The DFTFU Developer Preview 1.2.11 is now available. This includes all the terrain code shown recently.
I have decided to make a Developer Preview build available after major milestones, but before code is quite ready for general release. Please keep in mind that preview features may change substantially before release.
I am also preparing a playable world demo for everyone else. This should be available today or tomorrow.
I’m having a blast right now mate! Wow it feel so great rushing city to city! Great idea for the sky light, it make traveling a lot easier. Everything is very smooth, only minor slowdown when I approach huge cities( Probably due to the kickass speed).
I will test it further to see if I may encounter some issues.
At first I wasn’t able to get it working( it spawn me in a void). It correct itself when I load a random BLOCKS of terrain. After that I spawn near Daggerfall (I think) and everything work perfectly.
As always GREAT job! You did it…you’ve recreate the entire (and better) Daggerfall continent!
Double post 🙂
I’ve run a bit further and increase my speed to explore faster. I’m having a lot of trouble orienting since I don’t know where I spawn exactly (I’m trying to find desert area).
I have found 2 bug…One is crashing with this error :
DaggerfallUnity 1.2.11: StreamingWorld: Unable to find free terrain. Check maxTerrainArray is sized appropriately and you are collecting terrains.
It was maybe my speed that cause that
Two is a billboard bug :
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=33f5kdu&s=8#.VLMhe3sRTqs
Other than that so far so good.
Hey mate. Thanks for the feedback. Glad you’re having fun! 🙂
You can just select a desert area on the map then click “apply to player gps”. This will set your new location to the player. You can also use the “find location” tool to enter somewhere like “Sentinel/Sentinel” (i.e. region-name/location-name – case sensitive). Don’t forget to set apply to player gps before running game.
Yep, setting speed too high will overflow the streaming buffer. I do mention this in the ReadMe but I realise now it’s not very clear. I’ll rephrase it. 🙂
Not sure about the floating billboards, haven’t seen this exact problem before. It may have also been caused by very high speeds desyncing the stream. If you can reproduce, please stand under them and let me know your map pixel coords from StreamingWorld inspector. I’ll see if I can repro at my end.
BTW, you shouldn’t need to place a block into the scene to stop from falling at spawn time. This may just be the physics taking slightly too long to init and the ray which grounds player can’t find anything. I’ll tweak this a little and upload a new test build when I can.
Thanks again for the feedback! 😀
I’ve been able to reproduce a couple of the bugs you mentioned by changing the TerrainScale at runtime. Make sure this doesn’t change while the game is running (I’ll lock this down next version). Recommended to not change TerrainScale past default of 1.5.
Lol I realised after that there was a README hehe…The map is indeed very useful 🙂
You were right about the BLOCK too… After a minute it manage to load up properly.
I didn’t alter anything beside the speed. So I decide to run trough your default speed a little and sadly the billboard bug still occur.
http://tinypic.com/r/2cylx3/8
maybe the default speed is way too fast too? (Its not vanilla Daggerfall speed for sure)
Thanks for the updated screenshot. Not sure why this is happening yet, and this hasn’t shown up in my testing yet. It looks like the billboards are trying to align to the wrong terrain. I’ll figure it out sooner or later. Thanks. 🙂
Edit: Quick question, do you get the right away, or only after travelling for a while?
Yes I was traveling for a while, and a lag shutter occur when it happen.
With the default speed its way rarer though.
For the last hour I’ve try some other few things. I bump up the terrain scale to 6 to explore the world with this setting and the billboard bug didn’t occur, even if I increase the speed a little too. (BTW the terrain look so sexy on scale 6 ! Could I increase it even more?)
I also try to edit the terrain on the fly with the editor…which amazingly work very well but mess up the billboard tree or building. Of course when I restart the testing all my changes go away(Can’t think of a way for saving modifications).
So far I haven’t encounter any other bugs of some sort.Tomorrow I’ll try to recreate the billboard bug a tad more to see if its worth fixing it.
Now enough of running around for tonight 🙂 Was pleasant.
Oh, that’s GREAT, Interkarma! And that was quick. 🙂
Just tried Direnni Tower Demo online and was surprised that you can enter other houses in the city not just the tower.
Now I’m convinced. 🙂 I think I’ll try something closely resembling original Daggerfall gameplay (adding RPG stuff) using the latest DFTFU with streaming terrain ability.
I wonder, can anybody suggest what Unity UI to use for this task?
@Solid-Head
You can increase the scale higher. Look for [Range(1, 6)] over TerrainScale in StreamingWorld.cs and bump the max value. This will allow you to increase scale by a lot more. Terrains quickly become very unrealistic at high scales. You end up with towns perched on kilometre-high peaks for example. Looks good and dramatic though. 🙂 After a lot of testing, I found 1.0 the most sensible for walking, and 2.0 to look reasonably steep. I compromised and made default scale 1.5.
I will have terrain editing working for static scenes by 1.2.x release. What I eventually hope to do is setup a workflow where you can import a bit of terrain, edit and save to prefab, then get the streaming to load in that terrain at runtime in place of procedural terrain. This will allow you guys to make hand-crafted areas and inject them seamlessly into the world. That’s the goal anyway, but it will be a few releases away.
For the other issues, I’m working on a fix. Just came back from leave however and drowned in work. I should have a new version to test on the weekend.
@Windom
Thank you Windom. 🙂 Check out the new UI features in Unity 4.6. They’re very sexy. Unity actually hired the nGUI guy who did much of the work on the new system.
It would be awesome to see a good general-purpose Daggerfall UI. The original UI is locked to 320×200 and not designed to be modular at all (not sliced into tiling regions for example).
If you don’t mind working with others, there’s another talented programmer working on gameplay features (along with Oculus proof-of-concept and other stuff) on Reddit (reddit.com/user/InconsolableCellist). He’s maintaining a GitHub fork of my code. https://github.com/DKoestler/DFUnity
Another developer on Reddit (reddit.com/user/lypyl) has been adding multiplayer features, climbing, replacing billboards with models, that kind of thing.
There’s a small developer community starting to build around the Reddit site. http://www.reddit.com/r/dftfu
All you guys might be more powerful together. 🙂
@Windom
Unity 4.6 or just go with NGUI. I don’t think I could use anything but NGUI.
@Interkarma
You have spawned a revolution, or a retrolution? Either way, good job. Your hard work and dreams for Daggerfall are finally coming true.