Scout said:

Just promise me you're not going to mod tulips into the Ashlands. [Image Can Not Be Found]

I'm having lots of light emitting chickens (see above). Tulips can't hold a candle to a light emitting chicken.
 

Speaking of light emitting.

Since night descended on one of my troubleshooting sessions a week or so ago I've noticed that candles, lanterns and torches emit bugger all light. I'm pretty pissy about poor lighting and by extension poorly implemented stealth. I attribute this to being spoilt rotten by Thief I and II. Anyway, I thought I was on to a winner when I found The Lighting Mod (TLM), a plugin which tweaks every light in the game, reduces ambient light, integrates light based sneaking and penalities during certain weather and times of day, and also gives ownership to every street lantern and torch so you can't just run around pinching them. The problem was that after installing the mod the Census and Excise Office in Seyda Neen (and any other interior for that matter) looked like some sort of flashing boogie wonderland. The only thing missing was some funkin' beats, a disco ball and Socucius Ergalla shaking it down with Sellus Gravius. "Ah YES!"

I mean, seriously, had the person responsible for this mod ever sat by candle light? I'm not sure whether it was the lower ambient light indoors that was exasperating the already dubious vanilla flicker or it was simply their tweaks that had caused it, but the mod was immediately uninstalled despite the rest of it looking really good. TLM comes in complete and modular flavours and even with parts of the modular version installed the problem was still there unfortunately 🙁

I'm reading this book called Air Guitar which is a bunch of little chapters on capital "A" Art and commerce in the US. The author goes on and on about the hotrodders of the 50s and 60s and how they took a car and carved it up and remade it to their liking. He really, really goes on and on but he called this a form of "embodied dissent", against, I guess, the dominate paradigm, or in our case, Bethesdsa. And the car manufacturers were right on their tail, incorporating the best mods into standardized design, which were again cut up and etc., etc. 

Which reminded me of this thread.

So shine on you crazy modders. A day will come when every game will have glowing chickens. At which point you will have to mod them out, of course.

EDIT: That new graphic extender does look sweet.

To be honest, aside from the obvious performance hit on my rig, I wouldn't want a fogless Morrowind; I like the atmosphere and mystery it creates but I will say that the vistas look stunning.

I'd dearly love to have real time shadows on the environments though. Bwah! Might have to check out the 'unstable' build... is it very unstable Yap?

Spent the other evening deliberating over the environment textures. I've been using the Visual Pack with some of Connary's textures for the last couple of weeks and I've noticed a few of them don't play nicely with each other -- very jarring in some cases. So I thought I'd stick to the standard Visual Pack which is, by and large, terrific. The only problem is that after looking at this texture pack comparison page I've got a few reservations about some of the changes it makes to the vanilla palette (see here and here) -- I'm not convinced they're enough to make me want to go back to vanilla though, we'll see. I also noticed that the Anisotropic Filtering in MGE hasn't been working so I've had to set up a game profile which forces it through my video card. Tch! (Forget what I said about Mipmap LOD Bias Armand -- AF is a better solution if it works :-P!)