Daggerfall Tools for Unity

The first release of Daggerfall Tools for Unity is now available. The package includes full source for my Daggerfall API and editor scripts for Unity.

You can download from the main download page, or from download links on the right of home page.

There is also a PDF manual available if you would just like to see how the package works.

I will be adding more features to Daggerfall Tools for Unity soon. The next release will focus on lighting and action scripts in dungeons. Enhancements to the editor scripts are also incoming.

Thank you for taking the time to download. Have fun!

Daggerfall Unity – Climate Swaps

I wasn’t happy with needing to set climate properties before importing cities. I remember being able to change climates at run-time in Daggerfall Explorer and decided that’s how things should work in Daggerfall Tools for Unity.

After a solid few hours work, it’s now possible to set your city’s climate directly from the editor and have materials change immediately. No need to rebuild scene, it all happens procedurally like magic.

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I also completed mesh import options for adding tangents (useful for normal maps) and secondary UVs (handy for light mapping). Everything is starting to feel nice and functional.

Daggerfall Unity – More Progress

Just a quick update today. I’ve been hard at work on Daggerfall Tools for Unity, adding caching, mesh combining, texture atlasing, ground planes, material sharing, and lots of small tweaks to vastly improve load times and reduce draw calls. I’m almost ready for first release build now. I just want to get in climate swaps and kill some bugs. Oh, and I need to write a manual as well.

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Latest source code code is on the SVN now: https://code.google.com/p/daggerfall-unity/

 

Daggerfall Unity – Cities

The code to import cities is now working, and crikey does it need some improvement. Importing a full city into Unity takes around 10 seconds (compared to less than 1 second in Daggerfall Modelling) and results in a massive scene hierarchy requiring over 5000 draw calls per frame! Obviously this won’t be good enough for a final version. I don’t even have ground planes in yet…

dfunity-city1

The good news is this can be easily improved. Daggerfall Modelling made heavy use of caching, batching, mesh combining, and texture atlasing. I can do the same in Unity to bring those numbers right down. However, I will leave in the ability to import fully atomic scenes in case someone wants to see the native layout without regard to performance. Actually, I think even that can be streamlined. Lots of work to do, but I think I’m on track to finish in a few months as planned.

Edit: I implemented basic caching and mesh combining, and performance is great again. Even the fully atomic scenes load in a few seconds and only require a few hundred draw calls in heavy environments. Unity’s dynamic batching is really awesome. This will get even better once I implement atlasing.

One more thing, the source code is now online. I’ll be updating this every day or so. If you’re really keen you can grab the code and copy it into a Unity project to play with. However if you wait a few days, I’ll create a .unitypackage for download with a manual included.

https://code.google.com/p/daggerfall-unity

 

Daggerfall Unity Update

I’ve completed the first pass at porting code over to Unity. I now have textured models, city blocks, dungeon blocks, and flat objects working. I could lay out complete cities and dungeons at this stage, but want to do some code tidy-up first. Overall, I’m very happy with progress considering I only started work on this a few days ago.

There is a lot of Unity-specific work to go. I need to flesh out editor scripts and add options controlling how scene data is spawned. In case you’re wondering, everything is created procedurally from game files directly within the editor with a single click. After that it just works like a normal scene. The same could be done directly from code as well. Check out the new screens below.

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In the last screenshot, you can see realtime shadows acting on the scene. Even the flats are casting and receiving shadows. This is using a standard cutout shader, which works in both forward & deferred.

Right now the scenes are built very atomically (from very small pieces). This is perfect for seeing how everything is put together and mucking about with the individual pieces. However it won’t be optimal for real-time uses. One of the options I’m planning will combine meshes and textures sensibly to minimise draw calls and state changes.

Check back in a few days for another update. The next update will include the first release for you to play with.

Daggerfall Tools For Unity

Since leaving the Workshop, I’ve been using Unity a good bit for other projects. It occurred to me the other day it should be trivial to drop my Daggerfall library (Daggerfall Connect) into Unity as everything was written in very portable C#. A few hours later, I had Daggerfall models firing up in Unity.

Scourg Barrow exterior in Unity

Scourg Barrow exterior in Unity.

It’s only a small step from here to spawning entire game-ready cities and dungeons in Unity. For the most part, this can be done using layout code I’ve already written for Daggerfall Modelling. I’d just need to refactor for Unity and build some editor scripts to hold it all together.

Based on this, I’ve decided to repackage the useful parts of Daggerfall Connect and Daggerfall Modelling into a small suite of scripts for Unity developers. As usual, this will be free and open source for everyone.

This doesn’t mean I’m returning to the Workshop full-time. I’ll only be allocating a few months of spare time for this project. I just think it would be great to see all the code I’ve written over the years being put to use by someone, and what better way to wrap up my years with Daggerfall than making one final tool available for a game engine anyone can use?

Let me know what you think! Is there something particular you’d like to see in Daggerfall Unity? If you’re a Unity developer and want to contribute, I would be more than happy to share access to the SVN (will be setting this up soon) to people with the right skillset.