Vapourware Daggerfall Unity isnt Vaporware

[theSavant]

I just wish we'd see a modern take on Daggerfall. New engines and technology to run the procedural gen mixed with handcrafted stuff, too. I'd like to see someone attempt a style of CRPG like that again. Hell, I'd like to see Bethesda do it, but that will never happen.

Though there was multiple times talk about "things they gonna do, they never did before" for both Starfield and the next Elder Scrolls. Can't help but think this is going to be lots of procedural generation, evolving AI for NPCs, evolving factions, economy based on real resources in the game, etc. which may dynamically change the world. Which is indeed huge if it comes to that...

 

[ADL]

It's a damn shame we never got LeFay's Morrowind. Everything I've ever heard about it sounded really nice but even with a hundred million dollar budget, I'd be wary of a Daggerfall successor the size of Daggerfall again. Mainland+Vvardenfell+the isles in a 250-500 sq mile world using a mixture of procedural and handcrafted elements? That sounds like an acceptable downsizing and I think that even the casuals would've been able to enjoy it, even on console hardware which is what popularized the series to the extent it did in the first place.

Fundamentally that's my frustration with Bethesda's output, all these concessions being made didn't need to be made. They don't iterate on what works, they cut too much and every major element they've introduced in their games has just been things we had 20 years ago, albeit in a sprite-based entirely procedurally generated world while now it's 3D, handcrafted and in a significantly higher fidelity. Not saying it's good and there's an argument to be made that the procedurally generated elements are more interesting than what they can do by hand. Designing a world that can be navigated without the magical quest arrow bullshit doesn't take anything away from their idiot proof design. Spellcrafting, faction reputation, civil war, survival mechanics (they belong in Skyrim) and more fleshed out role playing mechanics in general don't detract from their experiences. Their omission only hurts anyone who wants to go beyond the surface level.

 

[Luzur]

January Builds – Vampirism, Spell Icons, More Magic Stuff, New Quest Actions, and More!
Posted on January 19, 2019 by Interkarma


It’s time for a fresh round of Live Builds for January 2019. The last month has seen a lot of progress across a wide variety of systems, so rather than waste time on an intro. let’s get right into it.

Vampirism
The full loop of Daggerfall-styled vampirism is now in the game from curse all the way through to cure. Each time you’re mauled by a vampire, you have a 0.6% chance of contracting the disease that will transform your character into one of their kind. Some time after being infected, your rest will be plagued with bad dreams. Unless you like fangs and late-night shopping, this would be a good time to find a temple and cure yourself of diseases.





If you allow the disease to continue a few days, you will “die” and awaken two weeks later interred somewhere in the region. In classic Daggerfall, your death will also remove you from all guilds and reset your legal reputations. At this time, Daggerfall Unity doesn’t modify guild memberships or reputations, this will be implemented sometime in the next few months.







Becoming a vampire comes with some great perks. You can no longer be touched by weapons less than silver quality, you get +20 to most attributes, +30 to Climbing, Critical Strike, Hand-to-Hand, Jumping, Running, and Stealth, and unique vampire versions of spells including one specific to your clan. I should note that only Levitate and clan-specific spells are currently delivered to vampires. Charm Mortal and Calm Humanoid are not working yet, but will be added soon. You also get a nice set of fangs and some really bloodshot eyes.







It’s not all positive though. As a vampire, you will start taking damage from sunlight and holy place. But most pressing of all is the need to satiate your urge to kill at least once a day. If you fail to kill each day, you will find yourself unable to rest which can make things difficult. Fast travel will also make you arrive at night, so you will have limited time windows for shopping in cities before they close.





After playing for a while, you will receive unique vampire quest, starting with an introduction ques from your clan. There are 10 vampire quests in total, including one that will cure you of the infliction.





It’s probably worth mentioning that most of the back-end work for racial override effects is now complete, so lycanthropy won’t be too far away.



Spell Icon Packs
While still a work in progress, it’s now possible for modders to create custom spell icon packs for magical distinction. You can have any number of icon packs installed which can have any number of icons. A test HD icon pack painted by VMBlast and prepared by Alyndiar on the forums is included in this build. This pack is likely to be upgraded at some time in future.

This feature comes with an enhanced icon picker that opens a scrolling palette of all available spell icons from packs and classic, rather than cycle through icons one at a time.







You can set the new spell icon from inside the spellbook or spellmaker UI. Your new spell icon will then be visible on the HUD when you cast that spell. Screenshot below by Alyndiar.





If you remove a spell icon pack, then Daggerfall Unity will just fallback to one of the classic icons instead. Effect icons from magic items do not currently use custom spell icons – a system for this working automatically and being defined by icon pack metadata is in progress.



Smaller Dungeons
If you’re one of the many people who find Daggerfall dungeons overwhelming, there’s now an experimental feature to make most dungeons much smaller and easier to navigate. You can enable this by setting “SmallerDungeons=True” in settings.ini. Because this is still in experimental stages, the setting is only available in settings.ini. Please make sure your save is not inside a dungeon when changing this!

Smaller dungeons work by remixing a random dungeon at layout time down to the minimum viable size of one interior block surrounded by four border blocks. This will simplify all random dungeons to around the size of Privateer’s Hold. Dungeons that are already small (e.g. cemeteries) and main quest dungeons are not affected by this change.

The following screenshots show a comparison of dungeons before and after enabling SmallerDungeons in settings. The smaller dungeon is still in the same style because components from the original dungeon are being remixed into a more compact format. If the original dungeon had water blocks, then the new dungeon might have a water block as well. New random layouts are seeded by the dungeon’s unique mapid, so the layout continues to have persistence like the static layout data read from classic.







Hopefully this feature will help newcomers have a better experience with Daggerfall while not completely changing the way Daggerfall’s dungeons look and feel.



City Gate Schedule
By order of the City Watch, walled cities now maintain a strict daily schedule. Gates will close at night and open again in the morning. Any travellers arriving at night (such as vampires) will need to find another way over the walls.







Potions & Potion Making (Hazelnut)
Daggerfall Unity now has full potion support thanks to Hazelnut’s efforts. All recipes are matched to effects and can be mixed in game. Potions have improved icon matching (a healing potion will have a red liquid for example) and potions of the same type will stack nicely. This feature is a huge plus for characters that prefer not to use magic directly.

Edit: Potions were originally available in December 20 builds, but some refinement has been done since then. It seemed appropriate to mention the feature again in light of how much work Hazelnut has put into it.









Use Magic Item Popup (Hazelnut)
You’ve been able to Use magic items to cast spells for a while, and now you can hit the “use magic item” hotkey (default U) to open a list of available magic items to cast from. This helps cut down on recasting time. Magic items will also now lose a bit of durability on each use until they break.





Organise Spellbook Items (Pango)
You can now move spellbook items up or down manually, or sort by alphabetical and order of spell cost. You can also rename spells and change their icons in the spellbook UI.





Racial Bonuses Info (Numidium)
When you click the History button on character sheet, any racial bonuses are now displayed as part of the popup info. This will include changes from secondary races like vampires and lycanthropes.





Special Mentions
Hazelnut has changed quest dispensing to be more like classic. Unfortunately this has breaking changes with quest pack mods. If you’re running any community quest packs, you’ll need to update that mod to a version compatible with this release. For example, Jay_H’s Daggerfall Unity Quest #1 already has a version for Daggerfall Unity 0.7.3 and later. You’ll need that update for these builds.

I also want to highlight all the amazing work being done by Nystul and Hazelnut around moving terrain setup to use parallel tasks and take advantage of multi-core CPUs. On most test systems, the time to load a terrain tile has been reduced from around 9ms to around 3ms. That might not seem like much, but it’s a big improvement to world streaming. Hazelnut continues to work on optimisation, and I understand more improvements are coming in the following months.



New To Effect System
New effects are now ready for use in game:

• Acute Hearing now allows player to hear enemies at greater distance
• Athleticism now allows player to jump 10% higher and experience 10% less fatigue loss
• All player special advantages and disadvantages are now implemented
• Can now trap enemy souls with Soul Trap spell and a free soul trap item
• Implemented several item powers from roadmap (Extra Spell Points, Potent Vs, Regens Health, Vampiric Effect, Increased Weight Allowance, Repairs Objects, Absorbs Spells)

For the new item powers, these are currently not available from the Daggerfall Unity spellmaker. I’m busy laying down groundwork and a feature complete spellmaker will be ready soon. In the meantime, you can test these effects by creating these items with a character in classic Daggerfall and importing that save into Daggerfall Unity.



New To Quest System
More quest actions are now ready for quest authors and classic quests to use in game:

• Implemented “remove foe” quest action
• Implemented “legal repute” quest action
• Implemented “mute npc” quest action
• Implemented “destroy npc” quest action
• Quest authors can now use “Place _symbol_ local house” or “Place _symbol_ remote house” to use any available house type

General Fixes & Improvements
As always, there’s a good number of smaller fixes and refinements to the game:

• Fixes and refinements to mod system and asset injection (TheLacus)
• Use correct format for ICON00I0.IMG when texture compression is enabled (TheLacus)
• Allow readonly flag for IMG/CIF/RCI textures (TheLacus)
• Fix scale of TVRN00I0.IMG texture replacement (TheLacus)
• Fix casting spells with no spellbook (Hazelnut)
• Fix selling horse and cart (Hazelnut)
• Ship ownership (but not what’s on it) is now imported from classic save (Hazelnut)
• Fix tavern resting when loading inside or when memeber of Fighters Guild (Hazelnut)
• Fix enemies bouncing down inclines (Allofich)
• Adjust large enemy colliders to fit through doors (Allofich)
• Now receive Dark Brotherhood tally for guards (Allofich)
• A mobile guard now correctly spawns when attacking a mobile guard NPC (Allofich)
• Fix murder handling for casting spells on guards (Allofich)
• Fix going to prison for 0-day sentences (Allofich)
• Fix NPCs to use parent factions for dialogue (Allofich)
• Fixes to chgain greaves item graphics and dyes (Allofich)
• Improve enemy AI movement prediction (Allofich)
• Enemies no longer attack magically concealed targets (Allofich)
• Fix draw order of male robes (Allofich)
• Tutorial quest content fixes (Pango)
• Fix item info weight discrepancy for stacks (Pango)
• Fixes to stack splitting (Pango)
• NPC reaction rolls are now semi-random to help players with low legal reps (Numidium)
• Can now bash open exterior doors (Numidium)
• Interior fog now independent of exterior fog (Nystul)
• Fog colour in dungeons is now black (Nystul)
• Fix for classic save game import and exterior automap (Nystul)
• Fix climate 230 settings (Ferital)
• Fix for streaming world locations not loading (Lypyl)
• Collision tuning for spell missiles
• Player no longer loses fatigue while loitering
• Flag handling causing excessive delays on quest timers has been removed – Note: this might leave some local quest with only a few short hours to complete
• Added vampire console commands
• Fixed letters popping back to HUD on first click
• Fix PlayerGPS not resetting properly after fast travel
• HUD place markers for quest debugger now support floating Y and should align correctly to buildings
• NPC clicks now only rearm on success, so failed checks aren’t clearing clicks out of order
• Compatibility fixes to vampire quests
• Fixed multiple quest Foes generating same name
• Action record spells no longer cost spell points
• FACTION.TXT is now part of game data to fix common issue with bad faction data in the wild
• Fix for some quest resources being incorrectly hidden
• Player will no longer be crushed or forced to crouch under sloping geometry (e.g. in home attics and ships hull)
• Main quest backbone now protected from ending using “enddebugquest” or from exception handling
• Fix exception for out of range social group check

And that’s all for now, thanks for reading!



For more frequent updates on Daggerfall Unity, follow me on Twitter @gav_clayton.

 

[Feargus Jewhart]

Damn that looks good, can't wait for people to start revamping some of the meshes (fixing vanilla bugs and maybe add in slightly more detail to fit in with the new foliage). Can't wait for it to be in a proper playable stage!

 

[Funposter]

Must admit that smaller dungeons is a tempting reason to return to the game. I like the long crawls, but eventually they start to wear thin. It's a bizarre system where the side quests can take a long time, but the main quest is a total breeze because it's pre-determined. Would finally be an excuse to get lost in some of the mian quest dungeons, since side quests would be less time consuming.

 

[Makabb]

they surely picked up the pace, at this pace it will be in beta in half a year

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

As long as it gets out of beta before my retirement, we're right on schedule.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Must admit that smaller dungeons is a tempting reason to return to the game.

I don't mind the size of the dungeons; it's the inane procedural generation that doesn't work. The concept is fantastic, but the execution doesn't land. I'd love to see (if it's even feasible) a mod that rewrites the procedural generation to make the dungeons more sensical; still labyrinthine monstrosities, but laid out in ways that a person would actually conceive of structuring them.

 

[Luzur]

Must admit that smaller dungeons is a tempting reason to return to the game.

I don't mind the size of the dungeons; it's the inane procedural generation that doesn't work. The concept is fantastic, but the execution doesn't land. I'd love to see (if it's even feasible) a mod that rewrites the procedural generation to make the dungeons more sensical; still labyrinthine monstrosities, but laid out in ways that a person would actually conceive of structuring them.

I believe Interkarma is going to address that, actually, they talked about it in the forums.

 

[Azdul]

The Unity project is great, and I'm very excited for it, but it lacks the versatility of OpenMW. There has been some (and I emphasize some in its smallest order of magnitude) talk among OpenMW devs about bringing OpenDF back once they reach 1.0. I think that's unlikely too, though.

OpenDF already exists, it's just that DFUnity is much further ahead. It lost momentum when main developer was busy with OpenAL.
There is even third open source DF implementation based on Lucius XLEngine code.

If someone wants to resurrect original LeFay ideas - engine is really not a problem.

 

[Funposter]

Must admit that smaller dungeons is a tempting reason to return to the game.

I don't mind the size of the dungeons; it's the inane procedural generation that doesn't work. The concept is fantastic, but the execution doesn't land. I'd love to see (if it's even feasible) a mod that rewrites the procedural generation to make the dungeons more sensical; still labyrinthine monstrosities, but laid out in ways that a person would actually conceive of structuring them.

The labyrinthine dungeons don't bother me at all on a one-by-one basis. Which is to say, if you sat me down and said "play Daggerfall for an hour" I wouldn't become annoyed by them. They do start to wear thin when you play the game for too long in a single sitting, however. Certainly they would be less annoying if they were mazelike but were limited to a single vertical level, or if they were comprised of a single block that just went deeper and deeper underground. As it is, it's too easy to pass a random door which actually contained the quest objective and waste 30 minutes of your time, and that's the worst thing about the game. A long crawl with minimal backtracking is fun. A long crawl where you run around the map and realise you missed a door located down what you thought was a dead-end isn't.

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

I believe Interkarma is going to address that, actually, they talked about it in the forums.

Is he also aware of the clipping issues on the equip screen that have been rustling my 'spergers for over a year straight?

 

[HarveyBirdman]

I believe Interkarma is going to address that, actually, they talked about it in the forums.

It'll be very cool if they can pull that off.

If someone wants to resurrect original LeFay ideas - engine is really not a problem.

What do you mean by that? I'm mostly illiterate on computer science, but my limited understanding is that XnGine prevents modders from easily doing simple things like implementing new UI features. OpenMW's spell searching function comes to mind. Daggerfall Unity even needed to do some funky overlays to change the text from eye-stinging pixels into a squashed ye olde english-looking font. Even movement in vanilla Daggerfall is a pain in the ass because of the engine. So when it comes to something much larger, i.e. making the randomly generated dungeons resemble something that an actual person could have envisioned, I expect that having a versatile engine would help dramatically.

The labyrinthine dungeons don't bother me at all on a one-by-one basis. Which is to say, if you sat me down and said "play Daggerfall for an hour" I wouldn't become annoyed by them. They do start to wear thin when you play the game for too long in a single sitting, however. Certainly they would be less annoying if they were mazelike but were limited to a single vertical level, or if they were comprised of a single block that just went deeper and deeper underground. As it is, it's too easy to pass a random door which actually contained the quest objective and waste 30 minutes of your time, and that's the worst thing about the game. A long crawl with minimal backtracking is fun. A long crawl where you run around the map and realise you missed a door located down what you thought was a dead-end isn't.

Missing a random door in a featureless spiderweb of hallways is definitely not fun, but I really love the idea of a 3D maze instead of a 2D one. Instead of limiting dungeons to a single floor or a big descending block, I'd want to see something that changes the rules for procedural generation to create a certain logic that keys the player into the surroundings.

For example, one simple rule could be "less hallways, more rooms." Rooms are easier to navigate and easier to remember by their shape. Rooms take up more space, and are easy to pick out on the map. In real life, people tend to build structures with rooms rather than a jumble of hallways, so the dungeons would feel less absurd too.

Here's another: say you enter a dungeon and it starts off as just a single hallway, and then you reach an intersection that opens up forward, left, and right. In vanilla, these hallways could spindle along multiple different floors and lead you on a merry chase for a half hour. What if, instead, hallways weren't allowed to span multiple floors? You would follow a hallway and it would lead you somewhere on its own floor, or to a staircase going up or down. The staircase would then open to a kind of chamber that only appears at the junction of staircases, and that could then lead somewhere else. Just simple things like that would make dungeons so much more intuitive to navigate, because you'd know that once you reach a staircase, you're about to enter a new region of the dungeon -- you can clear floors methodically, and use the staircases and conjoined chambers as landmarks. (And on that note, replacing the stupid, almost imperceptible ramp texture with a staircase texture would be pretty fantastic).

***

Or, you could just redo the entire procedural system at a conceptual level. Handcraft, like 200 different hallway/room/staircase models, and then let them procedurally generate with a set of rules. If Model5, then connect one of Models18-27. Only let models that actually fit together well... you know... fit together. And iterate the hell out of them all over the place, so you get tens of thousands of possible dungeon types that all feel like they could have been handcrafted.

 

[Efe]

for a working example of your last point look at warframe.
everything is a room and they have connection points. Airducts connect to airducts, stairs connect to stairs and everything mostly makes sense.

 

[Luzur]

I believe Interkarma is going to address that, actually, they talked about it in the forums.

Is he also aware of the clipping issues on the equip screen that have been rustling my 'spergers for over a year straight?

Dunno, im not his secretary, report it on the forums would you kindly.

 

[Luzur]

I believe Interkarma is going to address that, actually, they talked about it in the forums.

It'll be very cool if they can pull that off.

If someone wants to resurrect original LeFay ideas - engine is really not a problem.

What do you mean by that? I'm mostly illiterate on computer science, but my limited understanding is that XnGine prevents modders from easily doing simple things like implementing new UI features. OpenMW's spell searching function comes to mind. Daggerfall Unity even needed to do some funky overlays to change the text from eye-stinging pixels into a squashed ye olde english-looking font. Even movement in vanilla Daggerfall is a pain in the ass because of the engine. So when it comes to something much larger, i.e. making the randomly generated dungeons resemble something that an actual person could have envisioned, I expect that having a versatile engine would help dramatically.

The labyrinthine dungeons don't bother me at all on a one-by-one basis. Which is to say, if you sat me down and said "play Daggerfall for an hour" I wouldn't become annoyed by them. They do start to wear thin when you play the game for too long in a single sitting, however. Certainly they would be less annoying if they were mazelike but were limited to a single vertical level, or if they were comprised of a single block that just went deeper and deeper underground. As it is, it's too easy to pass a random door which actually contained the quest objective and waste 30 minutes of your time, and that's the worst thing about the game. A long crawl with minimal backtracking is fun. A long crawl where you run around the map and realise you missed a door located down what you thought was a dead-end isn't.

Missing a random door in a featureless spiderweb of hallways is definitely not fun, but I really love the idea of a 3D maze instead of a 2D one. Instead of limiting dungeons to a single floor or a big descending block, I'd want to see something that changes the rules for procedural generation to create a certain logic that keys the player into the surroundings.

For example, one simple rule could be "less hallways, more rooms." Rooms are easier to navigate and easier to remember by their shape. Rooms take up more space, and are easy to pick out on the map. In real life, people tend to build structures with rooms rather than a jumble of hallways, so the dungeons would feel less absurd too.

Here's another: say you enter a dungeon and it starts off as just a single hallway, and then you reach an intersection that opens up forward, left, and right. In vanilla, these hallways could spindle along multiple different floors and lead you on a merry chase for a half hour. What if, instead, hallways weren't allowed to span multiple floors? You would follow a hallway and it would lead you somewhere on its own floor, or to a staircase going up or down. The staircase would then open to a kind of chamber that only appears at the junction of staircases, and that could then lead somewhere else. Just simple things like that would make dungeons so much more intuitive to navigate, because you'd know that once you reach a staircase, you're about to enter a new region of the dungeon -- you can clear floors methodically, and use the staircases and conjoined chambers as landmarks. (And on that note, replacing the stupid, almost imperceptible ramp texture with a staircase texture would be pretty fantastic).

***

Or, you could just redo the entire procedural system at a conceptual level. Handcraft, like 200 different hallway/room/staircase models, and then let them procedurally generate with a set of rules. If Model5, then connect one of Models18-27. Only let models that actually fit together well... you know... fit together. And iterate the hell out of them all over the place, so you get tens of thousands of possible dungeon types that all feel like they could have been handcrafted.

What i would like to see are dungeons above ground, like inside castles, and also dungeons with one kind of enemies (like banditforts above ground with bandits and not bandits, liches and spiders mixed living setup), and small open air camps in the wilderness.

But i think the enemy setup coding thing is in the works too.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

What i would like to see are dungeons above ground, like inside castles, and also dungeons with one kind of enemies (like banditforts above ground with bandits and not bandits, liches and spiders mixed living setup), and small open air camps in the wilderness. But i think the enemy setup coding thing is in the works too.

Love the idea of adding above ground dungeons. Not keen on making all dungeon enemies homogenous in terms of creatures vs. humanoids though. Some dungeons ought to be that way, but it makes sense that bandits could be looting a dungeon just like you are. It'd be neat to see creatures and bandits treat each other as enemies, so they fight you and each other. Maybe even some priority rules --- bandit is more afraid of the lich than you, and will fight it until it's dead, and then turn on you later. Glad to hear they're working on that in some form or another.

 

[OndrejSc]

As long as it gets out of beta before my retirement, we're right on schedule.

 

[Azdul]

What do you mean by that? I'm mostly illiterate on computer science, but my limited understanding is that XnGine prevents modders from easily doing simple things like implementing new UI features. OpenMW's spell searching function comes to mind. Daggerfall Unity even needed to do some funky overlays to change the text from eye-stinging pixels into a squashed ye olde english-looking font. Even movement in vanilla Daggerfall is a pain in the ass because of the engine. So when it comes to something much larger, i.e. making the randomly generated dungeons resemble something that an actual person could have envisioned, I expect that having a versatile engine would help dramatically.

One of Julian vision was to have battles between kingdoms and city sieges - let's say 200 knights on each side. Such feature can be implemented in DFUnity without major performance penalty, and OpenMW, although much faster than original Morrowind, will struggle with such scenario. Not because OpenMW is poorly optimized, but will try to do much more about every object (3D model, physics, AI, collisions etc.)

Another DF feature - large cities with hundreds of buildings and thousand of citizens also will be much harder on OpenMW engine than DFUnity.

OFC once you start to increase graphical fidelity - DFUnity performance goes down much faster than OpenMW. OpenMW deals with gigabytes of textures quite nicely, and DFUnity seem to be struggling with texture packs.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Oh sure, I wasn't suggesting that DF somehow get a port into OpenMW. I'm just saying that it's probably possible to create a much more optimized DF engine in the spirit of OpenMW (i.e. an OpenDF that can handle big battles like Unity, but could also handle 2D sprites with more than 4 animated frames (or better yet, make 3D clones of the 2D sprites).

Still pumped for this project though. It's the best in the biz right now.

 

[Luzur]

What do you mean by that? I'm mostly illiterate on computer science, but my limited understanding is that XnGine prevents modders from easily doing simple things like implementing new UI features. OpenMW's spell searching function comes to mind. Daggerfall Unity even needed to do some funky overlays to change the text from eye-stinging pixels into a squashed ye olde english-looking font. Even movement in vanilla Daggerfall is a pain in the ass because of the engine. So when it comes to something much larger, i.e. making the randomly generated dungeons resemble something that an actual person could have envisioned, I expect that having a versatile engine would help dramatically.

One of Julian vision was to have battles between kingdoms and city sieges - let's say 200 knights on each side. Such feature can be implemented in DFUnity without major performance penalty, and OpenMW, although much faster than original Morrowind, will struggle with such scenario. Not because OpenMW is poorly optimized, but will try to do much more about every object (3D model, physics, AI, collisions etc.)

Another DF feature - large cities with hundreds of buildings and thousand of citizens also will be much harder on OpenMW engine than DFUnity.

OFC once you start to increase graphical fidelity - DFUnity performance goes down much faster than OpenMW. OpenMW deals with gigabytes of textures quite nicely, and DFUnity seem to be struggling with texture packs.

well from what Interkarma (or one of his "officers", i kinda forget) have said everything that was supposed to be in the game and still exist in the files will be re-installed into DFUnity, such as sieges, and whatnot.

 

[HarveyBirdman]

well from what Interkarma (or one of his "officers", i kinda forget) have said everything that was supposed to be in the game and still exist in the files will be re-installed into DFUnity, such as sieges, and whatnot.

To borrow the versioning nomenclature from the OpenMW team, we could consider vanilla DF a pre-1.0 release, and DFUnity's fulfillment of the vanilla promise as 1.0. In other words, true feature parity. Very exciting stuff, and easily the best we got.

But at the risk of sounding like an ungrateful cuss, and also in full recognition of my nearly nonexistent coding knowledge, where does the project go from there? My understanding is that endgame benefit of OpenMW isn't feature parity, but the ability to more easily incorporate robust mods that wouldn't be possible on vanilla MW. Obviously DFUnity will be moddable, but I imagine its moddability would be limited vis a vis an modern, open source engine designed specifically to run and mod DF.

 

[Azdul]

But at the risk of sounding like an ungrateful cuss, and also in full recognition of my nearly nonexistent coding knowledge, where does the project go from there? My understanding is that endgame benefit of OpenMW isn't feature parity, but the ability to more easily incorporate robust mods that wouldn't be possible on vanilla MW. Obviously DFUnity will be moddable, but I imagine its moddability would be limited vis a vis an modern, open source engine designed specifically to run and mod DF.

Both engines want to have all features of original games first, and it takes priority over everything else. Once it is achieved - they will get much wider audience, and much more attention from potential developers and modders.

According to post-1.0 roadmap, OpenMW will slowly expand to incorporate features from later Elder Scrolls games and multiplayer. You'll be able to play all Beyond Skyrim or Tamriel Rebuilt provinces with Morrowind-like character development, either solo, or on persistent multiplayer server.

DFUnity is much more friendly platform to incorporate fantasy world simulation ideas or roguelike features. You don't need team of 3D modellers, animators or voice actors to add political intrigue, new skills, new career paths, or world changing events to Daggerfall. New features need only assets comparable to 1996 technology to not feel at odds with the base game.

 

[ADL]

well from what Interkarma (or one of his "officers", i kinda forget) have said everything that was supposed to be in the game and still exist in the files will be re-installed into DFUnity, such as sieges, and whatnot.

To borrow the versioning nomenclature from the OpenMW team, we could consider vanilla DF a pre-1.0 release, and DFUnity's fulfillment of the vanilla promise as 1.0. In other words, true feature parity. Very exciting stuff, and easily the best we got.

But at the risk of sounding like an ungrateful cuss, and also in full recognition of my nearly nonexistent coding knowledge, where does the project go from there? My understanding is that endgame benefit of OpenMW isn't feature parity, but the ability to more easily incorporate robust mods that wouldn't be possible on vanilla MW. Obviously DFUnity will be moddable, but I imagine its moddability would be limited vis a vis an modern, open source engine designed specifically to run and mod DF.

Morrowind is the least interesting thing about OpenMW honestly. OpenMW is a "create your own Bethesda-esque open world game" engine and I'm sure the hardcore TES/nuFallout fans are going to have a field day with it.

 

[Goi~Yaas~Dinn]

well from what Interkarma (or one of his "officers", i kinda forget) have said everything that was supposed to be in the game and still exist in the files will be re-installed into DFUnity, such as sieges, and whatnot.

To borrow the versioning nomenclature from the OpenMW team, we could consider vanilla DF a pre-1.0 release, and DFUnity's fulfillment of the vanilla promise as 1.0. In other words, true feature parity. Very exciting stuff, and easily the best we got.

But at the risk of sounding like an ungrateful cuss, and also in full recognition of my nearly nonexistent coding knowledge, where does the project go from there? My understanding is that endgame benefit of OpenMW isn't feature parity, but the ability to more easily incorporate robust mods that wouldn't be possible on vanilla MW. Obviously DFUnity will be moddable, but I imagine its moddability would be limited vis a vis an modern, open source engine designed specifically to run and mod DF.

Morrowind is the least interesting thing about OpenMW honestly. OpenMW is a "create your own Bethesda-esque open world game" engine and I'm sure the hardcore TES/nuFallout fans are going to have a field day with it.

What a strange opinion. I've never played Morrowind, mind you, but most of the things I hear on it amount to "next best thing to classic Elder Scrolls". Even Oblivion doesn't get that praise, I find. And of course, mentioning Skyrim with anything but contempt carries an automatic 50% chance of rape per turn.