First Look At Classic Save Importing

Posted on October 11, 2015October 11, 2015 by Interkarma

Just a quick update today, as I’m right in the thick of it getting the test build ready.

The below GFY shows the current early state of importing classic Daggerfall save games inside Daggerfall Unity. At the moment this is just spawning a character to exact position in world, but I hope to be importing all vital character details eventually. As with everything else, classic save import will become more advanced over time. My ultimate goal is for you to be able to import your Daggerfall characters and pick up the game more-or-less where you left off.

This represents a nice milestone in development so far, one that has required several weeks of planning and engineering just to accomplish this much. Now to put some meat on those bones.

[gfycat data_id=”JitteryAdventurousEnglishpointer”]

Daggerfall Unity Test Build

Posted on October 7, 2015October 7, 2015 by Interkarma

Sometime in the next 7-10 days, I will release a test build of Daggerfall Unity as part of my lead-up to first release. Everyone is welcome to try to the test build, but testers should be comfortable with editing INI files as this build will not include a launcher. I’m hoping to get valuable feedback and squash as many bugs as possible prior to first release. Test build will be available for Windows and Linux.

The first release of Daggerfall Unity will carry the moniker “Outer Loop” as this best describes the work so far. The outer loop is that essential framework of game startup, character creation, free roam, save/load, basic combat resolution, resting, and player death. With this framework out of the way, I can start work on individual systems that exist inside of the outer loop. For example, quests, inventory, and loot tables are systems that will be incrementally added over time. Systems with a high number of dependencies (e.g. quests rely on many other systems) will arrive later than more atomic systems with a lower number of dependencies.

Once the first release is available, I’m hoping to set a release schedule of every 4-6 weeks at most. I’m planning out the work in small dependency-aware chunks that should be achievable in those time-frames. This means releases will generally pendulum back and forth between small features and large features.

I have tried my best to create a versioning save/load system so that your saves from older releases can be loaded by newer releases, but it may become necessary at some point to set a minimum supported version for saves. I will mention this in the release notes if and when it happens.

As always, life has a habit of getting in the way despite best intentions. I will let you know whenever there will be delays due to personal issues or scheduled leave time.

Thank you all for your support and encouragement so far. I look forward to hearing your feedback if you decide to play with the upcoming test build.

Twitter Reminder

Posted on September 25, 2015September 25, 2015 by Interkarma

Just a reminder to anyone hungry for more news, my day-to-day progress is posted to Twitter @gav_clayton. I post small updates and screenshots almost daily (sometimes multiple times a day) whereas this blog is generally for detailed updates and major milestones Even if you aren’t on Twitter yourself and can’t follow me, the feed is visible to everyone.

I’m moving rapidly towards first release of Daggerfall Unity and will have more updates for you soon. Stay tuned!

Character Creation – Part 3

Posted on September 17, 2015September 17, 2015 by Interkarma

I’ve been so focused on importing Daggerfall’s save games that I forgot to post a video of the character creation as it will be seen in the first release of Daggerfall Unity. So welcome to part 3 of character creation (or part 2 if you’re just following along on YouTube). I really need to think about these titles more.

Players familiar with Daggerfall’s character creation process will notice a couple of things missing from that video. The first release of Daggerfall Unity will not have the “10 question to determine your class”, custom class creator, or biographies. The biographies in particular have to wait for a while as they interface with a few other systems (like inventory and reputation) which still need to be written. As outlined in my mission statement on the forums, I will be building individual parts of Daggerfall in small, incremental stages that give priority to core systems first. My goal is to work towards a minimum viable product sooner rather than later, and keep iterating over the whole until it takes shape as a completed Daggerfall clone.

Personally, I think it’s better to put a work in progress into your hands (along with the source code) than make you wait long stretches between releases. This approach also means that my efforts are battle-tested right from the start, leading to a more robust final product. Think of Daggerfall Unity along the lines of Early Access – except it’s completely free, open source, and you can literally become part of the development. Even if you aren’t a programmer, good testing and feedback is vitally important.

I’m running a bit behind on the first release now, mainly because of the additional work required to import native save games. But we’re getting close to first release of Daggerfall Unity now, so keep an eye on the Workshop over the next few weeks for more information.

Character Creation – Part 2

Posted on September 1, 2015September 1, 2015 by Interkarma

I have been working through the character creation process screen-by-screen. This has required a few diversions to work on hacking some additional file formats and of course writing new controls for the GUI system.

I nearly have the whole process finished, with the current limitations of not supporting biographies, custom classes, or the questions to select your class. These will be added in a second pass over character creation once more atomic systems are in place. The biographies in particular interface with systems like inventory and reputation, neither of which are implemented yet. All of these systems will come online in their own good time.

One great side-effect of using the existing Daggerfall files as-is will be that existing translation packs by international Daggerfall fans should work flawlessly with Daggerfall Unity. This comes with the other side-effect of having the same text limitations as Daggerfall, but to remedy this I have created a text interface in Daggerfall Tools for Unity called ITextProvider. Programmers are familiar with interfaces as a kind of contract between provider and consumer. Right now, all text you see is being routed through the default ITextProvider, which uses Daggerfall-native string methods. However, it’s possible to swap this out for another ITextProvider implementation using a different source for text. This is still quite early right now, but should pave the way for more advanced translation efforts in the future.

To mix things up a little from this typically English-centric site (it’s the only language I know, I’m sorry everyone) here’s the current state of character creation after applying Le Projet French Daggerfall to my installation. Everything here is running 100% inside Unity using a standard Daggerfall install for data.

Character Creation – Part 1

Posted on August 19, 2015August 19, 2015 by Interkarma

I want players to really connect with Daggerfall Unity from the start. Rather than dump you into Privateer’s Hold with a random starting character, my first order of business is to code up character creation and importing existing save games. This means you will be using your characters (new or existing) to experience the project as it grows. The below video shows progress far.

It will take several releases before character creation and importing saves gets to where I want them, but I’m iterating quickly over the problems. Once everything is working, I hope it will help you form a personal connection to the project. The other huge advantage in a save/load system is that you will be able to send me your save games with bug reports. This should cut down on time required to reproduce and resolve any bugs you find.

A lot of work was required just to bring things this far, and that doesn’t even include the big stuff you’ve already seen in action like the streaming world. To give you some idea of what’s happening above, here’s a rundown of new systems packed into that short video. Some of these systems are visible, others are ticking away under the hood.

An entirely custom state-driven UI system to render and properly scale Daggerfall’s 320×200 UI at any target resolution. This includes stuff like panels, buttons, outlines, text labels, message boxes, and so on.
A custom bitmap font system to render glyphs directly using Daggerfall’s native font files.
A messaging and event system for handling opening and closing windows, clicking buttons, etc.
ITextProvider interface and support classes to handle extracting native text resources from TEXT.RSC, book files, etc. This also forms the basis of translation features, which can implement ITextProvider in conjunction with a translation asset.
Extraction of native video streams and playback in Unity engine with all correct timings.
Initial race definitions. This is incredibly basic right now to keep development flowing. The goal is for final race definitions to be read from text files to simplify creation of custom races. Same goes for custom classes when the time comes.
Initial entity and effect systems. This covers stuff like player (and monster) resistances, immunity, special abilities, and weaknesses.
Real-time export of audio from DAGGER.SND into a Unity AudioClip for playback.
Started implementing an importer for importing vanilla Daggerfall save games.
Started integrating a serialization system for Daggerfall Unity save/load game.

I hope to have the first release available within 3-4 weeks with at least partial character creation working. New features will just keep being added from there. It’s obviously still early days, but that’s the shape of things to come.