New live builds are now available for the month of April. This release brings a completed item maker UI along with an Enchantment system to drive it all behind the scenes. In this post, I’ll break down some of the new features around enchanting without going too deep into the technical side of things. If you’d like a more technical primer on magic in Daggerfall Unity check out the Magic & Effects Back-End post from last year.

If you have an existing character with “on equip” type enchantments, I recommend unequipping then equipping those magical items again after upgrading to latest version. This will ensure any of the old intermediate effects are deactivated and the new effects are activated correctly.

Item Maker UI

This is the front-end we’re all familiar with. It is here, through the magical power of menus, that new enchanted items are forged. Select your item, add some powers, balance them out with a few side-effects, and give the item a cool name. Then provided you have the gold, a new magic item with all your custom settings will be added to your inventory.

There’s not much more to say about the item maker. While it’s the main feature of this release, everything is fairly utilitarian and most of you are probably familiar with this UI from classic. I’ve just made a few tweaks like adding scroll bars and proper text clipping, and fixed a few minor bugs from classic. The really interesting stuff is what’s happening behind the item maker UI with the Enchantment system offering all these powers and side-effects for use.

I also want to thank Hazelnut for his earlier work on the item maker UI layout. I could just get stuck in to wiring everything up without the rather manual process of mapping out buttons and list boxes. It was great to skip that this time, so thank you Hazelnut!

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Just as March was coming to a close, a second round of Live Builds landed for the month. This is primarily a bug-fix release, but thanks to our amazing contributors there’s new stuff too!

Artifact Progress

Some great progress has been made around artifacts lately. There are fixes to their appearance and equipment placement, a new console command to spawn any artifact, and even decent progress on the bespoke effects that make artifacts so unique. I won’t cover the artifacts in great detail here, so check out the UESP Daggerfall Artifacts page for more information about them.

Wabbajack (Numidium)

Wabbajack is a magical staff imbued with the chaos of Sheogorath. Striking an enemy will randomly transform it into another type of enemy. This might turn a powerful foe into a relatively harmless rat. If you’re lucky.

[gfycat data_id=”CraftyDampHen”]

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This article is a bit overdue, it’s for the new Live Builds that dropped on March 03, which in turn is a slightly delayed February build. There’s even another round of March builds coming up with mostly bugfixes, so it’s long past time to write up the change log for early March.

Terrain Performance Enhancements (Hazelnut/Nystul)

This one started in January after Nystul backported some optimisations from his Distant Terrain mod into the default terrain generator. Then Hazelnut added multi-core support for terrain generation so that several computationally heavy tasks could be completed in parallel. That’s a short summary of what was an awesome collaboration with lots of ideas and work being bounced around. And for what turned into almost a complete overhaul of terrain generation, it didn’t cause any major issues, a testament to the skill and dedication of those involved.

Once everything was in place, time to generate each terrain tile dropped roughly in half. This means the world loads more quickly after travel, loading a game, or exiting a dungeon. It’s a huge improvement for overworld explorers and users of Tedious Travel mod (which also received some optimisations around the same time when Hazelnut spotted a timestep issue).

If you use a terrain mod (Distant Terrain, Mountains & Hills), you’ll need to update them for compatibility with March builds.

Sunset screenshot by King of Worms on forums

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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.

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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

[gfycat data_id=”HarshSlimyCowbird”]

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