Vapourware Daggerfall Unity isnt Vaporware

[Luzur]

A New Main Quest BETA

• Quote

Post by Jay_H » Tue Jun 01, 2021 9:33 am

I added this to Nexus awhile ago, but that was while I was off the forums.

A New Main Quest!

This is a fairly short quest mod that completely supplants the Daggerfall main quest. It's sort of an alternate reality version, where (1) people are competent and helpful; (2) you're no longer the errand child for three foreign nations; (3) the threat facing the world is real and imminent; (4) you can summarize what happened in a single paragraph.

Lysandus' death takes a backseat to the real danger to the world, immediately revealed as Numidium. With the help of a few court wizards, you're the leading force to discovering how to control Numidium and who'll decide the future of western Tamriel.

This is incompatible with any installation that runs the normal Main Quest. The whole main quest backbone is rewritten, since many variables are completely unnecessary now. It's linear, it's short, it's somewhat challenging, and I hope it'll be more entertaining and comprehensible than the main quest we're used to.

This is a BETA because there are features I would like to add in the future, but the entire game is complete from start to finish. Since it doesn't have a lot of moving parts there isn't very much that can go wrong; I'm fairly confident it has few or no bugs.

If you want to go back from ANMQ to the normal Main Quest, you'll need to revert the changes done to the quests. The easiest way to do that is just to reinstall Daggerfall Unity (upgrading to a new version does precisely that; if you choose, ANMQ can be installed on a different version than you're normally playing on). You can try to rebuild the backbone, _BRISIEN and so forth, but it's really just easier to reinstall.

 

[Luzur]

[MOD] Lively Cities

• Quote

Post by Cliffworms » Sat Aug 21, 2021 5:23 am

Lively Cities

Download on Daggerfall Unity Nexus

Download on GitHub (Loose files)



Lively Cities adds static NPCs on the streets of Daggerfall's cities and smaller settlements. You may stumble upon beggars, tavern patrons, prostitutes, priests, commoners, children, minstrels and acrobats the next time you're in town.

These NPCs can be interacted with and some are guild members who will recognize you if you are a fellow guildmate. They cannot give quests or be involved in quests.

In addition, because I used buildings' exteriors to place NPCs, I added quest markers to 46 houses that had none. This means that there are 46 new quest locations that can be used for quests. I also fixed floating lights and aligned furniture with the walls for every building I used. You may thus see less visual oddities inside the houses I edited.

Using Carademono's Animated People is highly recommended, as it brings all NPCs to life with new animations.


Note that, for the moment, desert towns are not fully covered because of the lack of Redguard NPCs. Should the modding community create those, I'll gladly populate these locations.

Note also that the NPCs are not disabled at night, as it is not currently possible to do so.

Some more screenshots :

 

[Luzur]

[MOD-wip] Faithful 3D Animals
Post by Ninelan » Sat Sep 25, 2021 8:40 am

Faithful 3D Animals attempts to, as the name suggests, faithfully recreate the static animal billboards as best as it can.
There are some TLC tweaks on animal scaling, with some animals appearing much larger than their sprite form to better fit the world environment, namely the camels.

More images:
Spoiler!

Grab a copy of the alpha version here:
Works with the 0.13 preview build.
Windows: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LIV9K9 ... sp=sharing
Linux: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OLrZWL ... sp=sharing
OSX: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xutMCb ... sp=sharing

Github backup: https://github.com/Carnimec/DF-Faithful-3D-Animals
Current completion issues.
-The models produce no sound will be handled in the update.
-The models do not animate.
Once the new update for DFU is around for the public, the mod will be released properly on the Nexus.


Lively 3D animals of Daggerfall -The sister project by l3lessed and me.

Wishlist tracker:
1. Minor texture variation. (Some mud in random places, nothing crazy)
2. Minor size variation: have the models be randomly made up to 10%? smaller or bigger.
3. Potentially: Tacked horse for Ralzar's Realistic Wagon.

-The horse:

 

[Luzur]

Lively 3D Animals of Daggerfall (Extension Mod)

• Quote

Post by l3lessed » Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:16 pm

I'm at a point where my extension of Ninelan's very impressive Faithful 3D animals mod needs it's own area.



PURPOSE
The original purpose of this mod was to add a variety of random shapes and textures to the 3d animals to make them look more realistic and immersive. However, as usual with me, feature creep began as Ninelan provided more and more amazing content to work with and design around. Now it has led to a large overhaul deserving of its own area and mod file.

The end goal is to provide fully interactive, roaming, semi-intelligent animals to the world of daggerfall using Ninelans models and animation work as the base for the mod structure and any future animals others provide/want to add on their own.

CURRENT FEATURES TESTED & IN

• Dynamic Animal Skins: All animals will grab a variety of skins from their dynamic skin array, which is loaded on game launch from the "streaming assets/textures/Lively 3D Animals of Daggerfall" directory.
  
• Dynamic Skins User Friendly Loading Feature: All animal skins are stored in the "streaming assets/textures/Lively 3D Animals of Daggerfall" directory and loaded on game launch. This means anyone can edit, add, or remove whatever skins they wish by editing the files in the directories and see it in game on next game launch.
  
• Dynamic Animal Behavior: Animals will have behavior states that control their behaviors in a basic way. Currently there are two behavior states in; idle playing idle animations and roaming in an area. I plan to add a number of others including eating, playing, and resting behaviors that are time sensitive.
  
• Realistic Movement: Animals will increase their movement speed the further they move up to their max walk/run speed, and then start slowing down when they get close to their destination.
  
• Realistic Animation Speeds: Walking and running animation speeds are directly tied to their current movement speed to ensure they remain as realistic as possible and minimize unrealistic looking ice skating/dancing appearances.
  
• Dynamic & Blending Animations: Animals have custom animations made for their models and these animations are blended together using unities built in animation object.
  
• Mesh Colliders: Models are scanned and added mesh colliders to their models so the animal will have realistic collisions based on the actual shape of the mode.
  
• Character Controller: The animals will have a character controller attached and used to ensure they interact properly with the "physical" world of daggerfall. This will also allow me to create ridable 3d horses at some point.

FUTURE FEATURES

• Possible ridable horses. All parts are in place for it now, the script just needs coded.
• killable animals.
• animals that belong to the area and cause criminal complaints of killed.
• animals that provide some basic loot, like meat and skin.
• animals you can feed and make your followable pet. Looking at you dogs and cats especially.

CURRENTLY COMPLETED ANIMATALS

• Horse: 90%
  
• Everything Else: 10%

 

[mastroego]

It looks like it might still take a good while until "everything" has been perfected.
But it's amazing that the project ever got to this point.

 

[Narushima]

It looks like it might still take a good while until "everything" has been perfected.

If you're talking about all the things above, that's just mods. The game itself is complete.

 

[mastroego]

I did mean mods.
Though if the authors name the current version of the game proper 0.13beta, one would think there's lot to revise there too, at the very least.
But it wasn't criticism, just an observation.

 

[Sykar]

So is this worth the bandwith now or is it mostly unfinished still? Not sure if this was posted but there is this:
https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity/mods/5



Not bad tbh.

 

[Sykar]

Gave it a whirl with quite a mod list. A lot of amazing stuff on the nexus and works overall decent. My favorites are the changes to rogues where stealth skills actually affect thief quests, unleveled thief skills and spells plus functional race bonuses.
D.R.E.A.M with increased population mods are also great to make towns and villages feel more alive.

 

[Sykar]

Anyone wanna share his or her favorite builds?

 

[Lemming42]

Linguist is an interesting build since DF Unity fixes the language skills. In the early stages you get absolutely obliterated by everyone, so you need some combat or magic skills to compensate, but if your language skills upgrade effectively then by the time you get to Orsinium in the main quest, nobody's attacking you.

 

[Valdetiosi]

Everytime I play my Nord with immunity to frost, extra damage towards animals and phobia to undead. Axe and Archery is what he uses and the only magic is mysticism, rest skills are geared for movement.
It's just that Daggerfall is maybe the only elder scrolls series with some verticality, barring Morrowind, but that one is exclusive with Levitation, here you can climb.

 

[Sykar]

I love it that you can climb. Only think that it feels a bit fast at times.

 

[Poseidon00]

Anyone wanna share his or her favorite builds?

Stealth and language. Watch enemies fight it out against each other. Outrun your enemies with athletics and jump over em with acrobatics. Climb walls as a last resort. Innate resistance to magic so they cant blast you while you escape

 

[whydoibother]

Is this stable and feature complete yet?

 

[index.php]

 

[Poseidon00]

Dang vanilla DUnity looks better than ever.

 

[Narushima]

I think that looks worse than ever. That dungeon corridor looks leathery. And bloom and motion blur? What's this, the early 2000s? Good thing that's all optional.

 

[index.php]

Daggerfall Unity 0.13 Rendering Update – Part 3
Posted on November 25, 2021 by Interkarma


In this third and final instalment, Daggerfall Unity’s rendering review wraps up by fixing more bugs and giving Retro Mode some overdue love. Preview release 0.13.3 is now available on Releases page.

To quickly recap, this review set out to resolve problem of specular “shine” from Unity’s default Standard shader, switch to more accurate and flexible linear lighting space, and upgrade postprocessing stack to PPv2. Along the way, we fixed many small problems with loose texture mods and reviewed lighting. Almost every part of the game involved with drawing something to screen was inspected and tuned up if tuning was needed.

Thanks to community feedback, we were able to address several issues created by initial 0.13 preview release. Our new shaders were extended to support more PBR capabilities. The game received an extensible “Effect Settings” UI to configure postprocessing and other effects at runtime. We helped several mod authors overcome compatibility issues so their mod works with 0.13 and beyond.

With all the large changes now settling down, we could start refining a few things. Here’s what’s new in 0.13.3.

Remove Nature Shadows
Projecting shadows from 2D billboards comes with downsides. These are just 2D cutouts rotating to face camera, so their shadow either twists and turns with billboard or stays fixed in place. Fixed shadows look better overall, but results in any asymmetry becoming disconnected from cutout when seen from the wrong angle.


Nature shadows had other tradeoffs too. In deferred rendering, screen objects always receive shadows, which means trees received self-shadow artifacts while rotating. To workaround this problem, it was necessary to render nature objects in transparent queue which doesn’t write to depth buffer. This in turn created other problems with rendering elements relying on depth information.

After trialling more solutions and workarounds, it became obvious these shadows were causing too many issues for a minor aesthetic hack that only looked good some of the time. Considering classic didn’t have tree shadows either, the best solution was to simply remove them.

If you prefer these nature shadows despite their limitations, you can switch them back on by opening settings.ini and changing “NatureBillboardShadows=False” into True.

Please keep in mind that enabling nature shadows will revert them to transparent rendering queue, so trees and other nature billboards will not operate fully with effects requiring depth information – Ambient Occlusion, Retro Mode Postprocess, ColorBoost, to name a few.

Retro Mode Enhancements
Retro Mode is a feature in Daggerfall Unity where camera renders to a 320×200 or 640×400 resolution target before scaling output into your display area. The feature also comes with postprocess settings for palettization or posterization to crush palette down to fewer colours with neat side-effects like colour banding from nearby light sources.

From 0.13.3, Retro Mode is now in the Game Effects UI. You can access these settings from drop-down arrow at top-left of screen when game is on pause menu.

In addition to previous settings for retro mode and postprocess, you now have the option to adjust render scale into 4:3 or 16:10. Enabling either of these settings will scale output to selected aspect ratio inside your actual screen area. If you have a wider screen, e.g. 16:9, then vertical pillarbox bars are added.



Previously this aspect correction was only available as a hacky workaround by fiddling with resolution and UI scaling settings, which was error prone and didn’t work under all platforms. Now with this in Game Effects UI, you can switch around these settings at runtime without restarting game.

If you’re coming from an older version of Daggerfall Unity and have already setup Retro Mode based on the old hacky method, please reset your game resolution back to something with correct aspect ratio for your monitor. For example, if you have a 1920×1080 monitor and set your game resolution to 1280×960 to force the aspect change, please set your game resolution back to 1920×1080 or some other 16:9 resolution. You also no longer need to enable “FreeScaling” option, which has been removed from 0.13.3. This is now all handled automatically in-game from checkboxes shown above, along with fixes for problems created by the old FreeScaling option.

One final note about Retro Mode – now that you can switch settings at runtime and change aspect ratio, not all mods will support runtime switching of resolution or aspect. Any mods rendering to a stacked camera (e.g. Enhanced Sky, Distant Terrain) will need added support for runtime resolution switching (update: Enhanced Sky has this support from v3.0.2). Also custom UI mods might need to add aspect handling based on how they calculate screen position. If you have problems with a mod in Retro Mode, try restarting game, switching off aspect correction, or switching off Retro Mode entirely.

ColorBoost Effect
The best way to introduce ColorBoost is by talking about darkness in dungeons. Daggerfall dungeons aren’t dark, exactly. They’re actually quite bright near player then ramp down sharply into darkness after 30 metres or so. This is technically a requirement of lower draw distance in classic, but it creates a uniquely claustrophobic feeling. In classic, even light sources fade into darkness at range. To put it another way, there’s a high contrast between brightness levels depending on distance from player.

See below classic screenshots for example. Here our player is standing near throne lift in Privateer’s Hold. Note how environment around player is rather bright then ramps down into blackness at farthest point.


If you walk down toward that farthest point and turn around, now the brightly lit area near throne is plunged into darkness and world near player is bright instead. Step back a few more metres and area above stairs becomes totally black. Even those bright torches will fade away.


Daggerfall Unity uses a modern naturalistic lighting system where this kind of thing doesn’t happen. Lights have radius and intensity, and geometry is either touched by some amount light or not. In a naturalistic environment, torches don’t stop casting light behind themselves just because player walked a few dozen metres away.

It’s not quite feasible to capture classic’s rendering and lighting perfectly here (totally different engines and lighting systems after all) but it is possible to create more contrast between near and far brightness to capture this same atmosphere.

Let’s start with a screenshot of Daggerfall Unity, once again at top of stairs in Privateer’s Hold looking down. Note how distant torches still affect the wall behind them, and scene overall is rather uniform in brightness. A ramp down into darkness isn’t present at all.


Now ColorBoost comes into play. This postprocessing effect can both increase brightness near player and produce ramp down into darkness inside dungeons. Compare above screen with one below, and note difference in contrast between near and far points. Even the torches start to fade into darkness at range.


In addition to atmosphere, this gives you another way to tune brightness to your preference. Some ColorBoost will brighten things up without completely flattening or over-brightening whole scene. The dungeon falloff effect has adjustable strength down to 0 (disabled).

ColorBoost was originally intended to help in Retro Mode with posterization / palettization enabled, and it’s recommend to use a good amount of ColorBoost in combination with those effects.

Here’s a another shot of stairs in Daggerfall Unity at 320×200 16:10 Retro Mode with adjusted ColorBoost settings. This is finally approaching reasonable parity with classic Daggerfall’s dungeon atmosphere despite underlying engine differences.


You can enable ColorBoost at any time and it will work alongside your mods, lighting setup, and other settings.

Speaking of mods and settings, you’ll likely need to dial-in ColorBoost to suit your environment and preferences. Everyone can have a unique setup and world can light very differently as a result. For this reason, ColorBoost config page has several sliders to help dial-in Radius of effect, global Intensity, strength of effect in Dungeons, Exteriors, Interiors, and control Dungeon Falloff. Like all effects, ColorBoost is disabled by default.


General Improvements & Fixes
This release also brings several minor fixes and refinements:

• Don’t use transparent queue for standalone cutout billboards so they operate with AO and other depth effects
• Fix volume collider blocking spells and other missiles (fixed in 0.13.2b)
• Flag window textures in archives 171-173 to support emissive from replacements
• Allow changing retro mode settings at runtime
• Remove global UI FreeScaling method, this is now part of retro mode aspect correction
• Fix overlapping text in popup message boxes with FreeScaling enabled
• Change protections on MaterialReader Uniforms to public
• Fix StreamingWorld.TrackLooseObject “mapPixelX” and “mapPixelY” (KABoissonneault)
• Fix retro mode colour accuracy with higher precision render textures
• Hide spell icons when pause options dropdown is open
• Refine automap panel sizing with custom screen rect

Conclusion
We have now reached the end of rendering review in 0.13. Unless a blocking issue is found, the “preview” tag will be dropped from next release. Moving forward, there are no more large changes scheduled to engine or rendering, only bug fixes and minor refinements. This is to ensure best possible stability and mod compatibility moving towards 1.0.

If you are a mod author, please ensure your mod is rebuilt and tested compatible for 0.13.3. This release is very close to next full Beta release without “preview” tag.

Thank you for reading, and for playing Daggerfall Unity!

 

[agris]

Maybe it's my eyes, but this

OG Daggerfall

looks a helluva lot better than this

Daggerfall w/ ColorBoost(TM)(R)

Also, "ColorBoost"? Really? They went to the nVidia school of marketing apparently...

 

[Inconceivable]

I fear the Daggerfall Unity team have fallen into that rabbit hole of tinkering with graphics minutiae and tweaking minor lighting effects, instead of working on really important, engine stuff.

The former is fun and gives immediate gratification. The latter is hard.

 

[Butter]

I fear the Daggerfall Unity team have fallen into that rabbit hole of tinkering with graphics minutiae and tweaking minor lighting effects, instead of working on really important, engine stuff.

The former is fun and gives immediate gratification. The latter is hard.

They're like 99% finished the project. There isn't important engine stuff left to do.

 

[Hag]

Maybe it's my eyes, but this

OG Daggerfall

looks a helluva lot better than this

Daggerfall w/ ColorBoost(TM)(R)

Also, "ColorBoost"? Really? They went to the nVidia school of marketing apparently...

I for one prefer the newest one. Pitch blackness broken only by the meager light of torches is nicer than grey dithering (that do smell the 90s - not that it's a bad thing). But I don't have much experience with classical Daggerfall to start with, and it is hard to know from static screenshots how good it looks moving around.

 

[index.php]

OpenTESArena 0.14.0


The highlight of this release is weather effects. It also redesigns the internal implementation of the UI and input systems, which are big steps towards supporting alternative user interfaces and key rebinding.

Check out the release video to see it in action!



New features and changes

• Weather effects (rain, snow, thunderstorms)
  • Screen-space fog is unfinished and should be in a future release.
• UI system redesign (model-view-controller pattern, text rendering redesign, texture allocation redesign)
• Input system redesign (generic input action listeners; easier to add key bindings and more input methods later)
• Updated in-game debug profiler
• DPI-awareness on Windows (allows for native window resolutions on high-DPI monitors)
• CMake build configuration improvements (replaced Debug/Release/RelWithDebInfo/MinSizeRel with Debug/DebugFast/ReleaseGeneric/ReleaseNative)
• Updated OpenAL Soft version to 1.19.1
• Updated SDL version to 2.0.9
• Updated WildMIDI version to 0.4.4
• Fixed "Some intro screens might be using an incorrect palette"
• Fixed "The game will crash during the Ria Silmane cinematic in the CD version if it reaches the end without being skipped (related to chunk system)"
• Fixed "The automap colors voxels outside of city bounds that should not be considered part of the automap"
• Revised release build naming convention

Known issues

• Selecting voxels or objects across a chunk boundary may not always work as intended
• Some building names and interiors don't match original game
• The game world is empty for one frame after fast traveling, especially when arriving at a city with an arrival pop-up message
• Sometimes lights will not be counted as being visible to the camera (related to chunk system)
• The chasm wall texture of a deleted floor voxel might not match the original game
• Translucent entities exhibit vertical line artifacts (related to multi-threading)
• Tavern names in Imperial City don't match original game
• Diagonal walls have same collision as walls

For details on how to get OpenTESArena running, follow these instructions.

And check out the roadmap to see what's planned for the next release!

 

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Daggerfall Unity 0.13.4 Beta


Getting Started
If this is your first time installing Daggerfall Unity, please visit Installing Daggerfall Unity and Other Information for help getting started.

Downloads are below release notes under Assets.

Rendering Update
** Please also update your mods and check compatible with 0.13 **

This release contains several updates to rendering and lighting. This includes new default shaders, Gamma > Linear colour space change, lighting review, and update to postprocessing stack. As of 0.13.4, these changes are now out of preview.

More details about rendering update in blog posts linked below.

Part 1
https://www.dfworkshop.net/daggerfall-unity-0-13-rendering-update/

Part 2
https://www.dfworkshop.net/daggerfall-unity-0-13-rendering-update-part-2/

Part 3
https://www.dfworkshop.net/daggerfall-unity-0-13-rendering-update-part-3/

New Features

• Adds World Data Editor to Unity DFU editor tools (Hazelnut) #2267

Tutorials by Hazelnut on how world data works for Daggerfall and an overview of the World Data Editor's features can be read here:

https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?t=2857

General Fixes & Improvements

• Remove leftover elements of Baltham Greyman Pt2 (Jay_H) #2240
• KoW Totem Reputation fix (Jay_H) #2269
• Enemy corpse custom texture fix (KABoissonneault) #2242
• Fixed custom textures for NPC billboards not having a collider (KABoissonneault) #2255
• Virtual "Open" effect for exterior doors (KABoissonneault) #2264
• Floating Origin change now also adjusts EnemyMotor's "last grounded" (KABoissonneault) #2270
• Color picker tweaks and fixes (TheLacus) #2244
• Added actions property to task class (Macadaynu) #2249
• Randomize dye color for clothing items created by quests (Ralzar81) #2253
• Allow cast when held to be overridden and modified by mods (Hazelnut) #2254
• Fix Boethiah flat index in FACTION.TXT - requires starting new game (Interkarma) be87afe
• Fix position of arrow count label at different aspect ratios (Interkarma) d4fc32b
• Allow stronger ColorBoost settings up to a max of 8.0 (Interkarma) b794256
• Default sky follow main camera viewport rect (Interkarma) b5a5fad
• Save settings on exit game (Interkarma) 5ba0e15
• Change texture layout of portrait in large HUD (Interkarma) ce09920
• Fix talk manager exception from improper quest resource cast (Interkarma) f4d1668