Building Names

One of Daggerfall’s long-running puzzles is how to generate the correct building name for any given building in a location. Daggerfall’s binary data exposes this information only as a seed value with no obvious correlation to the final name. From today, I’m happy to say this has been solved and I will be able to generate proper building names in the future. This article is a summary of the technical journey, minus all the dead ends and frustration.

The seed value used to generate building names has been known about for some time. This can be found in the BuildingData structure (link to UESP). The first step along the way was to generate some known values by changing a known seed value in MAPS.BSA. I started at the location Ashfield Hall in the Daggerfall province, which has a single tavern and some residences. Taverns are a great place to start as they have a very obvious PartA + PartB structure. For example The Bat And Skull. In Ashfield Hall, our single tavern is the The Howling Stag with a name seed value of 27748.

The first thing I did was change the name seed value for The Howling Stag in MAPS.BSA then start up Daggerfall to see how the name changes. Here’s a small sample of names generated from seeds 0-3. Keep this list in mind as we’ll return to it later.

0 = The Dancing Chasm
1 = The Knave and Scorpian
2 = The Pig and Ogre
3 = The Thirsty Fairy

Now I have somewhere to begin. I know the building is a tavern and have a sample group of seeds that result in specific names. The next trick is to work out how Daggerfall derives these names from the seed value.

I open up FALL.EXE in a hex viewer and search through for strings like “The Dancing” and “Chasm”. These strings are easy enough to locate, but these are just resources packed into the executable. What I need is the actual PartA and PartB tables Daggerfall is selecting from at runtime.

To get this information, I first have to use the DOSBox debugger to dump out memory from Daggerfall while it’s running. I can then search not just for strings, but for memory offsets pointing to those strings. I write a small bit of code to do the searches for me, and it doesn’t take long to find the correct offset tables for Part A and Part B of tavern names. Just think of this as a pair of arrays. In this case, both arrays are 36 elements long. Here they are as captured from the spreadsheet I dumped them out to.

TavernNamePartsAB

So how do we go from a seed of 0 to The Dancing Chasm? This is where most of the difficulty started. It was obvious Daggerfall used a random number generator to pick both parts, but the trick was to find the correct random number generator used by Daggerfall’s C compiler circa 1994-1996. Fortunately, I also needed this for correct texture table generation (still an open problem at time of writing) and had previously researched the correct random generator, known as a linear congruential generator, specific to Daggerfall. Here it is for completeness.

static ulong next;
public static void srand(int seed)
{
    next = (uint)seed;
}
public static uint rand()
{
    next = next * 1103515245 + 12345;
    return ((uint)((next >> 16) & 0x7FFF));
}

There are two methods here, one to set the seed (srand) and another to generate the next random number from that seed (rand). This is pretty much the standard ANSI LCG but specific to Daggerfall’s needs. Implementing this manually ensures that critical random number generation will always work just like Daggerfall, regardless of platform.

Now that I have the right random number generator, let’s feed it our test seeds from earlier and see what comes out. Starting with seed=0 and generating two numbers (indices into Part A and Part B name tables above), I get the following results.

PartA = 0
PartB = 12

First obvious thing is the spreadsheet starts from 1, not from 0. Just need to +1 each number to match the tables above (although zero-based arrays will be used in actual code). Matching these numbers to the above name table we get: Chasm The Dancing. OK, so Daggerfall obviously generates PartB first then PartA. Let’s try that again with the +1 and order swapped.

Seed = 0
  PartA = 13 (The Dancing)
  PartB = 1  (Chasm)
  Result: The Dancing Chasm

Using our handy table we can match row 13 with row 1 and we get The Dancing Chasm. Good! Let’s run some more tests and prove the concept.

Seed = 1
  PartA = 35 (The Knave and)
  PartB = 27 (Scorpion)
  Result: The Knave and Scorpion

Seed = 2
  PartA = 30 (The Pig and)
  PartB = 9  (Ogre)
  Result: The Pig and Ogre

Seed = 3
  PartA = 16 (The Thirsty)
  PartB = 36 (Fairy)
  Result: The Thirsty Fairy

So far, so good! Building names are output just like Daggerfall given the same inputs. Let’s try the original, unmodified seed value of 27748 which should give us The Howling Stag.

Seed = 27748
  PartA = 21 (The Howling)
  PartB = 33 (Stag)
  Result: The Howling Stag

And there we have it! Building name generation from initial seed value resulting in a string exactly matching Daggerfall.

From here, I still need to extract hard-coded name tables for other building types like armorers and weapon-smiths. This isn’t hard though, I just need to find the tables using the same methods as taverns. I also need to assign full building data from MAPS.BSA to the correct models in Unity scene and wire up API methods to query this data when inspecting or entering a building. One challenge at a time though.

For regular small updates on Daggerfall Unity, I can be found on Twitter @gav_clayton.

Items Part 1 – Bootstrapping

Loot. Kit. Swag. Treasure. Whatever you call it, items are an important part of any RPG game loop. They provide the means for your character to defeat ever more powerful foes and create incentive to keep playing in search of the next big upgrade. While Daggerfall’s items don’t quite tickle the reward centres of the brain like Diablo 3 or World of Warcraft, they’re still a vital part of the play experience. Without decent gear and enchantments, you’re unlikely to survive the grueling ordeal of Mantellan Crux.

In this series, I’ll describe the process of adding items to Daggerfall Unity. I wanted to approach items early on as they will be involved at almost every level of the game. Shops sell them, blacksmiths repair them, monsters drop them, quests reward them. Your character may have a special affinity for bladed weapons, or be forbidden the use of shields. Even the biography questions when building a character can grant you items like the near-essential Ebony Dagger. With items embedded in almost every major game system, the hardest part was working out where to begin.

I decided to start with existing items as part of importing classic Daggerfall saves then bootstrap the whole item back-end from there. That way I could be certain I was dealing with the most real-world data possible. Having built support for classic saves in 0.1, I could already identify item records parented to the main character record and visualise them with a custom Unity Editor script. They looked a bit like this at first:

 

Items1

It’s not much, but at least I could find item records belonging to the character. The “Container” record is just a generic parent record. In this context, think of it as the character’s backpack.

The next step was to break apart the item record format. Fortunately the UESP came to the rescue here with most of the bytes already solved, but far from the whole story as you’ll see once the names are revealed:

Items2

A Frosty what of Ice Storms? OK, so there’s more to this than just the save record. How to we go about filling in the blanks? The key here is the “category” 16-bit field in that UESP article. This is actually a pair of 8-bit values. The first byte is the item group, the second byte is a table lookup for the item template within that group. The template indexed by this lookup has all the missing pieces of information we need to complete our item data. Now we have two more problems to solve. Where are the templates, and how to use those category bytes to find them? Let’s start with the templates.

Item templates are actually built into FALL.EXE. The offset is a little different depending on your version, but the easy way to locate them is open a hex editor and search for “ruby”. You will find the following data:

Items3

Here are all the item templates laid out one after the other. They even follow a certain kind of logic, with gems, weapons, armor, etc. all more or less grouped together. Fortunately this isn’t exactly unknown data and the UESP came to the rescue again with a good starting point for these templates. I just had to fill in some blanks.

I didn’t want to keep this data in the .exe however, it’s much harder to modify these templates later. That’s why I exported the item templates to JSON format. Once exported the above data looks like this:

Items4
Much easier to work with. There are still a few unknowns to work out but those will be solved over time. The next problem was how to link up instantiated items like our Frosty %it of Ice Storms back to their original template. I had to reproduce the lookup table Daggerfall was using internally.

It was here Lypyl provided a helping hand thanks to his research into magical items and artifacts. The file format of MAGIC.DEF is very similar to instantiated items found in save games. Furthermore, the creators of old item editors had solved quite a few of these problems back then. Armed with all this, Lypyl could derive enough information to rebuild the group and item tables which he kindly provided to me in C# enums. All I had to do then was link the enums back to their template index in the above JSON file.

The main group enum looks like below. It corresponds to the first byte of the earlier category short.

Items5

For every element in the above enum (such as Armor, Weapons, etc.) there is an enum for every individual item in that group. For example:

Items6

For the item enum, the individual item value is an index back into the template table. The order within the enum corresponds to the second byte of the category short. With a helper class to bring all this together, it was now possible to perform lookups from instantiated items back to their template data. This is how our items viewer looks now:

Items7

Success! We can now resolve an item’s template by type to discover the full name and other useful information. The next step was to determine which items are equipped on the character. Fortunately the “equipped” table is just another record in your save game, and was already known about thanks to that first UESP article. I just had to work out how that table referenced items and I could isolate which were equipped. Items marked by an asterisk are equipped to character.

Items8

There are almost two dozen equipment slots in total that map to specific parts of the character’s body and elsewhere. I will describe this in more detail in a future article.

With all of that research out of the way, my next job was even less visual than above. I had to write support classes such as API helpers and an entity item collection class. I also required a new type of image reader to handle the job of loading and caching item images for the inventory UI, tinting them based on material, cutting out unique alpha indices like the hair mask, and so on. Anyway, boring or not these new classes form the foundation of items in Daggerfall Unity and will continue to grow as needed.

With everything finally in place, I could start building the equipment UI to sort, view, and equip items imported from classic Daggerfall save games. Besides a few UI enhancements and fixes, the following came together fairly quickly.

[gfycat data_id=”PeacefulReflectingBarebirdbat”]

Some of the enhancements in this gfy include a scrollbar and mouse wheel scrolling. No reason we can’t have a few light modern touches to make our lives easier.

Back On Deck For 2016

Happy New Year everyone! I’m back from holidays and almost on top of my RL workload again. That means a whole new round of updates to Daggerfall Unity and DFTFU are about to begin. I’ve picked up where I left off last year with the item and inventory system, and will be posting more on this shortly.

Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll start adding new test builds leading up to the 0.2 release. Key features of 0.2 will be:

  • Basic inventory system and loot tables. Import items from classic saves.
  • Travel map interface (by LypyL).
  • Dungeon and interior automap interface (by Nystul).
  • More bug fixes and incremental updates.
  • Some more community resources for contributors.

I’ve also made a small new year’s resolution to post more technically-minded articles in 2016, as I let this slip with all the rapid-fire updates leading to 0.1. It was quite a shift for me going from pure tool development to building a game, and I rather miss just talking about what I’m working on.

Thanks for all your patience during the holiday season. I look forward to reading your feedback with the next round of updates.

Remastering Daggerfall

Less than 12 months have passed since I began work on Daggerfall Tools for Unity. In that time, my little project has grown substantially and attracted a lot of attention from around the world, including articles on Kotaku AU and Rock Paper Shotgun.

As word about Daggerfall Tools for Unity has spread, a lot of hopeful Daggerfall players have visited looking for word on a remake – only to find a set of development tools not aimed towards players. While everyone seems excited about the potential Daggerfall Tools for Unity offers, there’s a lot of latency between new developers coming on board and getting up to speed before they can offer their contributions. So as a developer community, we may be climbing a steady ladder towards remaking Daggerfall, but there’s very little for non-developers to experience and no clear direction from which a remake will come. I’m contacted by passionate Daggerfall fans almost every week and it breaks my heart that I don’t have more for them.

I want that situation to change. I want the average Daggerfall player to be able to experience progress and have a clear sense of direction that Daggerfall Tools for Unity can be used for remaking Daggerfall, and then some.

What this means is that I can’t just create a toolset. Raw building blocks aren’t enough. I also need to create a scaffold for remastering Daggerfall that includes everyone, developers and players alike.

So let’s get this out of the way. I will shortly release a burgeoning Daggerfall remake, proudly using the Unity engine and Daggerfall Tools for Unity.

For players, this means you will be able to download regular builds to experience the project as it grows. You will become part of the process, able to offer your feedback and constructive criticism to the betterment of the project. Developers win out as well, because you get a functioning Daggerfall remake – completely open source – to build on and change as you desire. For the first time we can all, developers and players alike, come together and contribute.

So where does this leave Daggerfall Tools for Unity? Nothing changes at all. My remake project will be built on the same Daggerfall Tools for Unity that everyone has access to. If anything, this will only improve Daggerfall Tools for Unity by creating a proving-ground for new features and increasing the number of testers.

I will soon release a new web site, solely for distributing the latest playable build of my Daggerfall remake. Daggerfall Workshop will remain as the hub of social activity and development news.

And the best news for players is there’s a swag of new features coming in Daggerfall Tools for Unity 1.4 and 1.5, all aimed at creating playable systems and filling in those blanks between a toolset and a game.

Feel free to leave your comments on this post, or head over the forum post where I’ve kicked off the conversation.

Daggerfall VID Playback

I’m going all-out in Daggerfall Tools for Unity 1.4. You will also be able to play Daggerfall’s VID movies right inside Unity to any texture you like. I’ve even provided a VID player panel for the native UI discussed in my previous post.

This is just a prototype, currently without audio or correct timings. I’ll show this off in a YouTube clip sometime in the future once its properly integrated.

[gfycat data_id=”UnrulyElaborateBagworm”]