Daggerfall Unity 1.0 is now available! After several years in development, and the efforts of many people, Daggerfall Unity is finally considered complete. The project will now move into post-release community support and maintenance.
What is Daggerfall Unity?
Daggerfall Unity is an open source recreation of Daggerfall in the Unity engine created by Daggerfall Workshop.
Experience the adventure and intrigue of Daggerfall with all of its original charm along with hundreds of fixes, quality of life enhancements, and extensive mod support.
Classic Daggerfall Plus
Cross-platform without emulation (Windows/Linux/Mac)
Retro graphics are boosted by modern engine and lighting
High resolution widescreen with classic style
Optionally play in retro mode 320×200 or 640×400 with VGA palettes
Optionally overhaul the graphics and gameplay with mods
Huge draw distances even without mods
Smooth first-person controls
Quality of life enhancements
Extensive mod support with an active creator community
Translation support via community mods
Get Daggerfall Unity
Daggerfall Unity requires a free copy of DOS Daggerfall to run. This provides all necessary game assets such as textures, 3D models, and sound effects.
You can get a free copy of DOS Daggerfall from Steam and a free copy of Daggerfall Unity from the Releases page. Then simply unzip the latest version of Daggerfall Unity to its own folder and point it to the DOS version. Daggerfall Unity will take care of everything else.
Here are a couple of links with more detailed steps to help you get started using either Steam or a cross-platform process.
Daggerfall Unity has the following system requirements. Please note that optional mods may substantially increase system requirements or cause game to become less stable.
Minimum
Operating system: Windows, Linux, MacOS
Processor: Intel i3 (Skylake) equivalent
Graphics: DirectX 11 capable with 1GB video memory and up-to-date drivers
Memory: 2GB system RAM
Recommended
Operating system: Windows, Linux, MacOS
Processor: Intel i5 (Skylake) equivalent
Graphics: GTX 660 with 2GB video memory and up-to-date drivers
Memory: 4GB system RAM
Featured Mods
Daggerfall Unity has an active mod community with hundreds of incredible mods. It’s impossible to feature them all, but here’s a sampling of a few popular mods that represent a variety of mods the community has created. They range from graphical overhauls, to new quests, new guilds, adding new world areas, and changing game formulas and other behaviours.
DREAM
The Daggerfall Remaster Enchanted Art Mod (DREAM) upgrades game assets including sound, music, videos & all graphics found in the game. It goes beyond a restoration and additionally fixes the old quirks, bugs and increases variety/fidelity everywhere possible.
Enhance Daggerfall Unity gameplay by making language skills more viable and adding a new guild to the game, called “The Archaeologists Guild”. Their mission is to delve into the history of Tamriel and they’re interested in all creatures and races who have lived or still live there. Joining gives access to locator devices to aid in dungeon delving.
From the ashes of Daggerfall’s past, experience the world of Daggerfall as originally envisioned. With glorious mountain tops that reach for the heavens, and countless new locations to explore.
Finding My Religion is a multi-release visual and gameplay overhaul of Daggerfall’s religions. The current release is “Detailed Temples”, which decorates and redesigns the temples’ according to the worshipped deity’s sphere of influence. Julianos boasts a bigger library than others, Kynareth has an indoor garden, Mara has a birthing room and more. Each temple have been expanded downwards, with priests’ quarters and additional rooms for all service members. They also feature a crypt where people of importance have been buried.
Instead of increasing chance to avoid an attack completely, armor now reduces the damage you take, based on the material as well as the type of attack. Skills now determine most of your chance to avoid attacks, including many more features.
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).
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.
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. But you can enable ColorBoost at any time, with or without Retro Mode, 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!
Our rendering update and review continues with 0.13.2 now available on Releases page. This release fixes bugs, expands capabilities of new shaders, and helps mods reach compatibility with 0.13. Let’s unpack everything new in this release.
Expanded Default Shaders
0.13 introduced new default shaders, the small programs which tell your GPU how to render objects and materials. These new shaders better reproduce classic’s colours and flat albedo look without all the unwanted specular shine that comes with Unity’s Standard shader, but did not support a PBR workflow by design. While this was suitable for classic textures, and mod authors could still use custom PBR materials in their .dfmod, any loose texture mods had less support than before.
From 0.13.2, default shaders now support albedo+normal+parallax+metallic maps, allowing loose texture mods to have an optional PBR workflow just by dropping the right textures into a folder. We also fixed several problems loading these optional maps in asset pipeline and extended this PBR support to terrain tilemap shader.
A good example of this kind of mod is Vanilla Normal Mapped which adds normal+parallax+metallic maps to complement classic colour textures. Screenshots below compare standard DFU textures and boosted by Vanilla Normal Mapped mod in 0.13.2.
These new capabilities in default shaders allow mods to intentionally reintroduce specular based on their materials, while still avoiding unwanted specular when using classic textures only. The big advantage of rolling our own shaders is more control over the rendering process.
Dungeon Water
Without proper alpha blending at the time, DOS Daggerfall used a stippling effect for water surface (a kind of black pixely noise) and a bright blue fog effect when submerged.
Daggerfall Unity improves water surface with a dark water plane and slime highlights, invoking murky and stagnant water suitable for dungeons. But when you submerge, we used the same bright blue fog effect underwater. After listening to feedback, we’ve changed the submerged effect to use a dark blue-green slime colour to better match water surface.
In case you want something different, we’ve also exposed the underwater fog to modders. See this topic for details on how to set underwater fog colour/density and some tips on updating surface plane as well.
Shout-out to King of Worms for his persistence around tweaking dungeon water and driving this change.
Increased Torch Brightness
On the subject of feedback, we heard several times the brightness of default and item-based torch were retuned improperly and looked too dark. We’ve now increased brightness of both default and item-based torch, and decoupled how these are handled so they can be tuned independently in future. Screenshot below compares local torch brightness when using a lantern with item-based torch in 0.13.0 vs. 0.13.2. You’ll note that 0.13.2 is brighter and more comparable to lantern in 0.12.
In addition to torch brightness, we also heard that retro rendering mode is too dark and tends to crush colours towards black. This kicked off a review into better matching classic’s brightness, particularly in retro mode rendering. During this review, we noted classic dungeons are very bright near player then ramp down to near black based on distance from camera. Because Daggerfall Unity’s retro mode uses naturalistic lighting and selects palette colours in a post-process, it does not properly capture this effect.
The solution was to introduce a new effect called ColorBoost to default shaders which juices up colours local to player and ramps down over a short distance. This better matches brightness contrast seen in classic, and will help players tune dungeons and nights to properly select brighter colours in retro mode local to player. ColorBoost is not a lighting effect, rather it scales albedo near camera so that brighter colours will be selected in post-process. ColorBoost will be available from 0.13.3 with or without retro mode enabled, but its primary purpose will be to select better colours in retro mode. You can see a preview of it in this tweet.
Terrain Mod Compatibility
We’ve worked with authors of popular terrain mods to help overcome compatibility problems and get their mods working in 0.13. This required updates to both mods and core. We’re pleased to announce that Enhanced Sky, Distant Terrain, and Eroded and Enhanced Terrain are now compatible with 0.13.2+. Mod authors should have compatible mods released soon now 0.13.2 is available.
General Improvements & Fixes
We’ve made several minor performance improvements and fixes under the hood. To summarise these quickly:
Retro-sized textures are no longer compressed automatically, as this destroyed appearance of small-sized texture replacements. The threshold for retro-sized textures is < 256 pixels wide and high. (Interkarma/TheLacus)
Fixed internal crash when loading compressed normal maps.
Fixed loading non-colour maps as linear.
Refactored loose texture asset loading to fix some minor bugs and clean up code.
Fixed errors in terrain tilemap shader and cleaned up shader code.
Fixed excess draw calls when rotating interior automap, a large performance improvement to automap (spotted by King of Worms).
Fix out-of-range error in FormulaHelper.CalculateCastingCost (KABoissonneault)
Effect Settings / Post Processing Tuning
There’s a new in-game UI under the pause menu chevron called Effect Settings.
This UI allows you to customise post processing effects while game is running. As Daggerfall Unity now embeds PostProcessing v2 (PPv2) stack, the mod which previously customized these settings is no longer compatible. Rather than update mod, we’ve integrated these settings straight into the core game!
All post processing effects are disabled by default. Once you access the above menu, you’ll be able to enable and tune Antialiasing, Ambient Occlusion, Bloom, Motion Blur, Vignette, Depth of Field, and toggle Dither while seeing your changes at runtime. Screenshots below of first three settings pages.
These settings have been expanded to include new settings available in PPv2 that were not available in older releases.
The Effect Settings window is also expandable, so mods can introduce new post processing or other effects, then plug their config page into this UI. This will be where ColorBoost is homed once that feature goes live in 0.13.3.
Post processing is very much a matter of personal taste and you should be able to dial in an effect to your liking. You might use these effects in your game or just to take screenshots. With effects like Vignette and Depth of Field, you can create more stylized screenshots like below.
The choice is yours how you want to use these effects. You can leave them disabled, enhance game by degrees, or pile on a bit of everything for photography purposes.
Conclusion
With all the tweaks and fixes in this release, along with increasing mod compatibility, Daggerfall Unity 0.13 is almost ready to lose the Preview tag and go back to stable beta releases.
As of now, 0.13.2 represents a close-to-final state for rendering in Daggerfall Unity. All the challenging and breaking changes are now behind us. Modders can release compatibility updates for 0.13.2+ and be confident their mods will remain compatible with 1.0 as no further rendering changes are scheduled.
Looking at a timeframe for 1.0, this will now most likely be early 2022. End of year is fast approaching and we still have lots to do. Once rendering is closed out, we’ll move on to Localization improvements and general bugfix. We’ll call 1.0 when happy with overall state and stability of game.
Thank you for reading, and for playing Daggerfall Unity!
Daggerfall Unity 0.11.3 is now available on Live Builds page. This is another general bug-fix release with some updates to mod system.
Starting from this release, I’m attaching zipped builds along with patch notes to Releases page on GitHub. This will eventually become a longer-term archive for older builds even after they’re cleaned up from Live Builds page. If there’s enough demand, I can work through attaching older builds to previous releases on this page.
Now that I’m finally caught up with code review, I’ll be able to get back into the localization tutorial series. This series was pending some fixes rolled out in 0.11.2 and 0.11.3, so please be sure to update before the next article in series is published.
Quest Debugger Input Changes
The quest debugger has a few changes to input settings. These changes are to prevent accidentally opening debugger during normal play, free up the Tab key for other uses, and to make shortcuts easier on non-US keyboards. For example, the square bracket keys [ and ] are not so easy to use on AZERTY keyboards.
If you are not a quest author or don’t care about quest debugger, you can ignore these changes.
Quest debugger is now disabled by default. Must edit EnableQuestDebugger=True in settings.ini to activate it again.
Ctrl+Shift+D now cycles through debugger display states off/partial/full
Ctrl+Shift+LeftArrow now opens previous active quest while debugger active
Ctrl+Shift+RightArrow now opens next active quest while debugger active
Ctrl+Shift+UpArrow now teleports to next dungeon quest marker while debugger active inside dungeon
Ctrl+Shift+DownArrow now teleports to previous dungeon quest marker while debugger active inside dungeon
Note: Some inputs might move character, e.g. Ctrl+Shift+D will also move character slightly to right when activating debugger. This is expected and not considered a breaking issue for a debug/development feature that is normally disabled.
General Fixes & Improvements
Pango
Potion maker: Fix issues tracking ingredient stack count between cauldron and player inventory
Conjured arrows: Don’t stack conjured arrows with different time-to-live
Daggerfall Unity 0.11.2 is now available on Live Builds page. This is a general bug-fix release with some updates to mod system.
New Features
Custom Mobile Units (TheLacus)
TheLacus has taken a big step towards support for replacing enemies with custom graphics, including 3D models. See gif below for an example of this in action using a humble cube.
If you don’t think a cube is that amazing, consider this a 3D model injected by a mod into an enemy mobile unit to alter it’s appearance. The same could be done with a fully animated 3D model. There are some limitations around this for now, notably that classic enemy attack triggers are linked to sprite animation frames. So for now a modder would also need to reimplement parts of combat to fully replace model. But this is something that can be refined over time as the community starts experimenting with this feature and sending their feedback.
Teleport To Any Dungeon Marker (Interkarma)
This is a very minor improvement to quest debugger that finally reimplements a test/cheat feature from classic. When quest debugger is open (default LeftShift+Tab) you can now use Shift+[ and Shift+] keys to cycle forwards and backwards through all markers in a dungeon. This doesn’t require a quest to be active in dungeon, only for the quest debugger to be open while player is in a dungeon. This is handy for situations like teleporting to Medora’s room in Direnni Tower, as she’s a permanent NPC without a specific quest marker.
The keybinds for quest debugger and cycling through markers can be changed in StreamingAssets/Text/DialogShortcuts.txt.
General Fixes & Improvements
Lots of bug fixes small and large from our awesome community of devs.
Hazelnut
Fix dictionary access for non-existent world variant keys
Prevent “remote” Place quest selection from randomly selecting local Place
Don’t restrict shields by plate or chain to match classic
Move hardcoded info panel colour into DaggerfallUI
Allow non-member quests to have rep requirements – to fix non-joinable Witch Coven quest dispensing
Fix Oghma removal after use to function from everywhere including wagon
AsesinoBlade
Change HotKeySequenceProcessed from Bool to Enum
Add forward thrust to click to attack – previously this move was never selected
Deepfighter
Fix formatting of date lines in diary entries of quests
KABoissonneault
Fixed misnamed formula overrides for CalculateFatigueRecoveryRate and CalculateSpellPointsRecoveryRate
Fix torch burning ticks progressing while game is paused
Fix %hpw inconsistent with classic for Dunmer characters
TheLacus
Import mod settings and presets files after create or changes from editor window
Fix mod settings not accepting negative float values
Fix mod asset loading on Turkish culture
Fix RuntimeMaterials by ignoring climate when using dungeon table
Improve support of mod localization through CSV text tables
Pango
Toggle large HUD with F10 like classic
Fix interacting with HUD when cursor not active on Linux
Fix NullReferenceException
Horse now has constant jump height to clear hedges
Jefetienne
Add joystick middle-click keybind and set joystick UI controls to protected
Prevent accidental axis button “presses” from binded movement and camera axes
XJDHDR
Reduce delay filling Dungeon variable in PlayerEnterExit
Add detailed exception handling and logging to BookReader
Automap check CombineRDB state before resetting so it stays disabled if previously set in editor
Automap move mesh and material update to separate script and optimise automap creation times
Fix texture table in dungeon automap to match environment
RuntimeMaterials automap type differentiation for interior types and other models
Add support for the discovery state of OBJ models to be saved and loaded
Fix some editor warnings
Interkarma
Fix vampires not being offered vampire quests
Restore per-task click rearming
Update DaggerfallFont to use .atlasTexture instead of deprecated .atlas
Deprioritise System Locale Selector to prevent an error during localization development
S0000011: Fix needing to click Barenziah twice with Chapter 6 before quest ends
S0000011: Fix clicking Gortwog to hand in Chapter 6 with per-task click rearming
S0000011: Reordered gold reward so it doesn’t interupt Barenziah’s information at end of quest
N0B00Y16: Fix issue of clicking on merchant at wrong time stalling quest
S0000021: Fix King of Worms potentially spawning into Sentinel during quest
S0000021: Fix logic issues with click handling carried over from classic
S0000021: Fix success condition to correctly check player has killed lich
M0B21Y19: Fix victim default home being selected as local and stashing live version of dead NPC
Get the most recent version of Daggerfall Unity:Releases
