October Builds 0.10.9
Posted on October 26, 2019 by Interkarma
Live Builds have been updated to version 0.10.9. This is primarily a bug-fix build, but a few new features have been added to the mix.
World Data Overrides (Hazelnut)
This is a longer-term initiative empowering modders to edit and change the world itself by providing substitute game data on the fly. While this is still under development, substantial progress has been made and is available in Daggerfall Unity now. For an early example, the below crypt has a few customisations. I have copy-pasted Hazelnut’s words in the list below.
- A third coffin – the centre one.
- A fiery birdbath (or whatever you would call it) in the corridor outside the door.
- A floating green pot which you can just see behind, a bit further down the corridor.
- An Archaeologists sign! I needed to test new models would work, so just used the one provided by my guild mod.
This really is just the beginning. As work on this progresses, it will become more flexible and powerful. One such upcoming feature is the “worldupdate” quest action. Large mods can use this to trigger world changes from within quests. It’s exciting stuff! But please keep in mind this can take time to develop and iron out the bugs, and modders will need time to learn the systems and start producing content. Someday this will lead to mods like nothing we’ve seen to date.
If you’d like to start learning more about how this works, Hazelnut has an excellent primer here.
Interior Replacement (Uncanny_Valley)
This is complementary to Hazelnut’s work above. Uncanny_Valley has been working on a world editor and the ability for interior replacement. Here are a couple of examples Uncanny_Valley has created using his tools and recent changes to the core to generate custom interiors.
And if you haven’t seen them already, check out Uncanny_Valley’s New Locations and Skyshards mods. These adds new exterior locations and fun goals to the game not already present in game data.
Nature LOD Performance Improvements (Hazelnut)
Hazelnut has upgraded LOD handling for nature flats, resulting in substantial performance improvements to mods like Trees of Daggerfall by VMBlast. If you found this mod was too slow in the past, give it another look. With Hazelnut’s improvements, this mod now performs better than ever. Here are a few screens of VMBlast’s 3D trees (and several other mods) running. Screens are courtesy of Kamer on the forums.
Fix “Water Everywhere” On Some GPUs (Pango)
If you have an AMD or integrated Intel GPU, you may have suffered from a shader precision issue that resulted in water tiles being display where they shouldn’t be. Thanks to Pango, the below issue has now been fixed and tilemap terrain should display perfectly on all capable GPUs.
Magic & Combat Targeting Review (Interkarma)
There have been a few persistent quirks with magic targeting for a while now. In this release, I’ve looked into how things were failing and tightened up some loose screws:
- Slightly increased range of touch spells.
- Slightly increased radius of area around target and area around caster spells.
- Touch spells now use a sphere collider like weapons for easier aiming and more reliable contact.
- Fixed bug where touch spells can collide with own missile object, resulting in a miss.
- Fixed bug where touching caster and target colliders would result in a miss for touch spells.
- Fixed bug where magnitude spells allowed two saving throws, resulting in damage sometimes being bypassed when not intended.
- Player can now only release touch spells when a valid target is in range, like classic.
- Reviewed damage mitigation prorate matches Daggerfall Chronicles and found prorate works as expected.
- Slightly reduced radius of weapon sphere collider so you can attack enemies inside cages with less difficulty.
General Fixes & Improvements
Nystul
Nash Muhandes
- Fixes to residence name resolving for quest persons
UncannyValley
- Trimmed all MIDI songs to loop seamlessly
TheLacus
- 3D props can now be rotated in X and Z
- Ladders only set to interactive when setup as prop model (all vanilla ladders setup this way)
- When replacing buildings, use original NameSeed, LocationID, and Sector values
JayH
- Fix to Fade rendermode for billboards
- Changed default mods directory for ModSettingsEditor
- Support for asset injection from virtual mods
- Store CurrentLevelUpSkill with save data to fix issue in loading screen mod
- Support for mod changes to item templates
- Fix precision issue with custom dungeon exit doors
- Add IPlayerActivable interface for custom interactions
- Fix importing books from disabled mods
- Fix title and author of custom books
- Improve handling of removed custom book
- Fixes to random book creation
- Do not use random price for custom books
- Support for custom books now enabled by default – older installs will need to toggle on manually
- Implement “addbook” console command
- Check mod required version of Daggerfall Unity
- Fix scale of custom escorting NPC faces
- Improve support for mod presets
- Support for live mod settings changes
Pango
- Add possibility of quest NPC infighting (requires custom quest action)
- Disable quest “A Mixup” as causing issues and requires further fixes
- Prevent early assassins in Sx12 “The Emperor’s Courier”
- Reduces legal rep penalty in K0C00Y06
- Add safety check to K0C00Y05 when player rep too low
- Fix stuck with dead body item from quests R0C11Y26 and R0C11Y28
Hazelnut
- Allow cancellation of Teleport (anchor/recall) spell
- Smoother player movements by fixing math errors in smooth follower and unstick handling
- Lowered stuck threshold so it doesn’t trigger while crouching
- Improvements to video playing (stop in-game music, stop ambient sounds, hide mouse cursor)
- Prevent accidental closure of vampire and lycantropy videos (must now use ESC to close)
- Remove deprecated Legacy Deferred setting
- Prevent closing bank window while inputting transfer amount
- Do not delay quest create foe by one spawnInterval (created quest foes now spawn a bit sooner)
- Fix missing word in A0C00Y14
- Remove black background behind HUD spell icons
- Raise event when teleporting out of dungeons to fix mods requiring this
Ferital
- More houses are now offered for sale by banks
- Fix inventory behaviour near exit
- Ensure pitch is within limits
- Allow ship availability to be defined by mods
- Expose horse animaton frame index for mods
- Fix gender filtering for social quests
- Implement “add_all_equip” console command to add all equipable items
- Allow vanilla guilds to be overriden by mods
- Fix custom activations to work with replaced meshes
- Add region and location cache for when not playing in editor
- Implement UIWindowFactory to allow mods to provide new implementations of UI windows
- Fix gold rewards for non-guild NPCs with faction IDs
- Fix ship purchasing popup window
- Fix identify spell popup window
Numidium
- Fixes to interior block data reading
- Fixes to rumour mill involving multiple factions in one rumour
- Fix factions becoming own enemy
- Fix Malacath summoning quest name
- Fix circular dependencies for Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood preventing garbage collection
- Expand %g3 macro when asking for work
- Clear all guild affiliations when loading or starting a new game
- Don’t display quality message when entering Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood safehouses
- Boost jumping skill that was missing for lycanthrope characters
- Fix PC greeting text for first question
- Filter houses for sale from questor locations
- Fix %qdt macro expansion
JorisVanEijden
- Fix dungeon micromap rendering incorrectly in some large dungeons
- Increase dungeon micromap texture size
Tolbell
- Fix enemy point-blank ranged attack and reduce minimum range
- Fix player catching breath when loading underwater save
- Fix crosshair when moving travel map using arrows
- Allow individual Daedra in quests
- Fix index out bounds exception
- Fix mismatch between quest pool and quest picker listbox
- Fix two quests decompiled incorrectly by TEMPLATE
- Add cleanup for quests not selected in quest picker
- Fix “named” version of “anyInfo”
Arcane21
- Fix typos in game settings
Interkarma
- Grammar and typo fixes to item templates and quests
- Fix instant death of lycanthropy cure
- Fix legacy “place npc at” site link reservation pulluting marker pool
- Implement “clear_negativelegalrep” console command to zero out negative legal rep and clear banishments
- Don’t use events to progress vampirism and lycanthropy (fixes another case of multiple dreams and spell instances)
- SoulBound enchantment now supports Azura’s Star
- Open random spawn chance formulas to modders
Keep up with that kind of talk, one day we'll wake up to the entire project shut down or bought up by Bethesda for a quick buck.
Project Spotlight: Daggerfall Unity
Today we are talking to Interkarma, developer of Daggerfall Unity a Unity port of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall that brings the classic RPG to a new engine substantially improving upon stability and playability. Curious to try it out? Follow the steps outlined here.
First and foremost: could you give us a bit of an introduction to who you are and how you got into modding / programming?
I’m just a normal geeky guy. I was born in Australia and have lived here my entire life. Most of my early life was spent in rural/outback regions due to my father being an opal prospector. I often didn’t have any technology around, not even a television. But comics, board games, and books were usually there to fill in time.
I’ve always enjoyed pulling things apart to see how they work. Once I got into computers, I started doing that with software. Early on, I had an Action Replay cartridge for the family C64 that let me pause games at runtime, inspect their assembly code, make changes, rip out sprites, etc. I had a tremendous amount of fun working out how these games did some of the things they were doing and used this to write my own small games and tools. I built tools like a sprite editor, ADSR sound editor, a basic word processor, and games like a side-scrolling shooter, that kind of thing. I kept doing this as I grew up, trying to rebuild small parts of other games to see if I could do it. I didn’t make mods so much as hack around with code and try to understand how the original game was created.
I’ve always wanted to create my own original games, and have dozens of ideas I want to work on. It’s only lately though that I really have the time and experience to make that a reality.
For those who have never heard of it, how would you describe what Daggerfall Unity is in your own words?
Daggerfall Unity is a superset of classic Daggerfall. I like to describe it as “Classic Daggerfall Plus”. It’s not a remaster in the sense we’ve come to expect when this is done commercially. Rather, it’s a ground-up recreation of the classic game plus quality of life features and modding capabilities. The foundation of the idea was to port the classic Daggerfall experience into a modern game engine and give it modding support like later Elder Scrolls games. The default experience should look and feel a lot like classic, while providing for modders to remix, upgrade, and extend the base game in ways not possible in classic Daggerfall. With some of the mods available now, such as new guilds and airships, I feel like everything is working out even better than I’d hoped.
Daggerfall Unity is very much its own game though and doesn’t always do things exactly the same way as classic. Usually, this is due to bug fixes in Daggerfall Unity, or platform differences as the result of playing on a different engine, modern hardware, or higher resolutions. But we’ve worked very hard to ensure the game can be enjoyed extremely closely to its roots. Options like Retro Rendering mode are there to deliver a true 320x200 experience, most QoL features can be toggled on and off, and many control element can be finely tuned. With a bit of patience, players can dial in either an pure retro experience, or mod things closer to Morrowind/Oblivion quality levels, or find something in between. Daggerfall Unity is very flexible in what you can do with the game and most people can find a setup they enjoy playing.
From what I have learned, the whole project has kept you busy for an unbelievable amount of time. If you had to give an estimation: how many hours/days/years would you say you have put into creating Daggerfall Unity and what kept you going during all this time?
This all began in the year 2001 when I started building tools to explore Daggerfall’s textures, 3D models, map layouts, etc. These were Daggerfall Explorer, Modelling, Imaging, Cartographer, and Jukebox. I started with information on Daggerfall’s file formats available from the UESP and gradually built on this with my own discoveries. I did this on and off for around 12 years, picking away at Daggerfall’s file formats and little mysteries just for my own amusement. I even had a shot at recreating Daggerfall in 2005, but lacked the experience and community then to make much progress.
While learning Unity in 2014, I wanted something more challenging to work on. My wife suggested I try porting some of my Daggerfall code into Unity, to use something familiar while learning a new tool. Because most of my code from 2009 was written in C#, it was fairly trivial to port it to Unity. This is how Daggerfall Tools for Unity (DFTFU) was born. I had model importing working in a day, locations in under a week, and the whole world working within a few months. At this stage though, it was just a toolset to import assets. There wasn’t any real gameplay.
This all re-sparked interest in recreating Daggerfall, something I was interested in again by that stage. I officially started work on Daggerfall Unity in August 2015 and it has been like a second job ever since. For the next four years, I would spend roughly 6-40 hours per week working on Daggerfall Unity, building a community, managing the codebase, and so on. I’d make the time a by creating a few hours each morning and evening, and basically sinking every weekend into it.
What would you say is the main lesson you learned from your time working on this project? What would you tell your younger self about going into a massive undertaking like Daggerfall Unity?
If I was being fair, I’d probably tell my younger self to do something easier instead. Daggerfall is a huge and complex game, and my younger self made the mistake of thinking it was a simple game because it was an older game. That’s just not true, something I worked out really quickly once it came time to build some of the game systems.
But now that I’ve come out the other side, I wouldn’t want to change a thing. I’ve become a better programmer, learned how to manage a large project with several developers, and grow an online community. All of this will be invaluable as I move on to creating my own games, something I wanted to do in 2014. I just had to get Daggerfall out of my system first.
Did you get a lot of support from the Daggerfall community during development?
Absolutely! The support from the community has been incredible, and it’s the main reason I was able to make it this far. For those first couple of hard years when I was mostly working alone, the love and support I received was the only thing that kept me going. And from around 2017, the number of top-notch contributors exploded and we suddenly had brilliant devs like Hazelnut, Pango, Nystul, Allofich, Lypyl, Ferital, TheLacus, Numidium just pushing things forwards every day with a seemingly endless stream of quality updates and information. Even when I thought we had all the people we needed, devs like Meteoric Dragon came along and added loads of improvements, JorisVanEijden helped expand knowledge of the quest system, Jay_H built, tested, and fixed hundreds of quests, and Pango became an overmind generalist who can help with practically anything including community management. I maintain a full list of contributors at the below forum link.
https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=233
Daggerfall (The Elder Scrolls II) was released in 1996, the same year Bill Clinton was re-elected, and Pokemon was first introduced to the world. My point is: Daggerfall came out a very, very long time ago! That being said, what makes Daggerfall as a game special to you and what made you want to revive it by developing Daggerfall Unity?
I played a lot of tabletop RPGs when I was in my teens and twenties. Games like Daggerfall gave me the feeling I was playing the videogame version of a tabletop adventure run by a great DM. There were just so many deep systems to explore and things to discover.
When I was playing Daggerfall back in 1996, the web was nowhere near as developed as it is now. Information was a lot harder to find. Daggerfall felt like this big black box to tease open and see how it worked. There were rumours about a dragon being in the game somewhere, and I’d set off into the wilderness looking for it like an idiot. There was always this feeling every time I went into one of those procedurally generated dungeons that I might really be the first person to explore it. There was just something very special about this game back then, and I couldn’t help but want to understand it more.
Everything since then has just been a gradual evolution of my love and interest in the game. It’s not something that happened all at once, but rather grew slowly over many years.
What can you tell us about the Daggerfall and Daggerfall Unity community? Other than diehard fans who grew up with the game, do you get a lot of people who are only now picking it up to see what it’s all about?
I’m amazed how many younger players are still trying out Daggerfall and Daggerfall Unity in 2019. This isn’t just the domain of older gamers like myself.
I feel that Daggerfall Unity helps make the game more accessible to new players. It’s a smoother and more comfortable experience with a lot of QoL features and new stuff to explore through mods. Given the modern popularity of The Elder Scrolls in general, I feel like it’s a great way to experience the series roots in a more comfortable and stable manner. I also encourage die-hard retro gamers to try out the original so they can experience what Daggerfall Unity is building upon.
Have you taken notice of Skygerfall - a mod for Skyrim that aims to bring the entire main quest of Daggerfall into Skyrim? What are your thoughts on it?
It looks amazing! I haven’t had time to play it yet, but I can tell it was made with love and attention to detail. I’m looking forward to giving it some playtime in the future.
Other than Daggerfall (Unity), do you have any other favourite games? Ever done any modding for those?
A few modern favourites are Elite Dangerous, World of Warcraft, Subnautica, Void Bastards, and Outer Wilds. I’ll play almost anything, but I prefer games that give me fun systems to explore and then just take their hands off. I get really annoyed when games constantly try to guide me, or too frequently break gameplay to show me a cutscene, or take away control of my camera to force me to see something.
I’m not much of a modder and have only tinkered with creating mods for other games. I tend to fall in love with systems first and gameplay later. Maybe because I grew up with basic stuff like card games and board games before I ever saw a video game, it feels like understanding rules and systems always comes before actually being able to play them. I’m the rare kind of person who prefers a heavy spiral bound manual filled with tables and formulas over an in-game tutorial.
Daggerfall Unity is currently released as an alpha. How can people get set up and help you with development going forward?
There’s not much left on the development side that isn’t already allocated out or being worked on by someone. Insofar as the core gameplay, everything is done now and it’s just bug fixes, refinement, and features unique to Daggerfall Unity. It’s hard to imagine getting more help than I already am. There’s always room for more mods though. I strongly encourage anyone interested in developing for Daggerfall Unity now to check out the mod scene and build something awesome.
Other than that, the best thing everyone can do is just keep being awesome to each other and help others create new stuff for the game. If we all continue lifting each other up, there’s no telling what people might be creating for Daggerfall Unity in a few years.
Is there anything else you would like to say to the Nexus Mods community?
I’d like to thank Nexus Mods for supporting Daggerfall Unity and making the lives of our players easier. I also hope the mods available today inspire other creators to make something new for the game. Considering some of the mods starting to appear, I can only imagine what the scene can look like in a few more years. I’m looking forward to seeing where it all goes.
When will it (ever) be finished? Is there a timeline? Also, not many mods for this one yet.
While he has been the top contributor for the past two years, there are still several other major contributors to the project
November Builds 0.10.12
Posted on November 27, 2019 by Interkarma
Live Builds have been updated to 0.10.12. This is another primarily bug-fix release, with one major new feature.
Class Questions (Numidium)
This is a feature from The Elder Scrolls 1: Arena that has carried over to other Bethesda games, including Daggerfall. Even the infamous G.O.A.T. in Fallout 3 is a variant of this system. During the class questions process, the player is presented with several ethical problems and a few alternate ways to resolve each situation. Each answer will weight player towards the Thief, Mage, and Warrior archetypes. Once the questions are completed, a class hopefully fitting your play style will be offered.
This UI is more than just an elaborate class selector. It provides hooks for the imagination to think about how you might roleplay your character once generated and plunked into the world. Thanks to Numidium, this feature is now fully implemented in Daggerfall Unity.
If you find it hard to see the darker portion of above animation on your device, Numidium created the following screenshot with false colours that make the archetypes easier to see. If you’ve played Skyrim, you might recognise these designs from the Thief, Mage, and Warrior Guardian Stones. It’s wonderful how the later versions of TES make little nods like this towards the earlier games.
New Release Schedule
I have a backlog of pull requests (pending changes) open on GitHub for review. Every change can take a lot of time to work through and test before merging into the monthly builds. This can mean simple fixes might take a few weeks to come out, or be held up while a larger change is still under review. Sometimes a change might get bumped to the following month just because there isn’t enough time to review it properly before end of current month.
Now so much of the game has been built out, I can’t see any reason to stick with a strictly monthly schedule. Rather than dropping a big release with many combined changes each month, I will start releasing new builds approximately weekly. If something minor is fixed, I’ll try to release a new build just for that change. This also has the benefit of making it easier to pin down new problems when the number of changes is fewer in each release.
On the Live Builds page, I will start retaining longer history of available builds rather than cycling out old builds once per month. If you encounter problems with a new build, you can roll back to the previous build until it’s fixed. I’m looking at retaining approximately 4-6 weeks of build history.
This also means a scaling back of the monthly blog updates. Unless something big is available to feature, I’ll use the forums to post incremental changes and save the blog for more interesting content. I will link future releases to change log as they’re posted to Live Builds page.
General Fixes & Improvements
The November builds have several other small fixes included.
- Allow mods to change wagon weight limit (AsesinoBlade)
- Fix opening quest log clearing residences from map (Nystul)
- Use classic formula for Masque of Clavicus (Numidium)
- Support for custom books is now stable (TheLacus)
- Fix player falling through floor when entering certain buildings while mounted (Hazelnut)
- Add console command “add_all_equip magicWeapons” to spawn all magic items for testing (Hazelnut)
- Make spawned weapons identified (Hazelnut)
- Fix issues wth replacement buildings (Hazelnut)
- Fix 1gp quest reward (Hazelnut)
- Fix rented rooms duration underflow (Pango)
- Use webm videos on Linux (Pango)
- Fix NullReferenceException in DaggerfallVidPlayerWindow.IsPlaying for loading screen (Pango)
- Fix comment displayed in text block for quest C0C00Y10 (Jay_H)
- Do not resist “caster only” self-cast spells, e.g. heals (Interkarma)
- Do not reflect spells from caster onto self (Interkarma)
- Fix Thieves Guild O0A0AL00 using local NPC for contact, causing a crash in some cases (Interkarma)
Wow, what a pleb wrote that. Imagine associating it firstmost with Skyrim and not the Birthsigns in Morrowind/OblivionIf you’ve played Skyrim, you might recognise these designs from the Thief, Mage, and Warrior Guardian Stones. It’s wonderful how the later versions of TES make little nods like this towards the earlier games.
