Author Archives: Interkarma

New Builds For 2018

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Welcome to 2018 everyone! What a great few months we’ve had in Daggerfall Unity. Despite my general absence in November through December last year, work still continued on the project at an excellent pace. I owe a debt of thanks to everyone that continued adding features while I was out of the scene for several weeks. I want to make this post all about these contributions, and mention the people who contributed during that time.

We’re close to a stable “Quests 0.4” build now before officially moving on to 0.5 and spells. “Stable” in this case doesn’t mean everything is complete or bug free – just that quests should be relatively steady and playable based on our current position in the Roadmap at the end of 0.4. Work will continue on improving and tightening up quest system all the way to 1.0, but now it’s time to move onto something new. This often means exciting new bugs to fix so the stable build stands as good fallback point if anyone is experiencing too many troubles with latest versions.

You’ll find the latest downloads on the Live Builds page as usual. If you’d like the very latest code, you can check it out directly from our GitHub page. And if you’d like a full blow-by-blow account of all changes up to now, the Commits page has what you’re after. This post mainly covers featured highlights and the people who added them. In alphabetical order, they are:

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Daggerfall Unity Now Playable Start to End

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That’s right! The main story quest in Daggerfall Unity is now completely playable from start to end. I’ve spent the last couple of months playing through the story quest, building out engine support, and fixing all the major bugs I could find. It’s true this game still has a distance to travel (spell system is next major journey) but this is a huge milestone in the project’s life cycle. It’s no longer fair to say Daggerfall Unity “isn’t playable yet”, that’s not even close to accurate anymore. And thanks to regular contributors like Nystul, Allofich, Hazelnut, and Lypyl, some of the later features on the roadmap are building out ahead of schedule.

The quest system has consumed around a year of my development time to bring to this point. It represents the single largest group of features in the project so far, and drives almost every other gameplay system forwards. I feel confident in saying the magic system probably won’t be anywhere near as challenging. And once we pass that milestone, everything else is on the downhill run.

 

Getting Started

After you grab the latest DragonBreak build from Live Builds page, there are two ways you can play through the main quest. You can either start a new character and play normally (using quests offered by any Fighters Guild to help level up between main quests) or use the “setmqstage n” console command to force the game to a specific point along the main quest process. There are 7 total quest stages, thus “setmqstage 1” through “setmqstage 7” are supported. Each stage is a chain of around two to six quests that represent a particular story arc in the game. If and when new problems are found with main quest, testers can quickly restart and test just that stage without playing through the whole game from the beginning.

If you want to play the game as normally as possible, start a new character. Playing the game from start to end normally is also an important and time-consuming part of the testing process, so your time here is valuable, even if something breaks and you need to start again. But if you want to perform focused testing of the main quest, grab a high level character save and use the “setmqstage n” console commands. I’ll post more details in this forum thread as time allows. Please offer feedback in that thread or ask general questions, and post to Bug Reports forums with obvious bugs.

 

Stable Builds

The next step from here is to work towards a DragonBreak stable build and complete the 0.4 cycle. This might take several weeks as the main quest is a massive and complex system, there’s no telling what problems testers might run into. Once the stable build is ready, work will proceed on the spell system and 0.5.

 

Thank You

I also want to thank all of Daggerfall Unity’s contributors, supporters, mod-creators, and community members. You are all responsible for this project’s momentum, and for keeping morale high during those bleak periods of solid development where nothing visible seems to be happening. I am very excited for the future of Daggerfall Unity and the community building around it.

Cheers everyone!

 

For more frequent updates on Daggerfall Unity, follow me on Twitter @gav_clayton.

 

Dust of Restful Death

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The main story quest in Daggerfall Unity is cracking along lately. The more problems I solve, the faster I can pass new quests. This has created a cumulative effect where things are snowballing towards the finish line. Today, I feel I’ve reached an important milestone with the main quest passing up to “The Dust of Restful Death”, only a few short steps from the end.

In this quest, the player briefly soothes the tormented bones of King Lysandus to learn why he requires vengeance. From a technical front, this is not only the result of a long chain of earlier quests, but required some new interaction between the world and quest system, and is the first quest to play an in-game cinematic.

There are bound to be problems and bugs to fix as the full story quest rolls out to testers, but for now let’s just enjoy this one quest where Lysandus has his big moment.

Vengeance Build 81

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New builds are now available on the Live Builds page, bringing us up to build #81 across all platforms. A lot has happened over the last month, with steady contributions from long-time Daggerfall Unity developers Lypyl, Allofich, TheLacus, and Nystul. I would also like everyone to welcome on board new developer Hazelnut, who has built many valuable updates over the last month.

I’ll post a more complete list of updates towards the end of this post, but want to start with the big visual stuff that’s changed since last update.

 

Main Quest

The complete main story quest is now offered when starting a new level 1 character. Please keep in mind this is still under construction, so you are likely to reach a point where you cannot continue and may need to start fresh later (or use a console cheat). It could be another few months before all main quests are in a passing state, but I felt it was important to start offering to new players.

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The “Vengeance” Update

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A few weeks on from the Fighters update and the quest system is now ready to run with Daggerfall’s main story quest. Well, the first few quests at least. Welcome to the Vengeance update!

 

The aim of this test cycle is to ensure the main quest can be experienced by a non magic using character. My plan is to roll out the main quest in small bite-sized pieces with the ability to reset the main quest instantly to one of several critical points along the way. This forum post has all the details.

In summary, you can use the console command “setmqstage number” to setup your character level, reputation, global variables, and quest loadout to start testing main quest from any point. Right now stage 1 and 2 are active, and more will be added in the coming weeks.

 

By limiting quests to a handful at a time, I can build out remaining quest actions in small pieces while bug-fixing the live quests. Hopefully this will keep testers on track and communicating in a standard way. But you can try to play ahead through the whole main quest right now if you so choose. Only please keep in mind some of the later quests are missing action support and will not execute properly. So play ahead for fun but keep the real testing and feedback for the current stages.

 

Also new in this version is full save/load of quest state. If a quest breaks or doesn’t go as planned, you can send me your save file and I’ll be able to inspect what’s happening from the save data. A lot of other bug fixes and small improvements have also made their way into the latest builds.

 

You will find latest builds on the Live Builds page as usual. I hope you enjoy playing through the first few story quests in Daggerfall Unity. Don’t forget, this forum thread is the right place for discussion and feedback. If you want more micro updates on the project, follow me on Twitter @gav_clayton.