In my previous article, I showed progress on the visual side of spell-slinging and had lots of fun with casting animations and throwing around missiles with lighting effects. Now I have to regard the business end of the spell system and how all of this holds together under the hood. This article will be a lot more tech-oriented than my previous one, but may still be of interest if you’re curious about how spells will operate in Dagerfall Unity.

Please keep in mind this is all under active development so concepts discussed here are likely to be refined or expanded by the time everything rolls out.

 

Magic & Effects System

One major shift in this process was changing how I think about the spell system. I have a long list of goals I want to achieve during this stage of development, above and beyond just emulating Daggerfall’s classic roster of spells. Primarily, I want to create a central way of handling the majority of effect-based gameplay. This means advantages/disadvantages, diseases, poisons, spells, magic items, potions, and so on should all come together under the one system or group of related systems. Once I had made that decision, it no longer made sense to call it the “Spell System” as spells are just one part of the collective. So the Magic & Effects System was born.

This is why you won’t see the word “spell” very much moving forward but you will see the word “effect” a lot. In this context an effect isn’t something visual, it’s how something works. For example, an effect that heals the player is a script which increases their current health. This naming is taken from Daggerfall itself where spells and magic items reference effects directly using a type and sub-type.  You can read more about classic Daggerfall’s spells and their effect indices on this UESP page.

You will also see the term effect used by Daggerfall’s Spell Maker UI when creating a new spell. You can add up to three effects per spell as shown in screenshot below from classic Daggerfall (spell maker is not yet implemented in Daggerfall Unity).

 

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Hi everyone, Hazelnut here. Interkarma has asked me to write a blog post about some of the work I have been doing recently, so for this post Daggerfall Workshop has been taken over by me! Muhahahaha… etc. I’m sure your regularly scheduled Interkarma posts will return soon, so don’t worry.

Anyway, allow me to introduce myself, you may know me from such features as horse riding, inventory upgrades, shopping, persistent state, icons, tavern rooms, ships and houses, as well as various other bits and bobs. So why did I spring up from nowhere and start contributing to DFU?

I bought Daggerfall on xmas after its release and played like crazy for 7 days until the end of the christmas break, then stopped. Because it’s such a huge game, never really got back into it for years due to lack of time & small children – until shortly before Morrowind came out. By then the game was simply far too dated for me to persevere, especially because I forgot about the WSAD option and I was using the default control scheme of stupid mouse pointer arrows to move. So I’ve actually never played beyond the first couple of character levels. Always wanted to, and do intend to once DF Unity is done. This is why I am absent for any discussion or work around the main quest! Spoilers! Yep even after all this time.

While the progress has been fantastic (Interkarma has Orc level stamina apparently) it’s a big project and takes a long time, and since I’m a software engineer for the past 2+ decades who now does software design so don’t get to write much code at work… I figured I’d see if I could contribute. Also my kids are all teenagers now, so I have more free time than I’ve had for 2 decades. I had no knowledge of Daggerfall and its data structures, hardly ever touched C# and never used Unity before, so it’s been quite a learning curve. Anyway, after I finished my work on ships, houses, shops and taverns I asked Interkarma what he thought I should tackle next and between us we decided it was time to implement guilds. I’d already done some work with the guild services menus, but now I needed to create the guild membership systems.

Guilds

Guilds in Daggerfall follow some common rules for promotion etc but offer different services and quests. The first thing to focus on was ranks and building some foundations that would make each guild easy to implement, allowing the common behavior to be shared. I also wanted to ensure that new guilds could be added by mods, as I was sure that several people in the community were keen to add new guilds having seen discussions on the forums, and I had some ideas of my own that would be best integrated into the base game by adding a new guild. I decided early on that the guild code should be designed to support modding from the start, and the only way to ensure this was to actually implement a guild mod early on to prove the concept.

So, quite a lot to take on. Fortunately I had 3 solid days free coming up to get started on this. The fighters guild is the simplest of them all so I started with that. First step was to test classic and see how guild membership worked with rank changes etc. To support modding, the guild classes are designed so that they know about the players membership status, rank, and what benefits and services the guild provides at that rank. Service and guild management code asks the guild class by calling the appropriate method when they need to know. They also supply guild specific messages to the ranking system which is shared. This means that a new guild can simply be added by implementing a new guild class and registering it with the guild manager.

Now by this time you could join the Fighters guild.

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