Hey everyone, belated happy new year for 2017!
I’m back to work after taking a few weeks off. Now things have settled down, I’m also back to working on Daggerfall Unity’s quest system. You can expect a blog post for part 3 of this series soon.
Quests are the beating heart of Daggerfall, everything from the tutorial to vengeance! are powered by quests, and this will be my main focus in 2017 until things are working well enough to move onto spells and effects. With a bit of help from others this will come together at a reasonable speed. Just to manage expectations, you won’t see a fully-formed quest system arise out of nothing – things will continue to be built in small stages. But barring any major setbacks, you should be able to launch quests for testing with the quest debugger by March-ish. I can’t promise every part of quests will operate (in fact, I guarantee it won’t) but it should be enough for testers to sink their teeth into and iterative development will continue from there.
Speaking of help, I’m also looking forward to seeing what contributors and modders do in 2017. I think last quarter saw the most number of new contributors since Daggerfall Unity began in August 2015. This is really exciting for me because it confirms opening source from the beginning was the right choice. There will probably come a point where the project will be taken further by others (and probably faster) than I could take it by myself. If things keep heading the way they did in 2016, this should be a big year for Daggerfall Unity.
Great news! I hope that at some point the ability to buy/sell items at the shops will show up. It’s a bit disappointing grinding a lot of stuff and not having a possibility to sell all that trash. 🙂
PS. I noticed an interesting effect when I was trying to grind up some rare stuff (weapons, armors of rare metals): It’s impossible to grind from 1st level char anything higher than elfish, but if you load a save from original Dagger and your char has something ebony or even daedric, you will find heaps of that! (Probably the generation system isn’t polished, but hey! – it’s stil fun!) 🙂