The generator merges each cell's geometry into one mesh split by texture
  state and packs static textures into atlases, so a cell costs one or two draw calls rather than
  one per object.
• Incremental regeneration. Only dirty cells, changed shards and touched atlas pages rebuild.
• Plugin -metadata.toml files are detected and loaded, so mod authors ship distant-land overrides
  and dynamic visibility with the mod instead of documenting install steps.
• Distance-tiered detail for statics: three triangle budgets per object instead of one fixed mesh.
• Horizon culling for statics and terrain, on by default.
• Automatic texture sizing and deduplication, with VRAM estimates and warnings during generation.
• Native depth capture, on by default (native_depth_capture). MGE reads the real depth buffer
  instead of redrawing the scene, which also fixes objects vanishing from scenes that use darkmaps
  with transparency.
• Native per-pixel lighting, on by default (native_ppl_packets). Lighting data goes straight to
  the GPU instead of through the legacy shader path.
• Up to 32 lights per object, opt-in (expanded_light_limit). Needs native_ppl_packets to reach
  per-pixel-lit objects.
• BC7 texture support, for finer detail and compatibility with OpenMW mods.
• Indexed skinning for meshes, opt-in and undertested (indexed_skinning).
• Native GUI with a dark theme, a tabbed generator window, four languages (EN/FR/PL/RU), a built-in
  log viewer and automatic startup rebuilds. Grass mods are detected and listed separately from
  plugins, and the distant-land tuning controls are new. No .NET runtime required.

Changed

• Settings live in mgeXE.toml in the game root, replacing MGE3 and MGE.ini. You can edit it by
  hand, and your comments and formatting survive a GUI save. Nothing migrates from 0.19.1.
• MGE_DL_VERSION 7 to 16. Distant land data is incompatible with upstream in both directions, and
  the runtime rejects it rather than rendering it.
• Landscape rewritten. Texture quality no longer degrades as landmass mods are added and no longer
  depends on world size, and the geometry is finer.
• Distant landscape uploads in frame-budgeted chunks during load and menu frames.
• Terrain index data uses the narrowest width each mesh allows, and grass vertices went from 28 to
  20 bytes. Both upload without a conversion pass.

Removed

• The C# WinForms GUI, the C++ helper process and the MSBuild build system.
• The vendored 3rdparty/ tree: niflib, AMD Tootle and the 4 GB patch. NIF parsing and mesh
  optimization are Rust crates now (tes3, meshopt).
• The bundled MWSE and its updater, the installer and the uninstaller.
• The DirectX capabilities viewer, static override template generation, the tooltip reading-speed
  preference and the "reduce texture memory use" toggle.

Requirements

• A custom DXVK build ships as d3d9.dll and is required. Do not substitute an official release.
  Stock DXVK lacks the memory-placement profile that prevents out-of-memory crashes in Morrowind's
  32-bit address space, and it cannot load BC7 textures.
• Vulkan 1.3 hardware (NVIDIA Maxwell, AMD Polaris, Intel Iris Xe or Arc and newer) on 2023 or newer
  drivers, 64-bit Windows 10 1809 or later, an SSE4.2 CPU, and 8 GB or more VRAM for large mod lists.
• The DirectX June 2010 redistributable and the Visual C++ runtime.
• An SSD holding your game data. Not strictly required, but generation is painful without one.
• Distant land must be regenerated after installing.