Vapourware Daggerfall Unity isnt Vaporware

[Narushima]

All features are implemented.

 

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Daggerfall Unity 0.10.28
Posted on December 8, 2020 by Interkarma


The latest update for Daggerfall Unity is now available on Live Builds page. If all goes well, this will be the last release under the Alpha tag and there will be a minor update soon into Beta. That’s right! Daggerfall Unity is feature complete and I marked off the final items on Alpha roadmap the other day. This release is a pre-beta test just to catch any last minute showstoppers before rolling over.

Does that mean Daggerfall Unity is done and dusted? Not quite yet, but it does mean work on new features is now at an end. From this point the only changes will be bug fixes, minor refinements, and incremental progress to modding/localization support. This is the real final stretch to 1.0, which I hope to reach in 2021 once I’m happy with overall state of game.

For the last year or so communicating where DFU is up to has been a challenge, as it’s a really a couple of projects in one. The core goal of the game has always been to recreate classic Daggerfall with some refinement and quality of life features. Then we have loads of features unique to DFU like epic mod support and some wild and wonderful core features that emerged along the journey (such as personal torches and advanced climbing). This means DFU is a also a superset of classic Daggerfall, and is why I often refer to it as Classic Daggerfall Plus. It’s the same game, with more.

This led to a situation where the core game has been essentially complete and very playable for over a year while these superset features continued development. We stayed in Alpha because DFU as a whole still wasn’t done. This in turn created confusion as people wondered how finished the game could be if it was still considered Alpha. This undermined what an incredibly functional and playable bit of software Daggerfall Unity really is. So it gives me great pleasure to finally tear off that Alpha bandaid and give this game the credit it deserves after so many people have worked so very hard to bring it into existence.

Let’s take a look at what’s in this release.

New Features
Large HUD
For some Daggerfall players, the large HUD represents a tiny piece of its soul. The large buttons and compass help us recall our early days playing Daggerfall and provide a big visual connection to the past. So this feature is best summarised with a few screenshots. Here’s Daggerfall Unity running with Retro Rendering 320×200, palettization, and large HUD. The only “modern” feature I left enabled is shadows.











Of course, it’s not just for retro modes. You can enable the large HUD at any time by deselecting the Fullscreen box on pause menu. And in typical Daggerfall Unity fashion, this feature can be tuned to fit a wide variety of displays so most people will be able find a setup they like when choosing to play with this HUD. Let’s upack this thing.

Docked or Undocked?
By default the large HUD works just like classic. That means it shrinks the rendering viewport to area above the HUD and the crosshair position will be raised to become centred in smaller viewport. The HUD itself will scale to fit entirely along bottom of display, which might entail some stretching if you have an ultra wide display. In this state, the large HUD is considered docked to bottom of display.





If you jump into settings.ini and set LargeHUDDocked=False then your large HUD will instead sit on top of a fullscreen render without shrinking the viewport area. Crosshair position will remain in the same place as fullscreen mode. When undocked, you can adjust the scale of large HUD by changing value in LargeHUDUndockedScale. This is best for very wide displays where the large HUD might otherwise become too stretched.





Other Customisation
Other than docked/undocked, you can tweak the HUD in a few ways in settings.ini. I’ll list all the new settings here and what they do.

LargeHUDDocked – Set True to be docked and False to be undocked as above.

LargeHUDUndockedScale – Sets your undocked HUD scale between 0.25 and 2.0 depending on preference. Only works with undocked HUD.

LargeHUDUndockedAlignment – Set 0 for default (which is centred), 1 for left-aligned, 2 for centred, 3 for right-aligned. Only works with undocked HUD.

LargeHUDUndockedOffsetWeapon – Set True to offset weapon position above undocked HUD height and False to draw weapon against bottom of screen. Depending on your HUD scale, you might prefer to raise weapon above HUD or not. It’s not recommended to enable this setting with small scale HUDs or weapon will appear to be floating. Only works with undocked HUD.

LargeHUDOffsetHorse – Set True to offset horse above HUD height or False to draw horse against bottom of screen. This is True by default to match classic, but you can set this one for both docked and undocked HUDs. The horse takes up a lot of screen estate and it’s nice to drop it below the HUD to clean up the view some more.



Using Large HUD
For some people this will be their first time using Daggerfall’s large HUD, so it’s worth going through what all the buttons do. But first, how do you click those big juicy buttons anyway?

Just as in classic, use the Activate Cursor keybind to toggle cursor active/inactive while playing game (i.e. not paused). By default Activate Cursor is bound to the Enter key. While the cursor is active, you’ll be able to mouse over the large HUD and click buttons with either the left or right mouse buttons, which sometimes initiate different actions. When the cursor is active, you can also click on world objects like doors, levers, and NPCs using the mouse cursor rather than activating under crosshair as usual. To get back to mouselook, hit the Enter again to make the cursor inactive.

Now that you can click on the HUD, here’s what all the various bits do.

Portrait. Opens the Character Sheet.





Vital Indicators. Displays your current health (green), fatigue (red), and spellpoints (blue).



Options. Pauses game and opens pause menu.





Spellbook. Opens spellbook UI.





Interaction Mode. Cycles interaction mode through steal, grab, info, dialogue. Left mouse will cycle to next, right mouse will cycle to previous.





Inventory. Opens the inventory UI.





Ready Weapon. Raises or lowers the weapon in your equipped hand.





Use Magic Item. Opens the use magic item UI (if you have any usable magic items). This uses a popup list for consistency rather than fitting inside HUD area like classic.





Change Transport Mode. Opens transportation UI to set transport mode between foot, horse, cart, and ship.





Automap / Travel Map. Opens local automap or travel map. Left mouse click to open automap, right mouse click to open travel map.





Rest. Opens rest UI. Careful resting in town!





Big Spinny Compass. This is the real deal, made from the finest magnetic pixels. Click to open info status pop-up.



That covers everything about the large HUD for now. Just something worth mentioning, this HUD isn’t related to Cursor Mode movement (i.e. move by pushing mouse around screen) and classic’s View Mode with mouselook will remain the only control scheme into foreseeable future. With that said, all the work on large HUD recently has laid the groundwork for Cursor Mode, so this is likely to be added as a Beta stretch goal in the future. I’ll add this item to roadmap when confirmed.



Movement Review and Jumping Skill
Not so much a new feature as an attempt to better match movement (Walking/Running, Jumping, Falling) to classic Daggerfall. Part of this review was to implement the effects of Jumping skill on jump height.

Because classic Daggerfall itself doesn’t have well-defined movement elements, and CPU speed can change the speed and “feel” of these elements, it’s not really possible to match these perfectly with classic. So instead, I approached this with the mindset of ensuring that low-level characters always have functional running and jumping (e.g. run from trouble and jump low obstacles) while high-level characters still feel powerful and acrobatic. What this means in practise is a level 1 can jump onto the throne lift in Privateer’s Hold and run from that skeleton, and a fully buffed character at 100 SPD with max Jumping, Enhanced Athleticism, and spellcraft will run like the wind and be able to leap from rooftop to rooftop with ease. Here’s a summary of changes.

Walking – Carefully measuring walk speed in classic vs. DFU found that characters in DFU walked faster than in classic. This was tuned to match classic within a small margin of difference at various SPD levels. Interestingly, walking in DFU still feels faster as the framerate is smoother. But timing over long distance walks yields very similar timings to classic.

Running – This had received some tuning previously and already closely matched classic. Further tuning brought this into a smaller margin of difference. Again, running can feel faster in DFU due to smoother framerates.

Jumping – The largest difference is to jumping. The jump height in pre-beta DFU had received no tuning and was unaffected by Jumping skill. This means all characters were making huge leaps regardless of their skill at jumping. Now a character with a low Jumping skill will make smaller jumps than one with a high skill. You’ll always be able to jump onto low obstacles, but you’ll need to skill up to truly make those epic leaps. Athleticism will give player a +10% to jump height, Improved Athleticism another +10%, and Jumping spell will give you +60%. These all stack together so that a fully buffed character can leap onto low rooftops with ease. As an added bonus, the Jumping spell now grants air control. Rather than propel yourself helplessly past your target, you’ll be able to move slightly while airborne when the Jumping spell is active. This just makes it a bit more fun and magical, not to mention useful.

Falling – Measurement found that falling speed in DFU was marginally faster than classic – about 20%. But due to the effect of smoother framerate, a faster falling speed just feels better. Sticking with the classic falling speed makes falling and jumping feel floaty, something that isn’t so apparent in classic due to the clunky framerate giving it a heavier feel. For that reason, gravity and falling were left unchanged in DFU.



General Fixes & Improvements

• Fix several errors in TEXT.RSC data via localization tables (Ferital)
• Fix guild greetings for unique NPCs (Ferital)
• Correct “Bhoriane” spelling everywhere (Ferital)
• Remove %2com as not implemented in classic (Ferital)
• Show RunInBackground setting in launcher, enable run in background by default (Pango)
• Adjust dungeon micromap resolution and use square pixels (Pango)
• Fix backstabbing transforming Seducers, they are now always considered facing player (Pango)
• Apply bank loan default reputation loss only once (Pango)
• Publicize parts of PlayerActivate and DaggerfallBaseWindow.NativePanel (jefetienne)
• Publicize CurrentRestMode (jefetienne)
• Remove SetupDefaults and add autofill parameter to ResetDefaults (jefetienne)
• Ensure models with registered actions are not combined for RMB and interiors (Hazelnut)
• Fix exploit for Knightly Order armor service (Hazelnut)
• Fix “potion of <LocalText-NotFound>” and support localization of potion name (Interkarma)
• Fix potion recipe name being blank or displaying “<LocaleText-NotFound>” (Interkarma)
• Fix null exception when no rumours available (Interkarma)
• Fix variant count of Formal Eodoric (Interkarma)
• Fix Short Shirt variant counts (Interkarma)
• Fix active spell tooltips not working when cursor active (Interkarma)
• Fix texture cracking in vertical scroll thumb (Interkarma)
• Fix inventory crash against certain corrupted/modded items (Interkarma)
• Chance-based potion effects now always succeed to be consistent with other magic items (Interkarma)
• Fix LocalScale in Panel fill texture (Interkarma)
• Store DFU version in quest state to help identify version quest compiled under (Interkarma)
• Implemented “add potion” console command (Interkarma)
• Use “target at range” not “touch” for action object spells to fix null exception (Interkarma)
• Start groundwork of book localization – not yet ready in game (Interkarma)
• Disable camera recoil when cursor active (Interkarma)
• Use available snow textures for swamp castles (Interkarma)
• Use smaller dungeon state as set when quest compiled to prevent target ending up in void (Interkarma)
• Groundwork for further refinements towards full smaller dungeon support (Interkarma)

I hope you enjoy this release!

 

[Luzur]

Nice of index to take over the "main build" news posting, i kinda forgets sometimes, so instead i'll post some new mods:

[MOD] Banditry and Travelling Merchants

• Quote

Post by imsobadatnicknames » Fri Dec 04, 2020 10:41 pm

This mod expands upon the banditry mechanic I introduced with my Travelling Alchemists mod and introduces a variety of different NPC travellers you can trade with or rob. You will encounter these NPCs every 0-3 days, and only if you're in the wilderness and during the daytime. You can click on them to attempt to talk or trade. To attempt to rob them, you'll have to succesfully land an attack on them. The chance to succesfully rob them takes your Streetwise skill into account. If you're succesful, they'll give you some of the items they carry and occasionally some gold, and then run away, otherwise you'll have to fight them.

Currently, the NPCs added by this mod are:

-Alchemists: They work the same as the one sin my Travelling Alchemists mod, they carry and sell random potions.
-Peddlers: They carry and sell random trinkets (rings, wands, bracers, etc.) They might sometimes have bodyguards with them, in which case they'll be much harder to succesfully rob.
-Cartographers: They carry and sell maps to random dungeons.
-Healers: They will cure you of any illness for a price. When robbed, they'll give you alchemy ingredients and religious items.
-Travellers: Regular people travelling from city to city. They won't trade with you, only talk. They're much easier to succesfully rob than everyone else, but they'll rarely be carrying more than a few gold pieces (altought occasionally they might be carrying bigger ammounts of gold or even gems).
-Adventurer parties: They won't trade with you either. They're significantly harder to rob than everyone else. They carry trinkets, gems, books, weapons, potions, and occasionally magic items.

Robbing or killing travellers will lower your legal reputation, and might sometimes have other consequences: It might lower your reputation with the Thieves Guild due to unsanctioned criminal activity, get bounty hunters sent after you, or get other bandits to target you for encroching on their territory.

Changelog:

1.1.1
-Fixed a typo introduced in 1.1 that was causing the mod to not check if the player is in the wilderness before spwning the travelling merchants.

1.1
-Made encounters a bit more frequent (0-3 days)
-Made the legal reputation loss for each robbery less severe, so you build up a reputation as a criminal more slowly.
-Healers no longer cure you on the spot, but rather give you a special item that you can use at any time to cure any disease. This item appears as a vial of elixir vitae, so it can be found on the "ingredients" tab of your inventory. You can't sell it, as it's considered a quest item. It's way more expensive but also way more useful than the service they provided before.

Installation:

Unzip the fille inside /StreamingAssets/Questpacks. If you're starting a new character, that's all you need to do. If you want to use it in a game you already started, you'll have to open up the console and type "startquest BATM0" to get the mod running.

Uninstallation:

Delete the questpack.

Future plans:

-More types of NPCs to encounter.
-Encounters based on your reputation with different factions, maybe?
-Special nightime encounters (vampire merchants, etc.)

Nexus link: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/163

[MOD] Interesting Terrains [WIP]

• Quote

Post by monobelisk » Tue Aug 25, 2020 10:59 am

Interesting Terrains

Current version: 0.5.2
Supported DFUnity version: 0.10.27
Download and instructions: Nexus Mods page
Source code: Interesting Terrains on GitHub

Known issues
Until this mod reaches v. 1.0.0, issues are to be expected. As issues are found, either by myself or the community, they're listed in this section. Unless otherwise noted, the intention is that the issues are fixed in the next release.

• (none at the moment)

Description
A mod that aims to make the landscape of Daggerfall Unity more interesting by procedurally adding geological features such as mountains, cliffs, and dunes to the existing terrain heightmaps at appropriate places in the world.

Currently, these landscape types are featured (though more may be added in the future):

• Swiss Mountains (alpine-style fold mountains, for the densest mountain areas)
• Jordan Mountains ("regular"-style mountains - varies between fold and fault types, and is repurposed for hills)
• IQ Mountains (sparsely placed fold mountains for non-mountainous areas - invented by math genius Inigo Quilez)
• Swiss Canyons (a modified variety of swiss mountains for canyons with cliffs)
• Dunes
• Bumpy Terrain (smooth bumps for non-mountainous areas)
• Rocky terrain (sharp bumps for mountainous areas)

Mountains can be found in large quantities at places in the world that are naturally mountainous, such as the Wrothgarian Mountains and Dragontail Mountaints, but can also be found at rarer intervals and smaller quantities in the rest of the world. A noise mask is used to alternate between the two mountain types.

Hills are mainly found in woodland hills areas, such as the Ilessan Hills and the area between the Wrothgarian Mountains and Wayrest, but can, like mountains, be found to a lesser degree in the rest of the world. Except in the desert; in the desert areas, hills are replaced by dunes.

At places, the original terrain is preserved and used as its own "flatlands" landscape type. Furthermore, the original terrain is preserved at oceans and beaches.

This mod also textures the terrain differently, making cliffs and mountains have a rock texture and at the same time create more interesting grass-dirt variations than the vanilla game offers. There are no more random patches of rock on flat terrain, as they now have mountains and cliffs to serve their purpose.

Purpose and motivation
For a long time, I've been interested in the relationship between procedural generation and nature. While real-life topology appears random and chaotic at a glance, it actually follows natural laws of self-similarity quite closely; if you zoom in on a coastline, for instance, you will find smaller versions of its shape repeating itself. This relationship exists everywhere in nature, from the shaping of continents and mountain ranges down to the segmentation of leaves and grass blades. Mathematical simulations of this phenomenon are referred to as "fractals", and are most famously illustrated in the Mandelbrot sequence.

For some time I've been experimenting with procedurally generating terrains in Unity using so-called fractional Brownian Motion, which is a fractaline noise generator algorithm that iteratively generates self-similar noise patterns while offering fine-grained control over the self-similarity aspect and, by using derivatives in the noise sampling process, makes it possible to simulate naturally occurring phenomena such as hydraulic erosion. The self-similarity and erosion make all the difference between odd looking tall hills and something that the human eyes instantly recognize as mountains.

I've loved Daggerfall since the first time I played it but always found the terrain to be highly uninteresting. Therefore I wanted to introduce this enhanced terrain generation algorithm to the game, but in a way that conforms to the original coastlines and various climate types in Daggerfall, to be both as compatible and lore-friendly as possible, while at the same time introducing enough different landscape types (and variations within each landscape type) to make the world look both natural and interestingly varied. Since the fBM algorithms are quite heavy, and several different fBM algorithms are used to compose the various landscape types, the GPU is used to perform the calculations; the GPU is an often under-utilized super computer that vastly outperforms the CPU when it comes to tasks like this.

Compatibility
Known compatibilities:

• Distant Terrain (disable Improved Terrain Sampler)
• Tedious Travel (be cautious when traveling in mountainous areas, as you can still die from fall damage)
• Airships (requires manual intervention when flying across mountainous areas)
• Realtime Reflection (oddities do occur - will investigate)
• D.R.E.A.M.
• Realistic Grass
• Realistic Wagon
• New Cannon Locations
• Windmills of Daggerfall
• High Resolution Terrain Textures and Splat Terrain Texturing

Known incompatibilities:

• Mountains and Hills (when both are loaded, one will completely overtake the other depending on load order)
• New Locations/Location Loader, and mods depending on it (it currently doesn't support terrains with a max height that's different from vanilla terrains)
• Basic Roads (Interesting Terrains currently doesn't smooth the roads, but plans are on the drawing board)

Other than those listed, this mod should be compatible with most mods. However, oddities and incompatibilities may occur with mods that in any way affects or relies on the vanilla terrain, or was designed specifically with the vanilla terrain in mind.

I have attempted to test Daggerfall Skyshards and Warm Ashes v4 on 0.10.25a, but couldn't get either to work even with Interesting Terrains disabled. If anyone has those two mods successfully enabled, I'd be very interested to know if they're compatible with Interesting Terrains.

Technical details
This mod utilizes a custom Terrain Sampler, which dispatches the job to a compute shader on the main thread, rather than running an async CPU job.

The base tilemap generation has been overtaken by the terrain sampler, which now generates the tileData that the GenerateTileDataJob normally does - a clone of the default TerrainTexturer, in which the afforementioned job has been omitted, has been implemented. If you're the author of a mod that uses a custom TerrainTexturer, and would like to access the generated tileData, there's a mod message handler in place that will provide it as a byte array. Check out the InterestingTerrainTexturer class on GitHub for more info.

Changelog

Version 0.5.2

• Fixed: Faulty location heights on Linux

Version 0.5.1

• Fixed a bug where terrain blending for terrains close to each other glitches
• Improved transition between terrain and locations
• Improved rough heightmap generation (better accuracy in Distant Terrain)
• Implemented initial Basic Roads support (still in extremely early stage - doesn't meet compatibility criteria)

Version 0.5.0

• Updated for DFUnity 0.10.27
• Fix: Location blending is now handled by the mod
• Fix: Texturing around locations now performs properly
• Compatibility: Now works with Distant Terrain
• Misc: Removed 'tui' and 'tss' commands, as the game already has features to make them obsolete

Version 0.4.1

• Fix: Removed bug that caused faulty terrain generation when using localization that doesn't use "." as decimal separator

Version 0.4.0

• Major overhaul: Interesting Terrains is now implemented as a custom Terrain Sampler, making it an organic part of the game's terrain generation flow, rather than a post-processing job. This provides better compatibility with the game itself, and better compatibility with other mods in general.
• Addition: Two new mountain types added, and hills are now a modified (smoothed) version of one of them.
• Tweak: The landscape generator now properly follows the natural laws of mountain formation.
• Fix: Removed Tedious Travel compatibility workarounds, as they caused issues. Fast traveling through mountains is now at your own risk!

Bonus features
A couple of console commands has been added, primarily for my own development-related benefits, but I've left them in the release version because why not. Don't save any important game after using any of these, as I cannot guarantee what would happen in the long run.

• clearnoon: Forwards the time to midday, sets the weather to sunny, and kills all enemies.
• speedy: Toggles "speedy" mode. When enabled, move speed and jump speed are greatly increased, and God Mode is enabled. Takes a number as an optional parameter, which multiplies the movement speed increase for even faster (or slower) speeds.

 

[Luzur]

Ive created a short intro. I hope you like it. Because I do

Utube massacred it a bit - it should be cleaner when ingame.
Its short and just a few cuts, but to get it right, it took me 2 days... because Im quite pedantic about the timing and the interplay of the video and music

And it took a while to decide on the scenes and music

 

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Daggerfall Unity Beta 0.11.0 – Milestone Accomplished
Posted on December 17, 2020 by Interkarma




The first official beta release for Daggerfall Unity is now ready to download from Live Builds page. This is only a small update over 0.10.28 release, which was a “pre-beta” test just to make sure there were no showstopping bugs before Beta proper. If you haven’t already, please read that article for more information about recent builds.

So yeah – beta. The game is feature complete and working well. If you’ve been waiting to play Daggerfall with smooth controls, quality of life improvements, and epic mod support, there has never been a better time than now. We still have some quirks and bugs that need to be fixed, but after 18 months of intensive fixes and improvements during alpha, this game is in pretty good shape. The feedback loop of near-monthly releases to community with rapid fixes over several years has proven to be a good formula for this kind of game. This will continue right through to 1.0 and beyond to make the best version of Daggerfall possible. Only the frequency and magnitude of updates will slow down as there’s not much left on the plate beyond fixing bugs and gradually expanding mod support.

If this is your first time here – welcome! You might also be wondering what Daggerfall Unity is, how it came to be, and who were the people involved? So rather than just info-dump the small number of changes in this release (scroll to the end for that), I thought it might be a good time to take a look back at the journey leading up to this point. We only get to reach beta once, so pull up a chair and settle in for the ultra-condensed version. I won’t bore you with the full history, you can check out the About page and this tweetstorm for more about me and this whole journey.



The Early Days 1996-2003
My name is Gavin “Interkarma” Clayton and Daggerfall Workshop is my site. After buying Daggerfall in 1996, I fell in love with the game. So much so that by 2000/2001, I began writing tools to view textures and 3D models from the game, including small chunks of locations called “blocks”. This culminated in a program called Daggerfall Explorer written for Windows 95, which incredibly still works today. Daggerfall Explorer was written in C++ and used a custom 3D engine on top of DirectX 8.1 which I called the Alchemy Engine. Sweet name, right?





Notable other people around this time were Dave Humphrey who founded the UESP, and Donald Tipton who made several excellent tools. There were many others hacking away at the game data formats back then, and my early efforts build directly on the knowledge they shared. Not everything was well understood, however. Some real basics like how UV coordinates were stored and several other file formats were still a complete mystery. These would continue to be understood as the years rolled by thanks to a sharing and wonderful community.

I continued to build more tools for Daggerfall such as Daggerfall Cartographer (view full cities), Daggerfall Imaging (view and export textures), and Daggerfall Jukebox (play and export music). Late in this tool-building stage, around 2003, I actually attempted a Daggerfall remake that didn’t get off the ground. I didn’t have the experience and the necessary social framework for this kind of project simply didn’t exist, so this attempt failed rather quickly. It was a good learning experience, but my interest faded for a while after that.



More Tools 2009-2012
In 2009, I got back to work building more Daggerfall tools. This time around, I constructed a C# library called Daggerfall Connect to read the game data formats and update with some of the new understanding of file formats that had emerged through the intervening years. This culminated in Daggerfall Imaging 2 and Daggerfall Modelling, both evolutions of my previous tools. By this point, it was possible to explore entire cities and dungeons, and even export models to COLLADA format.









A code library written in C# turned out to be a great decision. This library was very fast and portable between engines – even operating systems. Without realising it, I was laying the foundation of would eventually become Daggerfall Unity.



Daggerfall Tools for Unity 2014
Looking around for something to do while learning the Unity engine in 2014, my wife suggested doing something Daggerfall related. Start with something familiar to learn something new. After a few hours of tinkering, I found my old C# Daggerfall Connect library would plug directly into Unity, and I had the foundation of what became Daggerfall Tools for Unity.





In a couple of months, I had the whole world working with basic exploration and combat, and it was obvious we had something special on our hands. It wasn’t a full remake just yet, but even at this early stage a few contributors had appeared like Lypyl and Nystul, helping to expand the tools and show just how easy it was to create cool Daggerfall stuff. Remixing and rebuilding Daggerfall had never been more open and easy to all-comers.




Daggerfall Unity 2015-Present
By mid-2015, the number of voices asking for a true remake became overwhelming. I drafted a Mission Statement and a Roadmap that would define the next several years of my life, and the lives of many others. By November 2015, the first test build of Daggerfall Unity was released with Character Creation and most of the game’s framework in place. It was pretty raw and I still had no idea how to do a lot of stuff, but the bones were solid and the heart was beating strongly.

This is where other serious contributors started appearing and helping to build the game. After Lypyl and Nystul came TheLacus, InconsolableCellist, Allofich, Hazelnut, Numidium, Meteoric Dragon, Pango, Jay_H, Ferital, JorisVanEijden, and jefetienne. These were the contributors who made frequent and substantial contributions to the game and it’s underlying code.

It’s simply not possible to cover everyone’s work over the last several years in full detail, but I’ll try to cover the highlights. Read back through the update archive on this site for the full history or review our GitHub Contributors page to see just how much work has gone into this game. I’ll keep expanding this list out as the right words come to me. If anyone feels left out here, it’s not intentional. There are just too many people involved and so many years of work to think of everything. If I’ve missed something you’re proud of, please contact me and I’ll add it below.

Lypyl was the very first contributor and champion of Daggerfall Tools for Unity. He reverse engineered and implemented pretty much all remaining dungeon action records, and did some truly wild and wonderful things with DFTFU. He created the Enhanced Sky mod and architected the foundations of the mod system we still use today.

Nystul implemented the Automap and Talk UIs, and some amazing early mods like Distant Terrain and Realtime Reflections. Nystul was also involved in several other systems critical to the game’s early development.

TheLacus is most known for dialling the mod system up to 11 and building on top of Lypyl’s early foundations. TheLacus also documented the Daggerfall Unity API and mod systems in great detail, and created excellent tools around mod and quest authoring. Without this important work, the mod scene would be much smaller than it is today.

Allofich famously excavated the guts of classic Daggerfall to help DFU stay true to classic’s formulas and behaviours. Allofich also implemented advanced enemy AI and much more. His insights into Daggerfall’s inner workings advanced our knowledge well beyond the Chronicles and UESP alone. The game we have today would be far more divergent without him.

Ferital also reverse engineered several vital systems from classic and helped them reach parity in DFU. The talk and reputation systems particularly were refined extensively by Ferital. He’s also known for fixing many texture issues and other small gripes with classic game data so that DFU can be a better experience. On a personal note, Ferital was one of the first to encourage and support my exploring tools back in the early 2000s.

Hazelnut burst onto the scene with horse riding and went on to implement guild services, taverns, potion maker, and much, much more. Hazelnut is also a powerful force in the modding community, building support and helping others come to grips with the mod system. His mods are legendary, including Archaeologists, Roleplay & Realism (with Ralzar in parts), Basic Roads, and more. He is not only one of the most prolific contributors to Daggerfall Unity, he has been a true friend and supported me privately through some of the darker months. There’s no way to accurately capture just how important Hazelnut is to this project.

Meteoric Dragon built Advanced Climbing and other movement & camera systems. He also helped refine systems like underwater swimming, climbing out of water, and smoothly mantling onto a surface. If you walk, run, jump, swim, climb, or fly in Daggerfall Unity then you’ve experienced Meteoric Dragon’s work. He also added some work to the effect system and a few other subsystems beyond movement.

Jay_H was our resident quest ninja, building hundreds of new quests for Quest Pack 1 while performing deep fixes and improvements to the classic quests. Jay_H was also a positive force in the community helping others come to grips with the quest system and always ready with kindness for others. He helped moderate the forums and keep our little corner of the web a nice place to visit.

JorisVanEijden expanded our knowledge of the quest system, helping it to reach closer parity with classic. He also refined many subsystems and expanded on areas where my work could be considered “placeholder” at best. Joris was another one who patiently supported me when I struggled to understand something fully. The game is better in several places thanks to his help.

Jefetienne constructed the controller input system while overhauling and improving many part of input and related UIs. He is also known for opening some parts of the core game up to mod system, and helping to find and fix several bugs. He also created the screenshot feature and advanced keybinds UI.

Numidium is best known for custom class creator, class questionnaire, and many fixes and improvements across the core game. Numidium also implemented several artifacts for the effect system and bug fixes in other parts of the game.

Pango is another prolific core contributor to Daggerfall Unity. He worked hard through every system of the game, fixing bugs and improving as he went. I’ve watched him support people on several platforms in multiple languages. There just aren’t enough words for how important Pango was to this whole process. There was no job too big or too small for him to take on. He filled in the blanks where my own knowledge was lacking, and remained patient with me when I lacked understanding. Daggerfall Unity would be half the game it is today without his patient and clever hands on the wheel alongside us.

On the modding side, there are also many notable figures who deserve a mention.

King of Worms created the amazing D.R.E.A.M. mod which enhances almost every part of Daggerfall Unity from the textures to the music, to little touches like night and day dungeon exits. His work became so familiar that to many people it’s simply impossible to play Daggerfall Unity without his mods installed.

AlexanderSig crafted the sublime handpainted 3D models to uplift the base assets and even replace many 2D objects with true 3D objects. His work is also closely associated with Daggerfall Unity.

Uncanny_Valley is behind Taverns Redone, Mountains & Hills, and more.

Ralzar has created almost a dozen fantastic mods like Climates & Calories, Torch Taker, Realistic Wagon, Unlevelled Loot, and more. He has also been active helping users across the forums and on reddit.

Kamer is the mastermind behind the fiendish Warm Ashes quest mods pack, adding dangerous encounters around dungeons, wilderness encounters, sieges, and more. He has also created visual mods adding Rocks and Windmills, and expanded on town populations in Villager Immersion Overhaul.

There are so many others who made important contributions helping Daggerfall Unity become what it is today. Head over to the Credits topic on forums to see a complete list. In total, more than 45 people helped to make Daggerfall Unity. That’s just on the development side, it doesn’t count the modders and scores of community members reporting bugs over the years. Something that started as a small solo project quickly exploded into one of the most comprehensive and successful fan recreations of a classic game to date. Even if you hold no love for this project, it’s hard to deny just how hard everyone worked, how much love was involved, and how successful the project model proved to be.



Plea for a Future
Daggerfall Unity is made by the Daggerfall community out of love and love alone. This project has never been and will never be monetised. This site has no advertisements and no donation button. I didn’t create a Patreon for the whole of Daggerfall Unity’s development. Every time someone offered to contribute money to me or the project, I politely refused. At every turn, I tried to send a clear message this project is not about making money from Bethesda’s intellectual property. Even the name Daggerfall Unity is more a play on words – it references the engine used but is really a testament to the open development process. Daggerfall Community Edition would have been just as good a name.

Furthermore, you must own a copy of Daggerfall for the asset files essential to make Daggerfall Unity work. It’s a drop-in engine replacement over the original game, not a standalone product. Thankfully, Daggerfall itself has been freely available from Bethesda themselves and many other places online for several years. This means DFU is really a free upgrade to a free game, made by the community for the community.

For all these years, Bethesda has quietly tolerated our tiny presence working in their shadow to rebuild and reimagine their greatest early game. They could have squashed this project at any time, but mercifully chose to let it thrive as an offshoot to the wider Elder Scrolls modding scene. For that, I want to say thankyou. From the bottom of my heart – thank you. This game means the world to me and many thousands of other people. I’ve been contacted by people who said this game played a part in helping them out of depression and reconnecting with friends, that it made their lives better. I believe these heartfelt words and it brings me joy to know all these years of work have brought other people some happiness.

With that, I want to make a simple plea. Please let Daggerfall Unity continue to thrive in the hands of the community who created it. As ownership of The Elder Scrolls passes to Microsoft and into new hands, please let this project continue to be everything it can be. This is something special and virtually unique. A functioning and complete fan recreation that survived not only its own development but the potential of being shut down at any time. It’s a strange and beautiful thing that has no real right to exist, and yet here it is. Please let it continue to be.



Conclusion
That’s all from me for now. Daggerfall Unity is feature complete and can only get better from here. The beta builds are ready for download and Nexus has well over a hundred Daggerfall Unity mods all ready for your enjoyment. Go play and be happy, then send us some feedback. We made it so far thanks to positivity and encouragement from others, and I’m confident that will continue into the future as we approach 1.0. Even as our many developers come and go, the project itself lives on with its singular spirit of collaboration.

As promised, there are a few changes in the 0.11.0 release. Here’s a quick list for anyone wanting the patch notes for this version.

• Alternate Music setting to play FM versions of songs (Numidium)
• Allow custom Renderer for ObjectPositioner (TheLacus)
• Improve indoor guard spawns to use farthest entrance (Numidium)
• Harden SettingsManager against bad values read to reduce most cases of broken settings.ini causing a black screen (Interkarma)
• Flag emission for special case windows 036_2, 151_3, 154_3, 351_3 (Interkarma)
• Fix desert Mages Guild window emission (Interkarma)

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

decided to start this game up. It's pretty great! I liked dying 32 times to the skeleton before looking on youtube for help and finding out most people just run past them.

Oh well! I can't wait to start questing!

 

[Luzur]

Hi fellow modders!

I just wanted to introduce you to a very small tweak for Daggerfalls Wilderness I am currently working on.
Do you also think that the wilderness in Daggerfall seems to take Social Distancing a little bit too far?
Usually plants, trees and rocks don't group together and keep their respectful distance from each other, which doesn't really feel "wild" at all.

The idea of my tweak (not sure if it deserves to be called a "mod") was to redistribute the nature billboards for a more believable, dense and natural look. So far I only got to tweaking Temperate Summer/Winter Climate and Mountain Climate. I hope it won't be too taxing on most computers, as I squeeze out the max count of billboards

Enough words, let the pictures speak for themselves:

Temperate Climate Summer

Mountain Climate Summer

Let me hear, what you guys think!

Known Issues:
Since it is my first mode, expect some spaghetti code and bugs, such as hovering billboards and a lack of compatibility with other mods such as BasicRoads and Trees of Daggerfall.

 

[Luzur]

[Overhaul Project] Daggerfall Unity Re-imagined
Post by Magicono43 » Fri Oct 16, 2020 11:49 pm

So since i'm currently working on this, I figure I may as well start a thread for those that might be interested, and to have a place to post any of my progress in a somewhat organized fashion. In a similar fashion to l3lessed's "Combat Overhaul Alpha" Project, I recently started working on my own project in this way, that being I have forked the main DFU github repo and am working on an overhaul project of my own. The main reason I did this was that of impatience and laziness on my part to be honest, I was getting tired of trying to wrestle with things I have no clue how to work on myself, that being lots of the back-end work required to make more complex mods that don't already have support framework made by the many amazing contributors to the DFU project. These things I am sure will come with time, but clearly not in short enough order for my personal creative fervor to wait for. So that's why I started this personal fork, so I can edit the code directly without having to wait on PR commits to go through and constantly wrestle with the back-end coding that I have very little experience and confidence doing myself.

Now with that introduction context out of the way, i'll try and explain what my general plan is with this project. It's fairly vague and very broad, as I don't really have a specific end-goal in mind for this overhaul, as I pretty much would like to use this as the playground that I can hopefully make Daggerfall to be the game I always wanted it to be, as well as a place to hopefully hone my own skills along the way as well. But as of right now, i'm currently working on the base combat mechanics, which are basically going to be a more detailed extension of the ideas that my "Physical Combat And Armor Overhaul" had added through the proper modding system. I still plan on keeping the dice rolling system and skill checks and such, but much more detailed and hopefully more logical to my own rational.

One of the basic designs I am working toward is to make all the materials currently in the game to have some unique purpose or function, instead of just a straight linear equipment progression like the base Daggerfall has. After some discussion with Ralzar who has more actual Table-top RPG experience than I have by a wide margin, for now I have decided to go with a system that is not completely non-linear, but is much more open than the vanilla system.

The current system I have in mind has most of the damage dealt broken down into different "damage types" for the physical aspect it is currently Bludgeoning, Slashing, Piercing, and based on a bunch of other factors that I have not yet 100% worked out yet, this will all culminate into a system where some materials are best at dealing one damage type, and weak to other damage types in terms of the materials of armors as well. With this I added six new properties to weapons and armors.

Density = Blunt
Shear = Slashing/Cutting
Fracture = Piercing
Melting Point = Extra condition/damage from fire if low
Conductivity = Extra damage from electrical attacks if high
Brittleness = Extra condition/damage from ice attacks when high

With these, I can hopefully make all the materials in the game fill a different purpose to some degree and feel different from one another, instead of one just being a straight upgrade from another in every way. With this added emphasis on materials being different, I also wanted to make these various materials feel more "real" in the world like these is some supply and demand sort of thing going on. So I will likely add new items that will serve this purpose, likely ingots or chunks of material of some kind that will be necessary to repair equipment at black-smiths and the like. So maybe it will take 3 orcish ingots to repair that orcish chest-plate of yours, and 1 to repair that orcish dagger. But, if you can't supply the material yourself, perhaps the black-smith can pull from their "emergency supply" at a cost premium, something around those lines.

Also with this, I will try and do something similar with the magic damage types as well, basically giving each enemy unique damage resistances/weaknesses to different types of magic and damage types and such, which is something I have already played around with in my PCO mod with Iron Atronachs and Gargoyles for example being weak to certain weapons, but very resistant to others, but in this case I can hopefully also tack this onto the magic system, not just the physical combat part.

Now, there are obviously hundreds of other ideas and "improvements" that I will be adding to this project, such as my currently WIP skills and training improvements, something I can only currently do by editing the base code in this way, or even changing how the AI functions to hopefully be more challenging and add more spells to their pools and such, lots and lots of potential things I will be working on here.

As I said, i'll be updating this thread periodically, as well as occasionally making commits to the github fork itself which you can find here, Magicono's DFU Overhaul Project. So if you are interested in this, feel free to give any input or questions, as I plan to eventually release this to the public as well for use for those interested in this sort of Daggerfall Overhaul, thanks for reading!

Here is some of the testing I had done to show I added the six mentioned properties to weapons and armor:

Capture (5).JPG (30.27 KiB) Viewed 1858 times
Also, here is the spreadsheet I finished just a few hours ago that I will be using as a main reference for the various damage resistances/weakness of the various enemies currently in the game.
Daggerfall-Enemy-Dam-Type-Resists.rar
(11.54 KiB) Downloaded 16 times
So after getting to a point where I needed to make a decision, I now have a better general idea of how I think i'm going to do this, at least number-wise. Here is a first go draft for the values I plan on using for the various weapons in the game, these are all base values, so without any modifiers. With that in mind, i'm likely going to want to reduce these somewhat since they might become a bit too high with added modifiers and such.

Edit 1: So I did a quick re-evaluation of the base damage values I drafted and decided to reduce them across the board as to allow for more room for additional modifiers later that will hopefully not make the damage off the charts. Here is the new draft:

Capture.JPG (80.56 KiB) Viewed 1533 times
ATTACHMENTS
Daggerfall-Base-Damage-Values-Draft-1.rar
(9.24 KiB) Downloaded 13 times

 

[V_K]

Hi fellow modders!

I just wanted to introduce you to a very small tweak for Daggerfalls Wilderness I am currently working on.
Do you also think that the wilderness in Daggerfall seems to take Social Distancing a little bit too far?
Usually plants, trees and rocks don't group together and keep their respectful distance from each other, which doesn't really feel "wild" at all.

The idea of my tweak (not sure if it deserves to be called a "mod") was to redistribute the nature billboards for a more believable, dense and natural look. So far I only got to tweaking Temperate Summer/Winter Climate and Mountain Climate. I hope it won't be too taxing on most computers, as I squeeze out the max count of billboards

Enough words, let the pictures speak for themselves:

Temperate Climate Summer

Mountain Climate Summer

Let me hear, what you guys think!

Known Issues:
Since it is my first mode, expect some spaghetti code and bugs, such as hovering billboards and a lack of compatibility with other mods such as BasicRoads and Trees of Daggerfall.

Finally. Frankly, I'll take proper wilderness over roads any day. I was quite disappointed with the roads mod because they don't match to city gates anyway.

 

[Luzur]

Check out these new city guards for VIO. Sporting new threads to represent knights of Daggerfall.

Hammerfell/Sentinel guards. Keeping vanilla colors until I'm done with the sprites completely.

 

[Luzur]

Re: Warm Ashes: Dangerous Dungeon Exteriors
Post by Kamer » Thu Jan 21, 2021 4:21 am

Warm Ashes Final Release

Warm Ashes Version 3 will be the final version of this mod. I had plans fora V4 to upgrade into a DFMOD but i ultimately decided to cancle that version.
I do not plan to go back to this version either however. In the future, expect an extended version of the modules but as separate mods. So for now,
I've updated the classic Warm Ashes quest files to add some features before I call it final.


Spoiler!

Warm Ashes v3.0.4 (Final)

-Added infighting to the encounters. (Sieges are compatible with the Mercs mod)
-Siege Bosses get abilities to heal and use certain buffs on themselves.
-Sieges now has music to represent the different waves of enemies.
-Wilderness system has been once again been tweaked.

This might not be the final release, I will fix any bugs that may be in this version, but when it comes to content, this is as far as it goes. Thanks for all the feedback and support these few years.



Installation

Step 1: Extract contents of zip file to .\DaggerfallUnity_Data\StreamingAssets. This will place "WAQ00.txt" through "WAQ06.txt" in your "Quests" folder, and the "Kamer" folder in "QuestPacks".

Step 2: Start Daggerfall Unity.

Step 3 - New Game
Click Play.
Start a new character.
After creation is complete, you'll get prompts asking if you want to enable things.
Verify quests have started by pressing "Shift-Tab".

Step 3 - Load Game:
(This only needs to be done ONCE after mod install, per character!)
Make sure "Advanced > Enhancements > Game Console" is enabled.
Click Play.
Load existing character.
Open console with ( ~ or ` ) key
Type "start quest WAQ##", without quotes, replacing the ## with the number of the module. Do this six times in total, 00 through 05.
Verify quests have started by pressing "Shift-Tab".

Download

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

Anyone got any tips? I'm in the nearest town. I'm built for magic/fighter Dark Elf. Should I go to the fighter's guild first?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Anyone got any tips? I'm in the nearest town. I'm built for magic/fighter Dark Elf. Should I go to the fighter's guild first?

Loot smaller dungeons until you can afford a horse.

 

[V_K]

Actually, speaking of smaller dungeong, get the mod that reduces the size of sidequest dungeons to the minimum supported by the engine. It makes them both more manageable and more varied since blocks are reused less.

 

[Konjad]

Buy TESO and enjoy almost whole Tamriel (+Clockwork City) with non-random human-placed areas, much improved architecture, useful crafting, modern graphics, and generally much better game overall (though it does have its downsides such as MMO mechanics). It's not like modern Bethturd games, and is made by people who don't mind TES lore (unlike Todd who gets his feelings hurt by it) and less family-friendly characters and quests.

Daggerfall was cool at the time, but when I think of playing it nowadays I get shivers.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

Daggerfall was cool at the time, but when I think of playing it nowadays I get shivers.

Noooo you can't enjoy good graphics, you should bury yourself in the 90s fossils and ignore the reality like a true RPG gamer.

 

[Konjad]

Daggerfall was cool at the time, but when I think of playing it nowadays I get shivers.

Noooo you can't enjoy good graphics, you should bury yourself in the 90s fossils and ignore the reality like a true RPG gamer.

Actually graphics are the least of a problem, Beth games were always quite shit in general.

I don't want to write an essay why, so let's do a quick comparison.

What does Morrowind have that any other modern RPG doesn't? Interesting lore and... uhh... big mushrooms... and a decent modding tool.

What does Gothic have that any other modern RPG doesn't? Wonderfully designed world, realistic NPCs (their daily life and quick down-to-earth dialogues), decent AI (wolves hunting scavengers, an NPC meeting superior enemy not fighting but running away), quests that are rarely unrelated to everything around, and usually not dumb fetch tasks, active combat (unlike press LMB in TES), and fascinating hand-crafted world where every place feels unique (no need to even bother with a map).

What Beth always did was just KEWL GRAPHIX and LOOK AT THIS ENORMOUS WORLD (but it's random-generated diarrhea or half-generated turd).

 

[Butter]

Anyone got any tips? I'm in the nearest town. I'm built for magic/fighter Dark Elf. Should I go to the fighter's guild first?

Get a horse and cart. Clear dungeons and sell your loot when you get back to town. Repeat until you get bored.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

So many daggerfall mods... what to choose?

 

[Gregz]

So many daggerfall mods... what to choose?

This is an amazing project with excellent mod support. 10/10

Which MODs would you recommend? I don't mind MODs changing mechanics or adding a ton of things, I've beat Daggerfall decades ago, so I'm not too keen on playing the same game again.

• D.R.E.A.M.
• Daggerfall Unity Quest Pack 1
• No Rush Main Quest
• No Dice - RNG Remover on level up.
• Inventory Filter
• Carry Weight Customizer

 

[V_K]

So many daggerfall mods... what to choose?

Smaller dungeons are essential. Quest pack is very nice to have some more quest variety.
Visual enhancements are up to you. Personally, I decided not to get DREAM because I don't like those upscaled sprites. Get distant terrain, enhanced sky and real grass - and then see with how much pixellation you can live with.

 

[Casual Hero]

Anyone got any tips? I'm in the nearest town. I'm built for magic/fighter Dark Elf. Should I go to the fighter's guild first?

Loot smaller dungeons until you can afford a horse.

Also worth noting that a cart is cheaper than a horse, and is very handy for carrying loot out of dungeons. You can go to the dungeon exit and load items into the cart so you don't have to make as many trips.

Edit: Ah, looks like this has already been mentioned.
So instead I'll say that my favorite mod is the skybox mod. I'm not a huge fan of the DREAM pack, but replacing the original sky "paintings" with a more realistic one improves the atmosphere a lot, imo.

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

I had to restart, but only because I got given a completely insane quest to go find a pet tiger. On top of that, it was in a nightmare castle filled with instakill skeletons and underwater bullshit. In general, the game gives me tons of quests that basically fuck me sideways, and every NPC in the game regardless of reputation is a mouthy shithead who tells me to fuck off no matter how polite I am.

I don't hate this but what was the name of that mod that makes dungeons smaller?

 

[Casual Hero]

I had to restart, but only because I got given a completely insane quest to go find a pet tiger. On top of that, it was in a nightmare castle filled with instakill skeletons and underwater bullshit. In general, the game gives me tons of quests that basically fuck me sideways, and every NPC in the game regardless of reputation is a mouthy shithead who tells me to fuck off no matter how polite I am.

I don't hate this but what was the name of that mod that makes dungeons smaller?

Actually iirc it isn't a mod; its one of those experimental options you can set in the main menu.
There should be a check-box for it.

 

[V_K]

I had to restart, but only because I got given a completely insane quest

You can safely refuse quests you don't like, it doesn't lower reputation. Failing them, on the other hand, does.

every NPC in the game regardless of reputation is a mouthy shithead who tells me to fuck off no matter how polite I am.

You have to be polite with nobles and (possibly) merchants, but commoners react better to being blunt (or neutral). Generally, you can get a whiff of what stance to use from how the NPC is speaking. If s/he tells you to fuck off outright, definitely switch to blunt.

I don't hate this but what was the name of that mod that makes dungeons smaller?

It's not on Nexus, see here how to activate it: https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?t=1689

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Funny, I always wanted the dungeons to be bigger. I never got beyond daggerfall but the difference between Arena & dag dungeons is pretty big. Its sort if like comparing Terminator Rampage vs Future Shock/Skynet.

 

[Narushima]

It's funny to see what forests look like in video games set in a medieval era equivalent, and how, even with a mod like that, it's nowhere near the forest coverage that existed in the Middle Ages. That would definitely be one of the most visible differences if you were suddenly tranported back in time (that and the packs of wolves that roamed those gigantic forests).
The image below shows the difference between the year 1000 and the year 1300 :