It’s time for a fresh round of Live Builds for January 2019. The last month has seen a lot of progress across a wide variety of systems, so rather than waste time on an intro. let’s get right into it.

Vampirism

The full loop of Daggerfall-styled vampirism is now in the game from curse all the way through to cure. Each time you’re mauled by a vampire, you have a 0.6% chance of contracting the disease that will transform your character into one of their kind. Some time after being infected, your rest will be plagued with bad dreams. Unless you like fangs and late-night shopping, this would be a good time to find a temple and cure yourself of diseases.

 

If you allow the disease to continue a few days, you will “die” and awaken two weeks later interred somewhere in the region. In classic Daggerfall, your death will also remove you from all guilds and reset your legal reputations. At this time, Daggerfall Unity doesn’t modify guild memberships or reputations, this will be implemented sometime in the next few months.

 

Becoming a vampire comes with some great perks. You can no longer be touched by weapons less than silver quality, you get +20 to most attributes, +30 to Climbing, Critical Strike, Hand-to-Hand, Jumping, Running, and Stealth, and unique vampire versions of spells including one specific to your clan. I should note that only Levitate and clan-specific spells are currently delivered to vampires. Charm Mortal and Calm Humanoid are not working yet, but will be added soon. You also get a nice set of fangs and some really bloodshot eyes.

 

It’s not all positive though. As a vampire, you will start taking damage from sunlight and holy place. But most pressing of all is the need to satiate your urge to kill at least once a day. If you fail to kill each day, you will find yourself unable to rest which can make things difficult. Fast travel will also make you arrive at night, so you will have limited time windows for shopping in cities before they close.

 

After playing for a while, you will receive unique vampire quest, starting with an introduction ques from your clan. There are 10 vampire quests in total, including one that will cure you of the infliction.

 

It’s probably worth mentioning that most of the back-end work for racial override effects is now complete, so lycanthropy won’t be too far away.

 

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Happy New Year everyone! It’s great to be here in 2019 at last. This will be the year that Daggerfall Unity steps out of pre-alpha into alpha, and reaches feature parity with classic Daggerfall. If you haven’t seen the Roadmap page lately, it’s time to take another look. There aren’t too many items left now and no major systems remain to be developed. Everything that’s still to do is just a small part of an otherwise finished system. Even the Quest System and Effect System roadmap pages are looking very green these days.

With a busy end to 2018, I didn’t make time to put up change notes for the Live Builds released on 20 December 2018. I think its a good idea to address these changes before dropping the next release, or solid contributions from our developers aren’t going properly credited. Let’s start with the highlights of new features from 0.6.1 Stable and 0.7.2 builds. I’ve tagged anything introduced in 0.7.2 with [0.7].

Highlights

Hanging Mode for Advanced Climbing [0.7] [Meteoric Dragon]

Upgrades to the optional Advanced Climbing system allows skilled climbers to hang from ceilings and eaves, and climb around on ceilings. This rounds out the other Advanced Climbing features such as sideways movement on walls and climbing around corners.

direct link to gfy

 

AI Obstacle & Fall Avoidance [Allofich]

Enemy mobiles have learned a few new tricks, and it’s a bit harder to trap them on the environment now. In addition to moving around static and dynamic obstacles, they’re smart enough not to walk off high places. While this isn’t perfect yet, it’s still a big improvement over classic AI. In other news, enemy AI is now capable of bashing open locked doors to reach the player!

direct link to gfy

 

Personal Light Sources [Hazelnut]

If you enable “item based player torch” in startup settings > Advanced > Enhancements, you can finally make use of those lanterns, torches, and candles in General Stores. Lanterns and torches can be refuelled using oil, also found in General Stores. If you make dungeons darker with the ambient light settings on the same Enhancements page, this adds a nice RP touch to dungeon delving. It can be quite tense knowing you’re running out of lantern oil and about to be lost in the dark.

 

Potions [0.7] [Hazelnut]

This is a big one! All potion recipes and effects are now supported in game, along with the crafting UI to make them. As a Daggerfall Unity quality of life feature, like-kind potion will stack.

 

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