For the first time yesterday, I was able to run a full quest in Daggerfall Unity from start to finish, and I’m very happy to say that a sizeable chunk of the quest system is now implemented. Following is another quick visual diary on what I’ve been working on lately. Where possible, I’ll share some information on what the quest system is doing in the background. There’s also a new video at the end.

Guild Quests

I have partially implemented guild quests with their usual service providers. Visit the quest-giver NPC in any Fighters or Mages Guild across Illiac Bay to receive a quest from a curated pool that is “mostly working” in Daggerfall Unity. This system helps me set the scope for testers, and introduce new quests over time as more of the quest system is built. Let’s take a look at this in action by following a quest from start to finish.

If you have  a sharp eye for Daggerfall quests, or have ever written one yourself, you’ll notice a lot is happening in the screenshots above:

• Quest-giver NPC is identified by faction ID and the guild service window shows “Get Quest” as it should for that NPC.
• The quest offer process is in place for you to accept or refuse job offered.
• Many text macros are expanded automatically – such as random monster name, target location, player’s race, current region, and so on.
• Reward is being randomly generated based on quest script.
• Travel time is calculated from world using same logic as travel map, ensuring player has enough time to travel there, find the item, and return back.
• The quest log information is generated and stored in the journal with current date, return location, quest-giver NPC, target monster, and how long you have to complete quest.
• The quest-giver (Mordyval Moorhart) has also been tagged as the Questor NPC for this job. The quest system will keep track of your clicks on this person to know when you’ve returned with the wrappings.

If you travel to the named dungeon and explore it thoroughly, you will eventually find the mummy who is the target of this quest. If you don’t want to search you can use the ‘tele2qspawn’ and ‘tele2qitem’ console commands to teleport directly to the target spawn or item markers in dungeon. However you find it, kill the mummy and the target quest item is placed in its inventory for you to loot along with other randomly generated treasure.

Here are some of the things the quest system is doing under the hood in the above screenshots:

• Tracking when player visits target dungeon and injecting the mummy into world.
• Capturing script events like “injured foe” and “killed foe”. In this particular the quest, the mummy wrappings are placed on the monster when you injure it.
• Tracking quest items, setting their background green, and displaying scripted text after picking up the mummy wrappings.

Now it’s time to return to Mordyval Moorhart for our reward.

In this step, the following stuff happens in the background:

• Quest script detects you have clicked on the Questor NPC with the target item.
• The QuestCompleted text is shown for a successful outing.
• A loot container opens with your agreed-upon reward.

In classic Daggerfall, if you accidentally close the loot window without getting your reward that item is lost. I’ve made a small change where the reward is placed into a dropped loot container at your feet if you forget to collect it. This at least gives you a second chance to pickup your loot.

With all of the above working, this closes the loop on the quest process for a whole bunch of quests. It’s not just mummy wrappings, a lot of quests involving item hunts and killing monsters all operate inside this same framework. Where things fall down right now is with some of the special script actions that add flavour and complexity to quests. These remaining quest actions and conditions will be built out over time until quest system is at 100%.

Escort Quests

Sometimes a quest will ask you to take an NPC somewhere, such as rescuing the below person from a giant slain as part of a Fighters Guild quest. It seems the giant had been keeping this person for a snack.

A lot is happening in the above side-quest:

• The quest script selects at random from a victim NPC, a map reward, or no map and no victim. In this case, the victim NPC was selected.
• The random NPC Lysausa Gaerwing and her home town of Crosswold Borough are generated, giving her a bit of a backstory.
• According the quest log, she wants to be delivered to Lord Mordoryan’s Wares, a shop in Oxville. Note the %g2 pronoun macro isn’t working yet. This is on my todo list.
• When accepting the escort, a portrait (which usually does not resemble NPC flat in world) is added to your HUD to show this person is journeying with you.
• The quest system tracks when player enters target building, displays the scripted popup, and removes NPC from your HUD.

Artifacts

A smaller task than above, but still necessary for the quest system is the ability to spawn artifact items. These special items are created by merging two sets of template data together to form one very powerful item with a larger than usual number of enchantments. While magic system isn’t in the game yet, certain groundwork still needs to be implemented. Because I’m looking at spells and effects in the update chain immediately after quests, now is a good time to start thinking about this stuff. Artifacts are still at a very early stage, and I might not return to them for a while.

The character above is holding Chrysamere from a quest script intended only to test these items can be generated by quest system. A big thanks to all the people who sent me their saves so I could test artifact import and creation. I still have some bugs to fix, but I’ve made a good start on this.

Conclusion

The quest system is doing great. It’s still a ways from being finished, but all the hard problems have been solved and now I’m just building out support for remaining actions and conditions, and fixing bugs along the way. The next items on my list are multi-spawn foes (e.g. kill 6 rats in a house) and more work on text support (like the %g family of pronoun macros). There’s bound to be a few more articles to go before I can call quests complete.

If all goes well, I should have the first real test build with the quest system in current state available in 2-3 weeks. This will have the Fighters and Mages Guild quest system in place for testers to run through available quests and help me find bugs. You’ll also be able to use ‘startquest’ console command to launch whatever quest you wish, even quests you write yourself, but things might not work properly if you go too far off grid for now. I’ll post more about the test build once it’s ready, including any limitations in the build at the time.

Thank you for reading! If you would rather watch quests in action, following is a pure gameplay video of Daggerfall Unity, except I’m using the console cheats to teleport to objectives in dungeons for the sake of brevity.

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

I’ve been hard at work the last couple of weeks, finally making serious inroads into the real meat of the quest system. Here’s a quick diary of my progress since last post. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve already seen most of this, although there’s a new video at the end you might enjoy.

In the last post, I talked about using buildings as quest sites. This has allowed me to start work on placing NPCs, items, and enemies as part of quests, and to support branching quest execution based on where player is in world.

When a named NPC is reserved by quest system, Daggerfall Unity handles all the book-keeping to move that NPC to the quest site. I tested this out using King Gothryd at first. Once the new quest site is determined and Gothryd is reserved, scene builders will no longer deploy him at the usual home location – unless the quest specifies the atHome flag at time of NPC reservation. In screenshot below, Gothryd has already left for the quest site.

The quest system then generates a SiteLink between target Place and Person resources. When the player visits the target location, scene builders need to place Gothryd at that location. Here’s Gothryd at the end of his journey.

I wanted to take a short break from NPCs and moved onto items briefly. There’s a few different ways Daggerfall uses Item resources in quests. They might added directly to your inventory, placed in a dungeon, or used as a permanent reward. Different quest conditions will also trigger based on whether player is carrying a certain item or not. I still have a lot to do here, but have made a start on the first case – adding an item directly to player inventory. The parchment with a green background below is the first real quest item in Daggerfall Unity. Specifically, it’s the letter from Brisienna.

At this point the quest engine is getting advanced enough that I need more detail on what’s happening under the hood at any time. I put together a quest debugger that shows the various Task and Timer states for a running quest. I plan to make this capable of step-through execution in the short term. The debugger shows which tasks are active/inactive and which timers are pending/running/complete. After setting this up, I could finally resolve many bugs in execution flow. I also added proper support for persist-until tasks, global variable links, and rearming tasks designed to switch on and off.

I’m pleased to say the quest system is all coming together rather quickly now. There’s still a huge amount of work to do, but most of the hard problems have been solved now and I’m just building out action support and fixing bugs. Here’s a little video of the current state of the quest system. Some of the early quests are working nicely now.

As a bonus, this video also shows the new skill tracking and player levelling by Allofich. Yep, it’s possible to level-up in Daggerfall Unity now thanks to his efforts. Great work Allofich!

Now that buildings and NPCs can be identified in the game world, I can finally start linking together parts of quest system to world. The clearest starting point is quest buildings, as a majority of quests in Daggerfall will send player to a building somewhere in the world.

If you’ve been following my progress on quest system for a while, you already know a lot of technical progress has been made on the back-end. Without forcing you to recap on past articles, here’s a brief summary of quest system in its current state:

• Quest scripts are generated by Template v1.11 by Donald Tipton. This has long been the go-to solution for adding new quests to classic Daggerfall. By adopting this scripting format, it becomes possible to compile scripts between both Daggerfall and Daggerfall Unity for testing. And it means anyone with experience writing quests for Daggerfall can already write quests for Daggerfall Unity.
• Daggerfall Unity has a JIT quest compiler which builds quest scripts at runtime. This means you can edit, start, and stop quests without once closing the game. This will be even more useful once the Quest Inspector UI is ready.
• The QuestMachine execution environment runs compiled quests like small virtual machines inside your game session. It interfaces with the world and does all the necessary housekeeping for running quests.
• Quests are made up of resources (Place, Person, Item, etc.) and Actions (perform some task). Some actions are also conditional (do task when condition is true). Almost all of Daggerfall’s high-level gameplay is driven by the quest system. Even some things you might not expect (such as Lysandus screaming VENGEANCE! at night) are accomplished by quests.

When adding building selection to game, one of my first problems was how do I locate the building in whatever town player is in. Daggerfall Unity doesn’t have wandering NPCs to mark buildings on your map quite yet. Not a problem for named buildings like taverns and shops because these are visible on the automap, but what about some random residence in town? How do I get the player there for testing?

The solution I landed on was to add a simple quest compass on the HUD. This will show the direction, name, and distance to target door. Fortunately, I already track building entrances in the world. What’s needed is to build a set of marker positions based on active quests. I start by just adding a test sphere on quest target doors.

That blob above sits perfectly on the door to my quest building. Now I need to show that as text and distance. The HUD text overlay below align with doors in camera space and show distance to multiple targets.

And finally the building name. This marker can direct quest developers straight to all active quest sites in their current location. Of course, anyone will be able to turn this on from the quest inspector UI if they would like a quest compass. I’m almost certainly going to expand this system out for quest items in dungeons and other targets in the future.

I can now enable the quest journal, something Lypyl implemented perfectly some time back. I wire up the keybinds and UI to allow player to open quest journal, and find logged quest information sitting there as expected.

What you can’t easily see above is that some text macro support has been added as well. For example, %pcn resolves to player’s full character name, _buildingSymbol_ expands to building name, __buildingSymbol_ expands to location name, and ____buildingSymbol_ expands to region name. This is all part of the text engine inside Daggerfall I’ve had to reimplement in Daggerfall Unity.

With local building support out of the way, the next step is remote buildings elsewhere in the same region. This involves a bit more work, but in a few hours it’s possible to send player anywhere in the game world.

The final piece is to implement PcAt conditional action, which detects when player has entered target building and does something. In this test quest, I just display a popup and end the quest.

This is an important milestone for questing in Daggerfall Unity. It means a lot of the hard groundwork has been completed and the real work, the stuff visible to the player, can commence. This is a huge relief for me because I can finally show off my progress in a meaningful way with screenshots and videos. As important as all the code back-end is to outcome, its been very difficult to show progress which sometimes makes it feel like nothing is happening.

To celebrate visible progress, here’s the first video of Daggerfall Unity’s fledgling quest system in action.

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