Category Archives: Visual Diary

Daggerfall Unity 0.13 Rendering Update – Part 2

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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 0.13 Rendering Update

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There are some long-standing items on Daggerfall Unity’s Roadmap that have at last found their way into the game. These changes relate to visual rendering of classic textures in Unity engine and how they interact with lighting. There’s also a long-overdue update to the postprocessing stack. To summarise everything before getting into details, these changes are:

  • New default shaders for classic textures
  • Switch rendering from Gamma to Linear colour space
  • Lighting review
  • Update postprocessing stack

New Default Shaders

You might have noticed the visuals in DFU have a kind of silvery “shine” on top, and some textures tend to wash out easily under certain lighting conditions. Examples are objects that emit light, such as lanterns, and naturally bright textures like snowy terrain at midday. Even when using retro rendering with palletization, deep blacks will tend to shift value towards lighter greys.

The reason for this is somewhat technical. A concise version is that modern engines like Unity use something called Physically Based Rendering (PBR) which attempts to simulate the physical properties of a material and how it interacts with light. However, old games like Daggerfall predate physical material properties such as normal maps, smoothness maps, etc. and instead have only basic colour information in a single texture. When attempting to render these simple textures in a PBR engine without any other material properties, they are perfectly smooth and will reflect light in unsatisfying ways. This can give objects a shiny kind of look, as if made from plastic or dull metal.

In fixing this, the goal was to correct lighting incongruity while using classic textures and still allow mods like DREAM to use PBR materials. It was also necessary for these different materials to work together in the same scene with any combination of classic and modded materials. This presented some challenges that were eventually overcome with the help of new shaders and several updates to material pipeline.

The best way to see the difference is to compare a scene in 0.12 and 0.13. Pay close attention to the dark areas of the rat while adjusting slider. You’ll notice in 0.12 screenshot the rat has a uniform specular shine that is removed in 0.13. You’ll see the same across the entire scene, although most obvious in darker textures.

To fix this specular shine required new shaders better suited to Daggerfall’s classic textures. These new shaders lean fully into the retro textures and use simple Lambertian reflectance like older games of the time. This leads to better colour sampling under most lighting conditions and fixes brighter areas from becoming overbright. For example, the lantern and Fire Daedra wash out to bright yellows in 0.12 using PBR shaders but show their true colours in 0.13.

While relatively basic, the new shaders still support Normal maps and Emission maps, and conditional compilation. They are more lightweight than Unity’s Standard shader and will perform slightly better on lower-end computers running without mods.

Gamma to Linear Colour Space

The next change was switching from Gamma to Linear colour space. This is another technical subject, but in short it relates to how colours are added and multiplied. Linear colour space leads to more accurate results with improved lighting falloff and softer shadows. The results can be subtle in unmodded DFU, but the combination of new materials and linear lighting uplifts every scene with deeper colours and improved contrast while eliminating bloom and flat specular shine.

With the change to Linear colour space, modded materials now have a chance to look their best at all times with more accurate colours and no unwanted bright spots near lights. Of course, all these changes also require lighting to be reviewed and materials tweaked so they still look good. This leads into the next item on the list.

Lighting Review

Linear colour space blends and lights differently than Gamma. Lights appear to have a larger radius and is more defined on edges. This is more accurate overall, but also different if you’ve become accustomed to Gamma lighting. As a result, all the light sources in the game need to be tuned so they aren’t too bright and still resemble the game as it was.

In general, dungeons will appear a bit darker from 0.13. The combination of new shaders, Linear colour space, and lighting review result in darker colours becoming more prominent. You can really see the flat silvery shine over everything in below screenshot when comparing 0.12 to 0.13. The dark parts of brick textures stay dark rather than shifting value towards lighter greys.

Towns are still nicely lit oases, with Linear’s different light falloff visible against sides of buildings in below screenshot. But the removal of flat specular shine means night-time scenes have better overall contrast between light and dark areas.

Daytime scenes will light much the same as there’s only a single directional light source (the sun). The change to Linear with new shaders also resolves the problem of terrain textures looking over-bright under a midday sun. Finally, the daytime light curve was adjusted to provide a longer plateau of sunlight around 10am-3pm.

Update Postprocessing Stack

For some years now, Daggerfall Unity has continued to use an older embedded postprocessing stack. This has now been removed and replaced with current Post Processing 3.1.1 via Unity’s package manager. This updates deferred fog and postprocess capabilities to be in line with current engine. It also required some minor code changes and retuning fog as some parts of the old Post Processing library have been deprecated.

Fog is roughly the same, other than being a bit thicker towards limits of view distance. Compare the distant trees and buildings in below winter scene.

Preview Release and Mods

Daggerfall Unity 0.13 will be available as a Preview release soon. Due to all the changes across asset pipeline, colour space, default materials, and postprocess stack, you should expect some mods that work under 0.12 not to work in 0.13. Mods that include new materials and shaders will be most affected. Any non-graphical mods, or those which only change game settings, should be unaffected or only need minor tuning.

It could take several weeks for mod authors to update their mods to be compatible. If you don’t want to help test 0.13 and provide feedback to developers and modders, you can happily stay on 0.12 until 0.13 release is out of preview. You can also run 0.12 and 0.13 side-by-side by unzipping releases to different folders and running different mod loadouts. Other than changes outlined above, the 0.13 release is identical in terms of gameplay and patch level to 0.12.

Looking to the future, this represents the last major change to Daggerfall Unity leading up to 1.0. Bug fix and general refinement will resume once 0.13 is considered stable.

Thank you for reading! I hope you decide to try out Daggerfall Unity 0.13 preview to help test mods and provide feedback.

Daggerfall Unity Beta 0.11.0 – Milestone Accomplished

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The first official beta release for Daggerfall Unity is now ready to download from Live Builds page. This is only a small update over 0.10.28 release, which was a “pre-beta” test just to make sure there were no showstopping bugs before Beta proper. If you haven’t already, please read that article for more information about recent builds.

So yeah – beta. The game is feature complete and working well. If you’ve been waiting to play Daggerfall with smooth controls, quality of life improvements, and epic mod support, there has never been a better time than now. We still have some quirks and bugs that need to be fixed, but after 18 months of intensive fixes and improvements during alpha, this game is in pretty good shape. The feedback loop of near-monthly releases to community with rapid fixes over several years has proven to be a good formula for this kind of game. This will continue right through to 1.0 and beyond to make the best version of Daggerfall possible. Only the frequency and magnitude of updates will slow down as there’s not much left on the plate beyond fixing bugs and gradually expanding mod support.

If this is your first time here – welcome! You might also be wondering what Daggerfall Unity is, how it came to be, and who were the people involved? So rather than just info-dump the small number of changes in this release (scroll to the end for that), I thought it might be a good time to take a look back at the journey leading up to this point. We only get to reach beta once, so pull up a chair and settle in for the ultra-condensed version. I won’t bore you with the full history, you can check out the About page and this tweetstorm for more about me and this whole journey.

 

The Early Days 1996-2003

My name is Gavin “Interkarma” Clayton and Daggerfall Workshop is my site. After buying Daggerfall in 1996, I fell in love with the game. So much so that by 2000/2001, I began writing tools to view textures and 3D models from the game, including small chunks of locations called “blocks”. This culminated in a program called Daggerfall Explorer written for Windows 95, which incredibly still works today. Daggerfall Explorer was written in C++ and used a custom 3D engine on top of DirectX 8.1 which I called the Alchemy Engine. Sweet name, right?

 

Notable other people around this time were Dave Humphrey who founded the UESP, and Donald Tipton who made several excellent tools. There were many others hacking away at the game data formats back then, and my early efforts build directly on the knowledge they shared. Not everything was well understood, however. Some real basics like how UV coordinates were stored and several other file formats were still a complete mystery. These would continue to be understood as the years rolled by thanks to a sharing and wonderful community.

I continued to build more tools for Daggerfall such as Daggerfall Cartographer (view full cities), Daggerfall Imaging (view and export textures), and Daggerfall Jukebox (play and export music). Late in this tool-building stage, around 2003, I actually attempted a Daggerfall remake that didn’t get off the ground. I didn’t have the experience and the necessary social framework for this kind of project simply didn’t exist, so this attempt failed rather quickly. It was a good learning experience, but my interest faded for a while after that.

 

More Tools 2009-2012

In 2009, I got back to work building more Daggerfall tools. This time around, I constructed a C# library called Daggerfall Connect to read the game data formats and update with some of the new understanding of file formats that had emerged through the intervening years. This culminated in Daggerfall Imaging 2 and Daggerfall Modelling, both evolutions of my previous tools. By this point, it was possible to explore entire cities and dungeons, and even export models to COLLADA format.

 

A code library written in C# turned out to be a great decision. This library was very fast and portable between engines – even operating systems. Without realising it, I was laying the foundation of would eventually become Daggerfall Unity.

 

Daggerfall Tools for Unity 2014

Looking around for something to do while learning the Unity engine in 2014, my wife suggested doing something Daggerfall related. Start with something familiar to learn something new. After a few hours of tinkering, I found my old C# Daggerfall Connect library would plug directly into Unity, and I had the foundation of what became Daggerfall Tools for Unity.

 

In a couple of months, I had the whole world working with basic exploration and combat, and it was obvious we had something special on our hands. It wasn’t a full remake just yet, but even at this early stage a few contributors had appeared like Lypyl and Nystul, helping to expand the tools and show just how easy it was to create cool Daggerfall stuff. Remixing and rebuilding Daggerfall had never been more open and easy to all-comers.

 

Daggerfall Unity 2015-Present

By mid-2015, the number of voices asking for a true remake became overwhelming. I drafted a Mission Statement and a Roadmap that would define the next several years of my life, and the lives of many others. By November 2015, the first test build of Daggerfall Unity was released with Character Creation and most of the game’s framework in place. It was pretty raw and I still had no idea how to do a lot of stuff, but the bones were solid and the heart was beating strongly.

This is where other serious contributors started appearing and helping to build the game. After Lypyl and Nystul came TheLacus, InconsolableCellist, Allofich, Hazelnut, Numidium, Meteoric Dragon, Pango, Jay_H, Ferital, JorisVanEijden, and jefetienne. These were the contributors who made frequent and substantial contributions to the game and it’s underlying code.

It’s simply not possible to cover everyone’s work over the last several years in full detail, but I’ll try to cover the highlights. Read back through the update archive on this site for the full history or review our GitHub Contributors page to see just how much work has gone into this game. I’ll keep expanding this list out as the right words come to me. If anyone feels left out here, it’s not intentional. There are just too many people involved and so many years of work to think of everything. If I’ve missed something you’re proud of, please contact me and I’ll add it below.

Lypyl was the very first contributor and champion of Daggerfall Tools for Unity. He reverse engineered and implemented pretty much all remaining dungeon action records, and did some truly wild and wonderful things with DFTFU. He created the Enhanced Sky mod and architected the foundations of the mod system we still use today.

Nystul implemented the Automap and Talk UIs, and some amazing early mods like Distant Terrain and Realtime Reflections. Nystul was also involved in several other systems critical to the game’s early development.

TheLacus is most known for dialling the mod system up to 11 and building on top of Lypyl’s early foundations. TheLacus also documented the Daggerfall Unity API and mod systems in great detail, and created excellent tools around mod and quest authoring. Without this important work, the mod scene would be much smaller than it is today.

Allofich famously excavated the guts of classic Daggerfall to help DFU stay true to classic’s formulas and behaviours. Allofich also implemented advanced enemy AI and much more. His insights into Daggerfall’s inner workings advanced our knowledge well beyond the Chronicles and UESP alone. The game we have today would be far more divergent without him.

Ferital also reverse engineered several vital systems from classic and helped them reach parity in DFU. The talk and reputation systems particularly were refined extensively by Ferital. He’s also known for fixing many texture issues and other small gripes with classic game data so that DFU can be a better experience. On a personal note, Ferital was one of the first to encourage and support my exploring tools back in the early 2000s.

Hazelnut burst onto the scene with horse riding and went on to implement guild services, taverns, potion maker, and much, much more. Hazelnut is also a powerful force in the modding community, building support and helping others come to grips with the mod system. His mods are legendary, including Archaeologists, Roleplay & Realism (with Ralzar in parts), Basic Roads, and more. He is not only one of the most prolific contributors to Daggerfall Unity, he has been a true friend and supported me privately through some of the darker months. There’s no way to accurately capture just how important Hazelnut is to this project.

Meteoric Dragon built Advanced Climbing and other movement & camera systems. He also helped refine systems like underwater swimming, climbing out of water, and smoothly mantling onto a surface. If you walk, run, jump, swim, climb, or fly in Daggerfall Unity then you’ve experienced Meteoric Dragon’s work. He also added some work to the effect system and a few other subsystems beyond movement.

Jay_H was our resident quest ninja, building hundreds of new quests for Quest Pack 1 while performing deep fixes and improvements to the classic quests. Jay_H was also a positive force in the community helping others come to grips with the quest system and always ready with kindness for others. He helped moderate the forums and keep our little corner of the web a nice place to visit.

JorisVanEijden expanded our knowledge of the quest system, helping it to reach closer parity with classic. He also refined many subsystems and expanded on areas where my work could be considered “placeholder” at best. Joris was another one who patiently supported me when I struggled to understand something fully. The game is better in several places thanks to his help.

Jefetienne constructed the controller input system while overhauling and improving many part of input and related UIs. He is also known for opening some parts of the core game up to mod system, and helping to find and fix several bugs. He also created the screenshot feature and advanced keybinds UI.

Numidium is best known for custom class creator, class questionnaire, and many fixes and improvements across the core game. Numidium also implemented several artifacts for the effect system and bug fixes in other parts of the game.

Pango is another prolific core contributor to Daggerfall Unity. He worked hard through every system of the game, fixing bugs and improving as he went. I’ve watched him support people on several platforms in multiple languages. There just aren’t enough words for how important Pango was to this whole process. There was no job too big or too small for him to take on. He filled in the blanks where my own knowledge was lacking, and remained patient with me when I lacked understanding. Daggerfall Unity would be half the game it is today without his patient and clever hands on the wheel alongside us.

On the modding side, there are also many notable figures who deserve a mention.

King of Worms created the amazing D.R.E.A.M. mod which enhances almost every part of Daggerfall Unity from the textures to the music, to little touches like night and day dungeon exits. His work became so familiar that to many people it’s simply impossible to play Daggerfall Unity without his mods installed.

AlexanderSig crafted the sublime handpainted 3D models to uplift the base assets and even replace many 2D objects with true 3D objects. His work is also closely associated with Daggerfall Unity.

Uncanny_Valley is behind Taverns Redone, Mountains & Hills, and more.

Ralzar has created almost a dozen fantastic mods like Climates & Calories, Torch Taker, Realistic Wagon, Unlevelled Loot, and more. He has also been active helping users across the forums and on reddit.

Kamer is the mastermind behind the fiendish Warm Ashes quest mods pack, adding dangerous encounters around dungeons, wilderness encounters, sieges, and more. He has also created visual mods adding Rocks and Windmills, and expanded on town populations in Villager Immersion Overhaul.

There are so many others who made important contributions helping Daggerfall Unity become what it is today. Head over to the Credits topic on forums to see a complete list. In total, more than 45 people helped to make Daggerfall Unity. That’s just on the development side, it doesn’t count the modders and scores of community members reporting bugs over the years. Something that started as a small solo project quickly exploded into one of the most comprehensive and successful fan recreations of a classic game to date. Even if you hold no love for this project, it’s hard to deny just how hard everyone worked, how much love was involved, and how successful the project model proved to be.

 

Plea for a Future

Daggerfall Unity is made by the Daggerfall community out of love and love alone. This project has never been and will never be monetised. This site has no advertisements and no donation button. I didn’t create a Patreon for the whole of Daggerfall Unity’s development. Every time someone offered to contribute money to me or the project, I politely refused. At every turn, I tried to send a clear message this project is not about making money from Bethesda’s intellectual property. Even the name Daggerfall Unity is more a play on words – it references the engine used but is really a testament to the open development process. Daggerfall Community Edition would have been just as good a name.

Furthermore, you must own a copy of Daggerfall for the asset files essential to make Daggerfall Unity work. It’s a drop-in engine replacement over the original game, not a standalone product. Thankfully, Daggerfall itself has been freely available from Bethesda themselves and many other places online for several years. This means DFU is really a free upgrade to a free game, made by the community for the community.

For all these years, Bethesda has quietly tolerated our tiny presence working in their shadow to rebuild and reimagine their greatest early game. They could have squashed this project at any time, but mercifully chose to let it thrive as an offshoot to the wider Elder Scrolls modding scene. For that, I want to say thankyou. From the bottom of my heart – thank you. This game means the world to me and many thousands of other people. I’ve been contacted by people who said this game played a part in helping them out of depression and reconnecting with friends, that it made their lives better. I believe these heartfelt words and it brings me joy to know all these years of work have brought other people some happiness.

With that, I want to make a simple plea. Please let Daggerfall Unity continue to thrive in the hands of the community who created it. As ownership of The Elder Scrolls passes to Microsoft and into new hands, please let this project continue to be everything it can be. This is something special and virtually unique. A functioning and complete fan recreation that survived not only its own development but the potential of being shut down at any time. It’s a strange and beautiful thing that has no real right to exist, and yet here it is. Please let it continue to be.

 

Conclusion

That’s all from me for now. Daggerfall Unity is feature complete and can only get better from here. The beta builds are ready for download and Nexus has well over a hundred Daggerfall Unity mods all ready for your enjoyment. Go play and be happy, then send us some feedback. We made it so far thanks to positivity and encouragement from others, and I’m confident that will continue into the future as we approach 1.0. Even as our many developers come and go, the project itself lives on with its singular spirit of collaboration.

As promised, there are a few changes in the 0.11.0 release. Here’s a quick list for anyone wanting the patch notes for this version.

  • Alternate Music setting to play FM versions of songs (Numidium)
  • Allow custom Renderer for ObjectPositioner (TheLacus)
  • Improve indoor guard spawns to use farthest entrance (Numidium)
  • Harden SettingsManager against bad values read to reduce most cases of broken settings.ini causing a black screen (Interkarma)
  • Flag emission for special case windows 036_2, 151_3, 154_3, 351_3 (Interkarma)
  • Fix desert Mages Guild window emission (Interkarma)

May Builds – Lycanthropy

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It’s almost the end of the month, which means a fresh round of Daggerfall Unity Live Builds. May comes bearing the full lycanthropy feature from curse through to cure. If you’re the kind of Daggerfall player who just loves to wolf out (or tusk out if you dig more on wereboars) then this update is for you! Note that some spoilers are below for how lycanthropy operates and the paths to curing or managing it.

Lycanthropy

If you tangle with a stray werewolf or wereboar while out adventuring, there’s a small chance (0.6%) that you will become inflicted by their same curse. Unlike other infections, this one will bypass your normal disease resistance unless you happen to already be a vampire or lycanthrope. On the first evening after infection, you will have a dream about a “man who is less than a man”.

If you see this dream, you have just three days to find a temple healer or cure yourself through magical means. If you let the disease run its course, you’ll be cursed to hunt the innocent once per month and will be forced to shapechange when either moon is full.

Continue reading→

Get Ready For Diseases

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Unlike later games in the series, diseases in Daggerfall are more than a mere annoyance. They mean serious business and could spell a permanent end to your adventures if left untreated. Diseases will sap your attributes to nothing and even kill you in a matter of days if you don’t manage to get cured.

So good news everyone! Starting with latest Live Builds you can become infected with diseases in Daggerfall Unity thanks to dirty creatures like bats, rats, and mummies.

Diseases actually began development a while back. Most of the research and back-end framework was built out by two rockstar contributors you should already be familiar with: Allofich and Hazelnut. Diseases have just been waiting for me to implement effect system to handle their payload and support their curing by spell effects. This is another great example of a successful collaborative effort for Daggerfall Unity.

Rather than roll out a dry article about implementation details, I’ve decided to use the Visual Diary format to tell a bit of a story and show all the different parts of the disease system in the context of normal play. I’ve decided to create a fictional day in the life of your average character to show how he might catch a disease and find his way to a cure. This is also great opportunity to show just how far gameplay has come, as everything that follows is something that could play out in Daggerfall Unity right now.

Let’s begin.

 

Continue reading→

Spells: Front-End Graphics

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It’s finally time for spells to get the treatment and become a regular feature in Daggerfall Unity. I have decided to approach this feature-set in a more visual way than I did the quest system, which involved several months of back-end work before I could even show a single screenshot. This time around, I want the process to follow the visual diary approach from day one to make it more interesting to watch things unfold. This also helps me stay motivated as it’s a lot more fun to hurl around glowing balls of magical death than build a runtime compiler for the quest system.

There will be some more code-oriented articles later in the series, but for now let’s take a look at the front-end graphics of spell-casting animations and missiles.

 

Setup

Before I can do anything else, I have to implement the basic cast/recast loop. Thanks to Lypyl, a baseline spellbook interface is already in the game. It doesn’t have any actual spells yet, just some temp line items, but that’s all we need right now.

I wired up the spellbook to the “cast” key (default is Backspace) so player can select a spell from their collection. It doesn’t matter which “spell” you choose at this point. Just double-click any item to let the game know you’ve selected something.

Continue reading→