Twitter Reminder

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

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

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.

Translation1 Translation2 Translation3 Translation4 Translation5 Translation6 Translation7