Hey Meben,
Can't say I have much experience with the Steam version of Morrowind, since I busted out my old CDs when I was running it. That said, I can recommend a few things.
The first is what graphics pack to use. I
really recommend using the Morrowind Graphics and Sound Overhaul, found
here/
here. It's got a lot of wonderful general texture mods, new vegetation and foliage, new hi-res textures on people/armour/weapons, the works, and includes the Morrowind Graphics Extender as well as a really cool automated installer that will fill everything in for you at light speed, and carry out all the tweaks pretty effectively. In my experience it's the only graphics mod you'll need, since it bundles most of the other mods along with it, and can be tweaked depending on your system. I needed to make a few manual adjustments to get it to work after it was done, which were fairly complex, and you need to remember to run it all as admin etc., but overall, it's much simpler and more stable than running a whole bunch of conflicting mods.
As to installation - again, slightly complicated by the fact that I ran the non-steam version, and the Morrowind Graphics and Sound Overhaul 3.0 has just come out, but hopefully this will be helpful. The Something Awful thread on Morrowind has a pretty decent installation guide - I followed this when I installed it, and it was really helpful.
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Basic Installation
Before you begin:
Windows 7 users will need to disable UAC, and make sure the Morrowind .exe (as well as all the other programs) are set to "Run as Administrator." Also, DO NOT install Morrowind into your "Program Files" folder (x86 works fine for me). Otherwise, things won't work and crash constantly and we won't be able to solve your problems and we will make fun of you. I'm DEAD serious, you have no idea how many problems are created just by installing without administrator mode. Steam users can follow these instructions to move Morrowind to a different folder.
Instructions for Steam installation:
Follow these instructions to the letter or we will laugh at you when you ask for help. Particularly step three.
0. Buy and download the game
1. Open Steam, go to Settings, go to the In-Game tab, and uncheck the "Enable Steam Community In-Game" box.
2. Download and install Wrye Mash Standalone. When you launch it for the first time it will ask you for your Morrowind folder.
3. Under the Mods tab (NOT Utilities, which will be empty), change the dates on "morrowind.bsa," "tribunal.bsa" and "bloodmoon.bsa" so that the year is 2002.
4. Start Morrowind once, change some graphical settings, then quit (in order to generate some required registry files).
5. Install files 1-7 in this .zip folder (compiled by Hadlock). It includes dx9 full, visual c++ 2008 redist, .net framework 2.0, .net framework 4.0, and JRE win64. Number 6 can be extracted to your main Morrowind folder and number 7 to your Data Files folder. Number 8 is Oggumogoggum's megapack (described below), which is optional but highly recommended.
6. Continue on to one of the options under Adding Shaders below.
Adding Shaders and Mods
Option 1 - The Morrowind Sound and Graphics Overhaul (MSGO)
The MSGO is a collection of hundreds of different graphics mods compiled by Kingpix and updates nearly everything having to do with graphics: models, textures, shaders, the UI, and more. It includes most of the well-known mods, such as Better Bodies, Better Clothes, Vurt's Trees, Animated Morrowind, and many more you never knew you wanted. A convenient control panel allows you to control which mods you want visible and which ones you don't, so if you don't like a particular mod or the game runs slowly, MSGO allows you to fix it. As of version 2.0, Kingpix added an automatic installer, so you can now just sit back and watch as hundreds of meshes and .esp files install themselves. Here are the instructions for installation:
1. Backup your installation
2. Download the overhaul from one of the listed mirrors.
3. Open the newly extracted installation program.
4. [Note: due to the recent release of MSGO 3.0, these next few instructions may be out of date. New, revised instructions are incoming]
Choose automatic installation (unless you know what you're doing). Follow along as MGSO goes through each program and set your settings however you want. Except for MGE-XE (covered below), most of the settings either have explanations or they're done for you by the amazing new installer.
(The steps from here on are optional but can solve a lot of framerate issues)
5. Once installation is done, open up MGEXEgui.
6. Under Graphics, set Antialiasing to 8x. Under Shader Setup, double click everything under Active Shaders to disable it except Bloom Soft and Eye Adaptation (HDR). Don't forget to save.
7. Close MGE-XE, open up the Shaders folder (under Data Files), back up the folder and delete it. Then re-download XE and extract the downloaded shaders folder into the data files folder (so it ends up in the exact same place where the MGSO shaders were). Note: I've tested this and it solves many water-related framerate problems but may have some unintended consequences. Remember to back up the old shaders.
8. Under Distant Land, set the draw distance to 12 cells or less. I've checked and you really can't see further than that during normal gameplay. Then re-run Distant Land setup with lower settings.
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Hope this helps! Give me a shout if you need any help with any of the steps (bear in mind, again, that this is a slightly out-of-date instruction set, but there shouldn't be much significant stuff I don't think).
