Author Archives: Interkarma

DF Modelling – Crash On Startup

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Just a quick post for anyone experiencing a crash on startup in Daggerfall Modelling 0.8. To run this application, you will need the following prerequisites installed:

1. Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
Note: Only required for Windows XP.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=1639

2. Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 3.1
Note: This version is always required even if you have a later version of XNA installed.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=15163

I hope that is helpful for anyone trying to use Daggerfall Modelling and have not been able to get started.

The Future

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I had an awakening recently. My wife commented that she enjoys more of my company when I’m busy in real-life because I put my hobbies on hold. We ended up discussing just how much time I pour into my hobby projects, especially those relating to Daggerfall.

On a normal night, I will come home from work and spend an hour or two with my family, then spend the rest of my night coding. On weekends, I start coding after breakfast and continue right into the small hours of the next morning.

During intense periods of real-life work (such as now after end of financial year), things are different. There’s just too much going on to spend time with my hobbies. The result is that I spend more free time with my family and less time stressing over self-imposed goals and deadlines. It goes without saying that my family loves me. To discover that any respite from my hobby projects is time they look forward to was a devastating realisation.

Some of my hobbies, including Daggerfall, have been in my life since I was a single man in my early 20s. I’ve carried these extra work habits forward into my adult life and not paid enough attention to how it might be affecting those around me.

So here’s the problem. I’m spending all of this time doing something I enjoy without much regard for my loved ones. They let me get away with it because I’m a motivated person and they know how important it is for me to keep busy. But this isn’t crunch time on a commercial project with others counting on me. These hobbies aren’t part of my income. None of this extra work contributes to our future, or pays the mortgage, or puts food on the table. It’s just extra work (substantial extra work) I take on because I like to extend myself, learn, and push against my limits. Up to a point these are desirable qualities, but I have taken things past that point by a wide margin. The only word I can properly give to my behaviour now is ‘selfishness’.

And the sad part is not many people really care about what I’m doing. Probably a few hundred are casually interested, and a much smaller number are actively excited by my work. There’s a genuine imbalance between the time I’ve taken away from my family and how much value that time has to the world at large. I’m spending valuable emotional coin in exchange for a currency of much lower value.

So now that you understand my reasoning, I want to let you all know that I’ve reached the decision to permanently step away from my Daggerfall projects. It’s time to do something different. From today, I will cease all work relating to Daggerfall Workshop and Ruins of Hill Deep. This is something I need to do as part of growing up and nurturing the things in life that will be most valuable to me as I grow older.

I apologise to anyone disappointed by this decision, and I hope you understand. I also want to thank everyone who has supported me over the years with encouragement and kind words. This is the greatest online community I’ve been a part of, filled with genuinely intelligent and passionate people. I’m going to miss you all.

Gavin.

Busy Time Ahead

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We’re heading into end of financial year here in Australia. This is typically the busiest time of year for my real life work and I’m already substantially busier than usual. Unfortunately this means I need to step away from the Workshop for a couple of months until everything settles down again. Usually by the time August rolls around, I start getting larger blocks of free time that I can devote wholly to my hobby projects.

If I do get any time, I’ll work on whatever I can. Whether that will be Ruins of Hill Deep or Daggerfall Modelling, I can’t say right now. It will depend on how much time I get and what I feel like working on.

All the best to everyone. I’ll see you in a couple of months (or whenever I come up for air).

Daggerfall Modelling Beta 2 Roadmap

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I’m in the process of bringing everything together for Beta 2 now. This is the largest update yet and will be the final test version before 1.0. Following is a roadmap of Beta 2 with a few details on each item. Some of this is a recap of previous posts.

XNA 4.0

Daggerfall Modelling is now a Visual Studio 2010/.NET4/XNA4 project targeting the “HiDef” profile and Shader Model 3.0. I realise this will exclude some users with very old or integrated GPUs, however most cards from 2008 onwards should support this without any problems. This has been done in line with the new engine which is using some SM3.0 features like MRT and VTF.

Deep Engine

This is the game engine I’m developing for Ruins of Hill Deep. The reason this is part of the Daggerfall Modelling roadmap is that I will be using the same engine for both projects. Deep Engine is replacing ”XNA Library” as the renderer for Daggerfall Modelling. The main benefit for me is that any work on this engine progresses both projects. This engine is designed around a world/entity/component pattern, deferred shading, primitive rendering, and has a fully integrated physics engine. There are many more features to come as development continues.

Player Physics

You will be capable of exploring maps on foot with full player physics. This is delivered using the physics middleware in Deep Engine, not the simplistic camera physics I previewed earlier.

Full Day/Night Support

Change the time of day along with the direction and brightness of sunlight. Night-time cities and dungeons are now lit by atmospheric flickering lights.

Enter Buildings

You will finally be able to enter buildings in exterior locations and export their models.

Thumbnails View

The thumbnails view is getting a nice update. Identical models are collapsed by default into a “folder” thumbnail. This will help reduce clutter when browsing thumbnails and better display model “families”. The thumbnail view is also getting a scrollbar for faster navigation.

Model View

You will be able to cycle through models similar to Daggerfall Explorer, using increments to either model index or model id. It will also be possible to use the free camera to explore models.

Location View

The top-down camera will be more useful, with cutaway when zooming and improved camera sensitivity.

Exporting

You will finally be able to export a full city/dungeon/block/interior to a single Collada file.

Improved Dungeons

Dungeons will display the correct textures based on region. You can optionally render monsters and treasure piles in place of the default “editor flats”.

Animated Sprites

Flat NPCs/animals/lights/etc/ with idle animations will now play, bringing a little life to the scenes.

Bug Fixes

Contains several bug fixes, including a fix to the nasty texture alignment bug that crept into Beta 1.

Ruins of Hill Deep

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Since early 2011, I have been hard at work designing a new project. This isn’t a new tool, but a story-driven conversion mod for Daggerfall. Experience a new main quest and discover the expansive location of Hill Deep, set high in the Wrothgarian Mountains.

Production of this mod has begun as of October 2011, and I expect to have a playable alpha ready by the end of 2012.

For all news and information about this mod, please visit www.ruinsofhilldeep.com.

Lighting Up #3

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I’ve restored billboards (trees, rocks, etc.) to scenes and they generally light up correctly from surrounding point lights and the player’s personal light source. There is a simple light animation playing that changes the scale of the light volume +/- a small amount. Light attenuation means this effect is more obvious at the edge of the light radius than near the source.

The lighting system still needs a tidy-up, and a few bugs remain (such as the emissive wood textures you see in a few spots). I will continue to polish this leading up to Beta 2 release. Still, I’m happy overall with how the lighting is shaping up and posted a video preview.

Lighting Up

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After moving everything to XNA 4.0, I decided to build a lighting system into Daggerfall Modelling Beta 2. I’ve always wanted to play with deferred rendering and it seemed like a good fit for Daggerfall’s many point lights.

If you’re unfamiliar with this technique, the gist is that different information about the scene is rendered into different buffers (collectively called a GBuffer) and combined together to make the final image. You can see three of these buffers in the debug screenshots below. From top to bottom are the color, normal, and light buffers. These get combined with a depth buffer to create our fully lit scene. The results are very fast, even on a mid-range GPU. The heaviest scene below is “Daggerfall from Above”, with almost every building and light visible. Total render time is about 12ms, and most of that is spent rendering the geometry. The lighting itself takes almost no time at all.

This is only the first of several visual enhancements intended for Daggerfall Modelling Beta 2. Don’t worry if you have an older computer and just want to export the models. You will be able to turn off or scale back these rendering features using options.

Daggerfall Castle Privateer’s Hold Throne Room
Daggerfall from Above Scourg Barrow Entrance

SVN Updated

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The SVN repository has been updated to VS2010/XNA4.0 solution & code. If you are building DaggerfallModelling from source please ensure you have the latest version of the .NET Framework 4.0 and XNA Game Studio 4.0. You will also need to be using Visual Studio 2010 (or Express 2010) to load the new project.

A few bugs remain after porting to XNA 4.0. These will be ironed out over the next few weeks.

Building From Source and Other Issues

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I’ve received a few emails from programmers trying to build Daggerfall Modelling from source and experiencing problems. The reason for their frustrations is that Daggerfall Modelling is built as a VS2008/XNA3.1 project. This means it will only build with Visual Studio (Express) 2008 with XNA Game Studio 3.1 installed. Attempting to build with VS2010/XNA4.0 will fail due to breaking changes in the latest version of XNA.

I also get the occasional email from Windows XP users with an older version of the .NET Framework 2.0 (pre-SP2) that experience a crash when opening a dungeon. This problem is caused by a bug in the .NET Framework 2.0 that was resolved in Service Pack 2, and can be fixed by upgrading/patching .NET.

The reason I stuck to older versions was to ensure my tools remained accessible to more people. On the flip side, not everyone wants to install an older version of Visual Studio and XNA just to compile my code. I’m also running the risk that Windows XP users will come across that crash without having read my getting started page for Daggerfall Modelling.

After serious thought, I have decided to make some changes to my source code:

  • Solution format upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 / Visual C# 2010 Express.
  • Daggerfall Modelling and XNALibrary will be refactored for XNA Game Studio 4.0.

The DaggerfallConnect class library and Daggerfall Imaging 2 will remain based on .NET 2.0 for now, but I might bring these forward at a later date.

The SVN will be updated in the next few days with these changes. The next release of Daggerfall Modelling (Beta 2) will require the latest versions of .NET and XNA Frameworks to run.