Vapourware Daggerfall Unity isnt Vaporware

[Luzur]

What I've been curious about with Daggerfall Unity is if it would be possible to make a swimmable ocean. (as in you can swim underwater). If I remember correctly one of the ideas the developers had was to allow the player to locate undersea shipwrecks.

The other beta ideas that didn't make it are I imagine less ambitious like the full on economy simulator.

by Interkarma » Sat Jan 20, 2018 1:23 am

It's certainly possible, but would require a few change to terrain generation. Classic Daggerfall's ocean is really just a flat part of the heightmap textured as water. The player can never go below surface in classic, just kind of wobble around up to their armpits.

In order to allow true underwater exploration, a few changes must be made. Here's a high-level overview:

1. Remove the terrain flattening step for ocean "terrain pixels". Allow the ocean terrain to plunge to suitable depth. Maybe even a change in scale or heightmap generation is in order to get nicer underwater areas.
2. Replace the ocean surface with an appropriate water plane. Interface this with the swimming code currently only used in dungeons.
3. Inject different flats underwater (seaweed, bubbles, corals, different rocks, etc.). There are a few candidates in the game files and the "grass & plants" mod is likely primed to do something interesting here.
4. Ideally inject some random points of interest like sunken ships, ruins, fully underwater dungeons, etc.

Parts 1-3 probably aren't too challenging. I have already considered putting in the basics because I'm insanely-head-over-heels-in-love with underwater areas in games. Even just the very basics of underwater ocean exploration would add a little spice and give modders more to build on in the future.

Part 4 is where things get difficult. Doing this properly will take a substantial amount of time and is well outside of the scope for the core re-implementation, as Daggerfall does not have underwater ocean exploration whatsoever. You also need to consider retro purists who would hate for this to be in Daggerfall Unity by default.

Whenever there's a question of major changes like this one, my answer is always "do it like classic, anything else is a mod". But I might still add basic deeper oceans one day because I want to swim them myself. And mod creators need at least some of the basics done before they can build on it.

Edit:
I just popped up a quick poll to take the temperature on this through Twitter.

https://twitter.com/gav_clayton/status/ ... 8229050368

If this is overwhelmingly positive, I'll likely add basic underwater to oceans when I can. I don't want to get too distracted from the core gameplay, but sometimes it's nice to have a fun project on the side when the going gets tough elsewhere.

 

[agris]

Someone remind me... what was broken in the original Daggerfall release that this fixes?

Also, mixing high resolution art assets with the original low-res is a horrible idea. Unless you're going redo 100% of the assets, the mix will always be jarring and worse than a unified presentation.

 

[Luzur]

Someone remind me... what was broken in the original Daggerfall release that this fixes?

Also, mixing high resolution art assets with the original low-res is a horrible idea. Unless you're going redo 100% of the assets, the mix will always be jarring and worse than a unified presentation.

Well no more falling into void, missing quest targets in dungeon, or other assorted bugs.

 

[Luzur]

 

[eric__s]

Someone remind me... what was broken in the original Daggerfall release that this fixes?

Also, mixing high resolution art assets with the original low-res is a horrible idea. Unless you're going redo 100% of the assets, the mix will always be jarring and worse than a unified presentation.

The big idea isn't that this fixes things, although it does fix some of the bizarreness of an early 3D engine that routinely throws you into the void, but that people can change and add to it. Daggerfall was a massively ambitious game that wasn't able to deliver on even half of what it wanted. Now people have an opportunity to change that.

 

[Luzur]

Yes it opens up moddability, which is welcome as fuck.

 

[Luzur]

 

[primalsplit]

I have always wanted to play daggerfall. Is it a good idea to try to download this instead?

 

[Luzur]

I have always wanted to play daggerfall. Is it a good idea to try to download this instead?

Everything is not done yet, but it is fully playable as it is atm.

 

[unfairlight]

Daggerfall Unity is pretty unfinished, just use Daggerfall Setup by Wiwiland.

 

[primalsplit]

Thanks! There are all sorts of links in the wiwiland page. Do I only need the base game and dosbox? Or any mods I should not do without?

 

[unfairlight]

https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN
Just click "Download: DaggerfallSetup-2.14.1.exe"
It's a simple installer that adds mods, fan patches, improvements and other things, it already contains dosbox and will work instantly after you click the shortcut.

 

[primalsplit]

https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN
Just click "Download: DaggerfallSetup-2.14.1.exe"
It's a simple installer that adds mods, fan patches, improvements and other things, it already contains dosbox and will work instantly after you click the shortcut.

Thanks. The game seems really good. I have a hard time adjusting to it's controls but that was expected.

 

[unfairlight]

Rebind the controls if you haven't and make sure to use mouselook. It'll take you a few minutes to get it set up to a modern WASD layout but it's worth it.

 

[Luzur]

New Builds For 2018
Posted on February 3, 2018 by Interkarma


Welcome to 2018 everyone! What a great few months we’ve had in Daggerfall Unity. Despite my general absence in November through December last year, work still continued on the project at an excellent pace. I owe a debt of thanks to everyone that continued adding features while I was out of the scene for several weeks. I want to make this post all about these contributions, and mention the people who contributed during that time.

We’re close to a stable “Quests 0.4” build now before officially moving on to 0.5 and spells. “Stable” in this case doesn’t mean everything is complete or bug free – just that quests should be relatively steady and playable based on our current position in theRoadmap at the end of 0.4. Work will continue on improving and tightening up quest system all the way to 1.0, but now it’s time to move onto something new. This often means exciting new bugs to fix so the stable build stands as good fallback point if anyone is experiencing too many troubles with latest versions.

You’ll find the latest downloads on the Live Builds page as usual. If you’d like the very latest code, you can check it out directly from our GitHub page. And if you’d like a full blow-by-blow account of all changes up to now, the Commits page has what you’re after. This post mainly covers featured highlights and the people who added them. In alphabetical order, they are:



Aaron Fritz
Aaron is best known for his work on OpenTESArena, an open source recreation of The Elder Scrolls: Arena. This recently hit a 0.6 release milestone. If you’re a fan of projects like this one, you can follow Aaron on Twitter @aaron_fritz1.

The fake sky background in classic Daggerfall works best in 320×200, 4:3 aspect, and with the short draw distances you would find in a game Daggerfall’s vintage. It’s not a skybox in the modern sense, just a set of tiled images that slide around behind the world. Works well enough in classic and is quite beautiful in its own pixel-art painterly way, even with some oddness such as distant trees being larger than ones nearby.

In Daggerfall Unity with high resolution and long draw distances, the disconnect between sky background and foreground world is intensified. The sky images aren’t really scaled for widescreen and the way I implemented this originally lead to the sky floating around without really feeling connected to the 3D world. This had the potential to make some people feel motion sick, or at least uncomfortable, after playing for a while. The Enhanced Sky mod doesn’t have these problems, but some prefer the pixel-art sky and not feeling ill.

Aaron’s contribution was to add Y-shearing, a trick from the early days of realtime game graphics to help the fake sky horizon stay “glued” to the 3D world horizon. This goes a long way to making the sky more comfortable for anyone who experiences motion issues. It’s hard to communicate in a single screenshot, but when looking up and down, the horizon line of the sky no longer slips around. It may not be perfect depending how badly you’re affected, but it should be a noticeable improvement.





Allofich
Where to even start with Allofich? He’s a binary magician, that’s for certain. I’m not bad at reverse engineering stuff, but he makes me feel like my training wheels are still on. Some of the deep inner workings of Daggerfall Unity such as level-up formulas and combat work precisely like classic thanks to his efforts. He’s also responsible for locating obscure bits of data answering questions like “how is dungeon water level determined?” to “how are shop shelves stocked?”. Allofich has built or refined a large number of real gameplay features in Daggerfall Unity. Here’s an overview of his work over the last several weeks.



Dungeon Water

It’s now possible to swim in dungeons… and dive underwater… and drown when you get lost in that flooded passage. Allofich solved the long-running mystery around how dungeon water level was determined and proceeded to implement the entire feature stack of swimming, right down to sound effects and breath management. All I had to do was add the water plane to show the water surface visually. I still need to implement underwater effects at time of writing.









Knockback

When you deliver a big hit to enemies in Daggerfall, you can send them reeling, physically pushing them away. This knockback effect helps the player feel more powerful and stops enemies from always pushing forward relentlessly. It can even give the player a split second to turn and run. Allofich has recently implemented the knockback effect in Daggerfall Unity.





Magic Weapon FPS Graphics

In preparation for 0.5, magic weapon FPS graphics are now used when player equips a magical weapon. The actual magic effects aren’t there yet, of course, but this is still an important part of the process.





Animal Sounds

A small but welcome addition is that animals now play their appropriate sound effects at random when you stand nearby.





Enemy Ranged Basics

Certain enemies are now capable of attacking with ranged weapons if player is far enough away (or tries to run). It’s hard to see in this zoom below, but this Knight is lining up player for a shot.





Stealth Basics & Backstabbing

The player is now able to sneak as per classic Daggerfall by holding down the “sneak key”. To complement this, you can also backstab enemies by sneaking up behind them.





Stocking Shelves & Containers

And last one for now is the correct stocking of shelves and containers as per classic. While Hazelnut was building out shops and containers (more on this below), Allofich worked on stocking these containers with the correct items loadout.





Allofich has added many more smaller items than I can cover fully. This includes work on skill mastery, animation fixes, weapon and shield equip delays, and more. Look back through the commits on git to get a full idea on just how much work he contributes.



Hazelnut
He debuted with horse riding last year and has gone on to implement several important gameplay features. Between Allofich and Hazelnut, many 0.6 and 0.7 features on the roadmap are working ahead of schedule. Here are the highlights of what he’s been working on lately.



Teleportation Service

The Mages Guild offers a teleportation service. Thanks to Hazelnut, you can now use this service from your local Mages Guild to travel instantly across in the Illiac Bay.







Shop Shelves & House Containers

If you have bought or sold items in Daggerfall Unity recently, you have Hazelnut to thank for these features. While selling has been in for a while, the ability to interact with shop shelves and buy items is a more recent addition. This required some work to link up 3D container objects to loot containers, populate with items as per classic (Allofich helped here), and persist state of these containers when player enters and exits buildings. There’s a little more on this below, but the short version is you can buy stuff now.





World Persistence & A Shipworthy Home

In classic Daggerfall if you exit a building then return back inside the interior is just how you left it. Up until recently, Daggerfall Unity wiped the interior of buildings as soon as you left. Some work was needed to persist world state for the player as they entered/exited buildings, purchased items, opened doors, stole items, dropped loot on the ground, stored items in their home, and so on. This world persistence was a hard job, but Hazelnut has delivered excellent work all around. This feature is also the bedrock of player housing, which makes an early debut by way of the player’s ship.

You can now buy a ship from a bank, use that ship to speed up your transportation time and reduce costs, and transfer to that ship directly using the Transport menu. From here the ship acts as a kind of nautical home base where you can store loot gathered in your adventures. Any loot dropped on the ship or stored in the available containers will persist permanently in the save data for that character.









Numidium
New contributor Numidium recently added “organisation info” answers to the Talk interface. This is used when you ask wandering NPCs about groups like the Mages Guild. Every addition to Daggerfall Unity is welcome, and it’s cool to see new contributors building on and fleshing out existing work. Thank you!





Nystul
You already know Nystul from his fantastic work on the Automap interfaces (interior, exterior, and dungeon), and mods like Distant Terrain and Realtime Reflections. He’s made more important contributions to the core than I can list. He’s also the creator of the Talk window interface and the glue which binds this UI back into game data.

Over the last few months, Nystul has built out the Talk UI to be more functional and bug-free than ever. One of the big new features is rumours during and after quests. Below, the NPC is spreading gossip about the player’s most recent quest to rid a wife of her undead husband.

This kind of data wet-work is very hard and dry, and I can’t shine enough light on Nystul’s progress with screenshots alone. Hopefully it’s enough just to say what an incredible job Nystul is doing here and how important this work is to the final game.





TheLacus
If you’ve modded Daggerfall Unity in any capacity then you know TheLacus for his amazing work on these systems. Not only has he continued to build out the mod system from its humble beginnings, he has continued to provide documentation for creating modsand supporting new mod creators in need of help. He’s an all round great person with a great big brain.



New Advanced Settings Window

TheLacus has created and refined a nice Advanced Settings UI straight off the startup screen. It’s no longer necessary to dive into the INI to set most of the options players might be interested in. The latest builds are sporting an all new look for the Advanced Settings window with a tab-like interface and new controls. I can only see this getting better from here.







Texture Compression

This new feature applies DTX5 compression to replacement textures injected through the mod system. This will reduce texture memory by half or more at the expense of greater load time (as textures are injected procedurally). This is hard to show in a screenshot, and I have King of Worms on the forums to thank for this informative image created after performing some tests with texture compression and a large number of texture mods.

Some other things have improved in the texture modding side of things. The super-atlas is no longer used, which could lead to overflow for some textures. And a few memory leaks have been plugged in the texture system. Work in this area will continue to improve over time. The next step is to refine the texture cache to lower the amount of texture memory used after an extended play session.





Conclusion
All of that by itself makes for a huge couple of months, and I’m also back in the mix rolling out more parts of the incoming spell system. I look forward to posting about my progress on this soon.

If you want more frequent news, I post small bite-sized updates about Daggerfall Unity on Twitter @gav_clayton.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN
Just click "Download: DaggerfallSetup-2.14.1.exe"
It's a simple installer that adds mods, fan patches, improvements and other things, it already contains dosbox and will work instantly after you click the shortcut.

Thanks for the link. It took me some time to realize I had to actually diminish the number of cycles in DosBox, and by a lot, to get it running properly, but now it does. Character creation is so cool. I missed that shit.

 

[Luzur]

 

[Luzur]

The guys on the forums are experimenting:

I tried to replace the bat sprites.
Attachments

Made some additions to the PlayerMotor script to allow for holding the sprint key while on horseback to go into a canter, which will make the horse go faster and jump higher. Also made the horse animation play slower while cantering and made it use the horseback walking audio, which sounds perfect even though it's a little quiet.

Postby Interkarma » Sun Mar 12, 2017 5:57 am

Now that some folks are using mod features created by Lypyl and TheLacus, I thought it might be a good time to create an official thread of sorts to keep them all in one place for now.

If you've created a mod that is ready for download, please post a link and brief description as a reply to this topic. I will edit this first post to keep them all together.

While there is only a small number of mods, I will also host on dfworkshop.net and provide a central download page for them all. At some point though we should look at uploading them to Nexus, for example.


Note: Installing mods can increase system requirements compared to base Daggerfall Unity.


Released Mods

Distant Terrain 2.2.0 (Nystul) [download] - Increase draw distance far beyond even default Daggerfall Unity.

Enhanced Sky 2.0.5 (Lypyl) [download] - A beautiful procedural sky with smooth day/night cycles, stars, weather, lunar cycles.

Real Grass & Plants 2.0 (TheLacus/Uncanny_Valley) [more] [download] - Adds lush animated grass and new species of plants to the game world.

Birds in Daggerfall 1.0.1 (Uncanny_Valley) [download] - Flying birds across the skies of the Illiac Bay.

Loading Screen 1.5 (TheLacus) [more] [download] - Adds a loading screen to Daggerfall Unity with customisation available.

Remove Spiders (TheLacus) [more] [download] - Replaces spiders with bears.

Realtime Reflections 2.1.0 (Nystul) [download] - Add beautiful reflections and other surface enhancements to Daggerfall's textures.

Hand-painted Textures (VMblast) [more] [download] - Beautiful high resolution versions of Daggerfall's textures, hand-painted in the same style. Work in progress, not all textures completed.

Fixed Book Files (Eksevis) [more+download] - Aims to fix many of the issues with Daggerfall's Book files. These files should be copied to your "Arena2\Books" folder and replace old copy of the book.

Vibrant Wind (TheLacus) [more+download] - Changes strength of wind according to current weather.

Handpainted Model Replacement Project 1.39 (AlexanderSig) [more] [download] - All new handpainted models and textures.

Texture Replacement (Various Authors, Some Unknown) [more+download] - Higher resolution textures.

Post-Processing (TheLacus) [more+download] - Add post effects like SSAO.


Downloading Mods

A mod download page will be added to Daggerfall Workshop soon. Once the number of mods increases beyond this small number, it will be for the best to use a standard mod site like Nexus or ModDB to distribute mods.


Installing Mods

Mod creators, please make sure you include a helpful ReadMe with your mod to help users install and contact details so they can reach out for feedback or support.

If you have trouble with a mod, you should be able to reach creator in the Modder Discussion forum.

1. Unzip mod distribution (if necessary).
2. Copy the .dfmod package into your DaggerfallUnity_Data/StreamingAssets/Mods folder.
3. Check the included ReadMe for any special instructions to complete install.

 

[Luzur]

[QUOTE
Taverns, Custom Loot, Climbing, Languages, Mod Features
Posted on February 15, 2018 by Interkarma


A new round of Live Builds are now available with some great new gameplay and mod features to enjoy.

Tavern Rooms, Food & Drink
Thanks to Hazelnut, it’s now possible to rent a room in taverns. And thanks to Allofich, you can also purchase food & drink for RP purposes. During your tenancy, you’ll be allocated a bed and can use that tavern as a home base. Just talk to any friendly bartender across the Illiac Bay.

Rooms are saved with your character, so if you leave town and return later before your tenancy expires, your room will still be available. This all ties in perfectly with Hazelnut’s world persistence. You can leave loot piles in your room and return later to retrieve them. Just don’t forget to pick up your loot before your room expires or those items become property of the house. No refunds!













Custom Loot Containers
Another Hazelnut feature, and something unique to Daggerfall Unity, is the ability to customise your loot containers. You can now click on the loot container icon (shown in red box below) in your inventory UI while interacting with the container to set a custom icon from a much broader set of icons than normally available.





Use left-click for next icon, right-click for previous icon, and middle-click to change icon group. This feature means you now have some minor customisation over things you leave around your properties, ship, or rented tavern rooms. You can make the icons a bit more meaningful than just a random container, and it’s a great way to add more RP to your game.





New Mod Features
This one is impossible to take a screenshot of, but that doesn’t stop it from being any less awesome. TheLacus, our resident mod-master, has added some generic methods (generics are a way to handle data of any kind) to his asset bundle handling. This allows asset bundles to import more types of content in future and use load order on the mod import UI to handle duplicates.

The first new asset type now available to asset bundles is custom music and sound effects. It was already possible to inject custom sound and music into the game, but this means whole new music mods can be added as a single .dfmod package. TheLacus is also working on movie import for this feature, so one day it will be possible to import new movies from asset bundles as well.

This kind of work is critical to Daggerfall Unity having a vibrant mod community, and we all appreciate TheLacus’ work immensely.



Climbing
From Allofich we now have Daggerfall’s infamous climbing feature at long last. This works just like classic Daggerfall – face a wall directly and move slowly forwards. Your climbing skill will be checked as you ascend, so be careful climbing with clumsy characters, as they might come crashing back to earth.









Allofich tells me climbing still has some refinements ahead. For example, it’s not yet possible to climb out of water. But it’s already working exceptionally well and can only improve in the future.



Language Skills
Another Hazelnut gem, and something often ignored by classic players. Language skills give the player a chance to avoid combat with certain monsters based on a language check. If the language check is passed, the monster will become pacified as if you “talked them down”. Unfortunately my character speaks about ten words in Orcish – all of them insults – and is about to get into a fight.





The way Hazelnut has implemented this means that a character with a high Streetwise skill has a chance of avoiding combat with other roguish humanoids. If you encounter a Thief, Assassin, or the like in Daggerfall Unity your Streetwise skill might help you avoid an unpleasant encounter. For characters with a more polite way of handling things, your Etiquette skill might help save you from a tussle with a Knight or other non-roguish humanoid. For monstrous foes, you’ll need to know their exact language to pass.

This also means you might get a chance to land the first blow, if your character is that unscrupulous.



Magic Work-In-Progress
These latest builds also mark the first official step in the 0.5 release line from Roadmap. I have started building the back-end (effect system) and front-end (projectiles, cast animations, UI) of the magic system. This is still a work in progress and nothing is available to players in this round of builds, I’m afraid. But just like quests before it, the magic system will scale upwards in small incremental steps with each release.

I’ll be posting more on the magic system around spells and effects soon. Until then, I hope you enjoy all the other great stuff added to these builds.

][/QUOTE]

 

[Wulfris]

...how's the dungeon generation? If I can't go into a dungeon on a quest to kill a harpy, and fall through a trap into a huge underground cavern with a giant ass castle at level 1 with all enemies who are immune to anything less than deadric...

...then it isn't Daggerfall.

 

[Luzur]

...how's the dungeon generation? If I can't go into a dungeon on a quest to kill a harpy, and fall through a trap into a huge underground cavern with a giant ass castle at level 1 with all enemies who are immune to anything less than deadric...

...then it isn't Daggerfall.

I do not know, im waiting for the finish product, which just took another step:

Spells: Front-End Graphics
Posted on February 26, 2018 by Interkarma


It’s finally time for spells to get the treatment and become a regular feature in Daggerfall Unity. I have decided to approach this feature-set in a more visual way than I did the quest system, which involved several months of back-end work before I could even show a single screenshot. This time around, I want the process to follow the visual diary approach from day one to make it more interesting to watch things unfold. This also helps me stay motivated as it’s a lot more fun to hurl around glowing balls of magical death than build a runtime compiler for the quest system.

There will be some more code-oriented articles later in the series, but for now let’s take a look at the front-end graphics of spell-casting animations and missiles.



Setup
Before I can do anything else, I have to implement the basic cast/recast loop. Thanks to Lypyl, a baseline spellbook interface is already in the game. It doesn’t have any actual spells yet, just some temp line items, but that’s all we need right now.

I wired up the spellbook to the “cast” key (default is Backspace) so player can select a spell from their collection. It doesn’t matter which “spell” you choose at this point. Just double-click any item to let the game know you’ve selected something.





After selecting a spell, I then had to create the player’s basic spellcasting loop. For non-immediate spells like firing a missile, this hides any weapons and puts player into a ready-to-fire status for that spell. The player will see a message on the screen saying “press button to fire spell.”.





At this point, player can fire spell (press mouse button) or cancel (default is E key). Once the spell has been fired, they can “recast” that spell (default is Q key) or continue attacking with weapons. Most of the work at this stage was around handling when player was about to cast or cancel, when they had a previous spell to recast, and when weapons and other clicks needed to be directed to spell manager. With all that out of the way for now, we can give the player some magic hands.



Casting Animations
The cast anims are stored as a simple left-hand only set of animation frames. They are played from frame 0 through to 5, then 0 again as hand is retracted at end of cast. Here’s how the raw images look as seen by Daggerfall Imaging 2.





These are very similar to the weapon animations, but have a few unique requirements around how they must be scaled and positioned that are quite different to weapons. They’re also a single-frame CIF record format rather than a multi-frame CIF format. Considering how much they diverge from weapons, I opted to create a new FPS animation class to render these for the player and handle their unique requirements. There’s also a few other little twists, like frame 4 (second from right) not being a consistent type in all anims. In the the cast of frost, frame 4 must scale to side of display, but for fire it must be positioned independently like first and final frames.

The final frame is an interesting one as both sides of the anim must meet in the middle while retaining best possible position and scaling under a range of different aspect ratios. This is something classic Daggerfall didn’t have to worry about as it only ran at 320×200 and all the art was designed for that native resolution. This presented me a few problems, but I think these are solved now. To give you an idea how left and right hands join together, here’s an example with the split between each side exaggerated. You can see how the left hand is mirrored to the right and joins in the middle to form the moment of spell release.





After some work, I had all the casting animations working properly. Here’s a loop of each element type in action (direct link)

Spell Missiles
With casting animations done, it’s time to start hurling around glowing blobs of magical death. Well, setup the graphical side at least, these aren’t real spells yet.

Here’s how the fire and cold missiles appear in Daggerfall Imaging 2. The first set of animations are how the missile looks while moving, the second is played when it hits something and the spell is executed.







These were fairly easy to setup, as Daggerfall Unity already has pretty good billboard support. The only problem encountered was making them emissive (appear lit from within and not affected by surrounding lighting). There was a quirk of my texture loading code that detected spell missile textures as windows and blocked the emission. But once that was solved, I was ready to fire missiles around town. I’ve added some basic lighting to the projectile for that extra bit of magic (direct link).

Timing, Origin, Collisions
Now that I can shoot missiles, a few things had to be cleaned up. As one Twitter user pointed out, it looks like the player is shooting missiles from their pants. This is because origin of missiles is the player capsule, and the origin of capsule happens to be waist-height, which is roughly pants territory. This is enhanced when looking up or down as missiles don’t really appear to be coming from the hands themselves.

I setup a delegate event that allows me to time the release of missile with the exact casting frame where it should be released, and I adjust the origin to chest height and handle the facing vector properly. This needed a little bit of tuning as hands cast slightly below centre-point of display (even in classic) so spells don’t appear to go where you’re looking. And if I make origin too high, spell appears higher than casting point which ruins illusion as well. With a little bit of tuning, I found a good balance between timings, origin, facing, and missile radius.

Next I added collision detection. This allows missile to detect when it impacts scenery or an entity like a monster (or even the player themselves). There are two parts to this, first is the direct impact and second is the radius of any area-of-effect spell on that missile. There’s no easy way to show a screenshot of this, but the missile collects a list of every entity it strikes either directly or with AOE so it can hand this back to whatever system initiated the missile. Keeping things abstract like this allows for missile to be used in other ways (like archery) down the road.

And finally, I added the small explosion anim when missile strikes something. Here’s how it looks in action (direct link).

By the way, if you don’t like the lighting or shadow effects on spell missiles, you can turn these off in settings.ini by setting EnableSpellLighting=False or just EnableSpellShadows=False to disable shadows only. Hopefully this will satisfy both classic purists and those who want a little extra shine to their spellcasting. I’m hoping someday there will be spell missile mods to really amp up the visuals with particles, etc. But this early in development, I’m happy with just some basic lighting effects. I’ll show off a few more of these with other element types in later posts.



Putting It All Together
With all the front-end pieces working, I can simulate a magical brawl with some real enemies. There’s no actual damage happening here, because these aren’t real spells yet, but all the import parts are taking place. The player can select a spell, fire/cancel/recast that spell, see their cast animations, and watch the missile explode against the environment or their foes. Internally, any entity struck by the missile or subsequent AOE is collected for later processing when spells get real.

So here’s that magical brawl with one more lighting enhancement, a brief flash of brighter light when spell explodes (direct link).

Now player can hurl missiles around, the work of implementing real spells & effects can begin. My next article in series will take a deeper look at the inner workings of Daggerfall’s spell system and hopefully some first steps towards real spells in Daggerfall Unity.

(NSFW Mod) Prostitution

And, some good ol' modding being idea'd:

List of relevant links spoilered out:

Spoiler!
Only mentioned briefly in this thread:

http://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?t=177

Cut dialog here:

https://tcrf.net/The_Elder_Scrolls_II:_Daggerfall/Unused_Text

The relevant and rather uninformative UESP page:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Generic_Factions

Guild Act UESP page:

http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Guild_Act

Legality of prostitution discussion on r/teslore:

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/2g0om5/legality_of_prostitution_in_each_province/

LGBT discussion on r/teslore:

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslore/comments/229d28/how_widespread_is_lgbt_culture_in_tamriel/



Figured I'd start a dedicated thread so we could discuss what we could do with them, and also consider a join-able prostitute guild.


My suggestion for prostitutes is to make them "Grand Theft Auto" style, as in you pay them and they restore your stats. The trade off vs the innkeeper is that they as considerably more expensive (1000 gold?) while they are much faster (either a multiplier or a flat 1 hour rest time for full stat recovery). Could only work for health and/or magicka, fatigue would be lowered after the fact. Price could be lowered by streetwise skill, and also count as a skill use. May lower certain reputations for using this service.

Not sure what to suggest for a prostitute guild, all I can think of would be simple quests to "visit" a house or inn. Good money, but may lower certain reputations considerably. Could also be linked into Etiquette and/or Streetwise skills, giving them more usefulness. Would be separate from the Merchants and Innkeepers quests prostitutes can offer. High rank quest could send you into a dungeon to find a cure for a rare STD temples can't cure plaguing the guild. Another high rank quest could send you to a noble in a castle to do unspeakable things that ultimately lowers your reputation with peasants considerably.

Unsanctioned prostitution could also be a thing, with retaliation from the guild.

Which factions(if any) frown upon prostitution is up for debate.

In either case, buying or selling, there should be the chance to contract a disease. This would of course encourage players to visit the local temple to get cleansed afterwards.

 

[Drax]

Immersive Whores

 

[DragoFireheart]

Immersive Whores

Immerse your dick

 

[Luzur]

 

[Luzur]

Fan mods have started to trickle in on the forums

Archaeologists Mod, by Hazelnut, with quests from Jay_H

Announcing the first Daggerfall Unity gameplay mod. Think: Indiana Jones...

Archaeologists.jpg (461.17 KiB) Viewed 184 times
Description

This mod enhances Daggerfall Unity gameplay by making language skills more viable and adding a new guild to the game, called "The Archaeologists Guild". Their mission is to delve into the history of Tamriel and are interested in all creatures and races who have lived or still live there. The guild is a scholarly one and seeks nether attention, power, or riches, but rather knowledge. Its guildhalls are found in smaller towns throughout the Illiac Bay rather than the more expensive and visible cities.The guild is loosely split into members who perform field work, and the more senior members who perform research and are experts in the obscure languages of Tamriel.

Essentially contains gameplay changes I would like for my own playing once DFU is released. I hope others find it enhances their play throughs as well.

Mod Objectives

• Enable highly intelligent characters who don't use magic to still be a viable playstyle. Sneaking through dangerous dungeons, avoiding or pacifying enemies. Uses potions where neccessary.
• Provide a balanced in-game method for reducing the massive time-sink that DF dungeons can be with the guild service that provides a locator device for dungeon quest targets.

Features

• Language skill checks changed so high language skills give a much better pacification chance.
• Language skills are easier to raise.
• New guild allows training in all language skills up to the level of characters innate intelligence.
• New guild provides hand-to-hand training, which is missing in classic.
• Guild service providing locator device charges that enable enhanced location of quest targets in dungeons.
• New quests to be available from the guild. (written by Jay_H)

Locator Device

The intent of this service is to balance the atmosphere and epic-ness of dungeons, with provision of an in-game method for players to avoid searching the whole dungeon for hours and hours just to complete a simple quest that gets them 5 rep and a few hundred gold. It will not ensure every quest is successful, but just shortcut hours of very boring backtracking and having to explore every single crevice and cranny in the place. It's not intended to be used in every dungeon, but sparingly due to cost.

The locator device is available to any member and provides a magically powered ability to see the quest target location through walls. It will not activate until you have explored a certain portion of the dungeon (50% TBC) and even once activated doesn't help with the labyrinthine mazes, moving elements or magically held locks. Also, to purchase charges for the device you will need to be at least rank of Field Officer. Until that point you will receive one charge for each Archaeologists guild quest taken that requires entering a dungeon. Purchasing charges will be very expensive (5000gp TBC) and will also require a holy tome or dagger to be handed in as well. Rising in the ranks of the guild will reduce this price and at rank 6 you will no longer need to hand in holy items. Since the higher ranks are only available to high INT chars, this allows for characters who are not hoovering loot from corpses to be able to afford charges.

The guild obtains the locator devices and charges from a secretive sect of mages who have a different approach to things and do not see eye to eye with the Mages guild. For this reason those with high ranks in the Mages guild are restricted from the higher levels of the Archaeologists. (since they will probably be hoovering up loot and wont need the reduced charge cost either)

Guild Ranks and Benefits


CODE: SELECT ALL

Rank Title INT req Benefit
-------------------------------------------------------
0 Field Assistant 40 Training
1 Field Worker 40 Buy potions
2 Field Officer 45 Library access & buy locator charges
3 Field Director 50 Make potions
4 Apprentice 60 24/7 hall access
5 Novice 60 Free Identification
6 Journeyman 65 No holy item needed for locator charges
7 Associate 65
8 Professor 70
9 Master 70

The INT requirement is on top of the usual skill and reputation requirements for ranks. Subject to change during balancing.

Guild Skills

Ranks:
Centaurian, Climbing, Daedric, Dragonish, Giantish, Harpy, Impish, Lockpicking, Nymph, Orcish, Stealth

Training:
Centaurian, Climbing, Dodging, Daedric, Dragonish, Giantish, HandToHand, Harpy, Impish, Lockpicking, Nymph, Orcish, Running, Stealth, Swimming


Releases

If you want to give it a try, by all means do so. It's very early alpha so don't go in expecting a finished guild. Early test builds are now available since the hooks it needs are in DFU codebase. Download or clone master and run in Unity editor with mod package in StreamingAssets/Mods. Find the mod builds here: https://github.com/ajrb/dfunity-mods/tree/master/build

Latest version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yow0go8azbyfk ... ts.7z?dl=0

Hey y'all, joined the forum today after seeing jmanowar's post that he's going on hiatus for a little while - I wanted to pick up some of the work of upscaling the NPC flats, because this is genuinely the part of Daggerfall Unity that I'm most excited about.

I started with my favorite Daggerfall NPC, both in terms of personality and visual design. I tried to echo the styles of jmanowar and epicurius so that it will be cohesive with the hires sprites already in game, and I wanted to make her face more like her portrait, while also correcting Bethesda's mistake in terms of her race. However, to be honest I'm not terribly experienced with modding Daggerfall, so I'd appreciate any guidance that people can provide as far as turning this into a usable asset, and anyone who'd be willing to playtest it would be fantastic

And of course, if there's an interest, I'll keep going with these as long as I'm able.

This is a simple mod that shows splash screens (like these or these) during loading times instead of the default black screen.
The nice thing is that you can place any png file you want inside StreamingAssets/Textures/LoadingScreens and the mod will pick one of them randomly every time.

Download v1.0

known bugs: it doesn't work for the first loading screen, but once you are in game it works for both normal and quick loading.