Category Archives: Workshop News

News and information about Daggerfall Workshop

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.

Continue reading→

The “Fighters” Update

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The Fighters Guild awaits

A whole new cycle of Live Builds is now underway for Daggerfall Unity 0.4. Here are some of the new features you’ll find in the latest “Fighters” update.

 

Quest System

The quest system is now open! Visit any Fighters Guild and speak to the usual quest giver to receive a random guild quest. Be sure to bring your strongest character, because quests span everything the Fighters Guild has on offer, from rats to liches.

Mordane Yeomham has work for you

 

While still incomplete, the quest system in Daggerfall Unity manages to kick things up a notch over classic:

  • No more binary QBN/QRC files and command line compilers! Quest scripts can be created with a simple text editor like Notepad and are based on Donald Tipton’s TEMPLATE v1.11 scripting language, the de facto standard for creating Daggerfall quests. If you’ve written Daggerfall quests before, you already have the skills needed to write quests in Daggerfall Unity.
  • Quests scripts are JIT (just in time) compiled by Daggerfall Unity. This means you can write new quest scripts and test them while the game is running.
  • Daggerfall’s classic quests have already been migrated to the new scripting language and many quests are perfectly playable in Daggerfall Unity now.
  • New features! Daggerfall Unity is already extending the capabilities of the quest system beyond what’s possible in classic, such as using location exteriors in quests. It’s even possible to write new quest actions in C# and extend quest system through mods.
  • The Quest Debugger lets you see what your quest is doing at any time by displaying the internal Task states and Timers, and helping you find buildings quickly. This debugger will continue to grow in power as the quest system develops. Note: Quest Debugger is always enabled in “Fighters” update. A toggle will be added once quest system passes tests.

 

Real Skills

Be prepared! Daggerfall Unity now has real combat formulas, including weapon and armour checks, dodging, critical strike, and more. If you take on a vastly more powerful enemy, you might not land a single blow.

How do you like me now?

 

Skill and level progression are now working. Your character will grow in power by playing the game and be able to level up at last. Skills like dodging and critical strike will be checked during combat, and skills like medical are checked during rest. Daggerfall’s level-up formula is applied on travel and rest, and you’ll go up in level once your skills have been raised enough.

Practice makes perfect

 

You can now set your interaction mode using F1-F4 (default keys). Use Info mode to find an NPC or building name, and use Steal mode to try your luck at picking locks. This even checks your Lockpicking skill against the lock using Daggerfall’s lockpick formula.

Maybe a more direct approach is needed

 

New UI Windows

The exterior automap will help you navigate around town locations. Named buildings are marked automatically for now, and the Quest Debugger will direct you to quest buildings until the discovery and “talk” systems are implemented. Like the dungeon automap, you can zoom, pan, and rotate the map. It’s great dragging the map around with left mouse button rather than using arrow keys.

Now, where was I?

 

The keybind interface will help you bind keys just like in Daggerfall.

No more editing text files

 

Wandering NPCs

Mobile NPCs now wander the streets during daylight hours across all climates in Illiac Bay. Meet Nords, Redguard, and Bretons in your travels.

Excuse me, do you know where I can sell all this orc blood?

 

The “talk” system has not yet been implemented in Daggerfall Unity, so you can’t yet speak to these wandering people to ask for directions, rumours, and so on. This will be coming sometime in 0.5 update cycle.

 

More Mods

All the mods that were previously integrated with Daggerfall Unity now have standalone updated versions from their creators. Available mods are on the Released Mods page of the forums. Please let the creator know if you encounter a problem with their mod.

You can now create art replacement mods for Daggerfall Unity. Check out the new Modding pages for more details on how to replace textures, sprites, models, sounds, and movies. A few great-looking art mods are already in the works, such as the Terrain Flats art mod by jman0war. He is hand-painting all new terrain art and it looks amazing.

 

And in case you didn’t know already, Daggerfall Unity has a runtime C# compiler, mod packager, and mod loader. This has been available for a while, but not a lot of people seem to know about it yet. Check out this page on the forums for more information on creating a Hello World styled mod in C# for Daggerfall Unity. You could even make a mod that adds custom actions to the quest system!

 

Get Involved

You can find the latest builds on the Live Builds page as usual.

For conversations, please use the following forum thread for all talk and bug reports for now. More information will be found in that thread to help you run quests.

 

Credits

I have the following people to thank for their contributions to the above features, in no particular order:

Allofich – For tirelessly working on skills, formulas, level ups, and researching classic save format. Some of the real gameplay features in this release would not have been ready without his efforts.

TheLacus – For creating the asset swap capabilities, documenting everything, and supporting people in their efforts to mod Daggerfall Unity.

Nystul – For the incredible automap user interfaces and mods he creates.

Lypyl – For the runtime C# compiler, mod packager, and mod loader. Also for his help with reverse engineering building data during early stages of the quest system.

JustinS – For his perfect keybind interface.

And thank you to everyone else who has contributed smaller fixes and patches on GitHub: muderbeard, midopa, electrorobobody, and more. Daggerfall Unity has only come so far thanks to the ingenuity and generosity of contributors. The combination of open source and a brilliant community will take this project a long way in the future.

Cheers!

Recent Downtime

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It has been a frustrating few days after a recent AWS outage borked MySQL connections for our blog and forums. The host resolved this quickly for sites hosted in North America region, but dfworkshop.net was hosted in the closest datacentre to Australia (Asia region), and this continues to be down at time of writing. And after almost 48 hours, I’m still unable to obtain time-frame for fix.

I’ve worked around this by migrating sites to North America region with functioning MySQL servers. Unfortunately, databases couldn’t migrate because source servers still aren’t live. To fix this, I restored from the most recent backup available taken on 25/02/17. For the blog this isn’t a problem as nothing was posted in this time, but for forums this means all posts, replies, PMs, and new user registrations created after 25/02/17 are not part of the restore.

I’ve locked the forums for now and will continue working with host to try and recover a later version of databases. Outcome is dependent on how quickly host can resolve MySQL issue in Asia region. If they can’t fix this in next 24 hours, I’ll unlock forums and we’ll just move on. I’d rather have a functioning site than sweat over a few days of lost posts.

I apologise if you registered to forums or posted anything after the 25th. Forums will be back online within 24 hours and we can pick up where left off one way or another. Thank you for your patience!

Update: Forums are back online now. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like I’m getting those live databases back. This means I have to start from most recent backup as of 25/02/17. Please repost to any active conversations you were participating in prior to outage and we’ll be back on track in no time.

Back To Work 2017

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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.

 

December 2016 Test Build

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Hello everyone! This will be my last post for 2016. It’s been a great year for Daggerfall Unity with solid updates across the board. I was hoping to have basic quest support in by now, but sadly not everything goes to plan. This will return as a priority early in 2017 so watch this space!

One thing that always amazes me is the quality of work this community is willing to put back into Daggerfall Unity. It’s always a pleasure to find a new pull request on git from someone willing to contribute their personal time to make this project even better. So this post is going to focus almost exclusively on contributions from community members. It’s time for kudos and credits all around, and you’ll see very little of me this post.

 

Texture & Mesh Replacement

This feature began with Uncanny_Valley and has lately been updated and maintained by TheLacus. It allows for runtime injection of new textures and meshes into Daggerfall Unity’s scene builders, setting the stage for updated models, higher resolution materials, and improvements to Daggerfall’s vanilla UI. It’s still early days but the potential is incredible. Here’s a few screenshots of new assets by community members.

 

At time of writing, mesh and texture replacements aren’t quite ready for download. But now support for this is baked into the core, you should start seeing community-created packs in the near future. You can read more about mesh and texture replacement in this thread on the forums.

 

Early Bow Combat

New contributor electrorobobody added basic bow combat to the lineup of supported weapon animation. No counting arrows yet, and you’ll need to roll a new character for your free silver bow, but it’s awesome to finally burn down enemies with ranged kiting. Looking forward to bows becoming a strong part of the game in future.

[gfycat data_id=”MammothFeminineDeer”]

 

Save & Load Weather

Daggerfall Unity added basic weather events a while back, but they would not be saved and loaded with your games. Thanks to midopa, the current state of weather will be saved and loaded. This will only get better once correct weather events are wired up based on climate and season.

[gfycat data_id=”TenderHeartfeltGuillemot”]

 

Enemy Steering

Another epic update by midopa. He added a little steering to enemy AI to prevent enemies from stacking on top of small creatures like rats. As hilarious as this problem could be, it’s good to see a workable solution for this bug. It’s still possible for enemies to slightly stack in edge cases, but the problem is much improved and they will no longer ride around on each other (imagine skeletons surfing rats and rat-rat-rat stacks).

[gfycat data_id=”PinkVictoriousKodiakbear”]

 

Potion Recipes

The perennial InconsolableCellist returned with some amazing updates for us. Credit goes completely to him for working out potion recipe format and integrating with Daggerfall Unity. This also means potion recipes will display properly in inventory, and they’re even usable to see the individual ingredients. This is really important ground-work for a bunch of other things down the line.

 

Books

I wrote the initial book reader UI ages ago, but InconsolableCellist wrapped it up along with random book drops in loot, correct tooltips, and all-round awesomeness. Books currently exhibit the same formatting problems as classic (because it’s the same book data). That’s something yet to be fixed.

[gfycat data_id=”PositiveImpressiveAnchovy”]

 

Exterior Automap

Nystul has done it again with the perfect companion UI to his dungeon and interior automap. Yep, exterior automaps are now a thing! It even supports proper tagging of buildings, zoom, and rotation. As always, I’m completely blown away by how complete this is right from the start. It’s still waiting on full building name integration and building identification in scene, but that will come. For now, all the buildings are tagged by type. Go explore!

[gfycat data_id=”ZigzagSeparateBrontosaurus”]

 

Spotlight: Allofich

I can’t give Allofich high enough praise. He has worked incredibly hard tuning up different areas of Daggerfall Unity to make it more true to the original. He fixed a wide range of UI problems, identified sound effects, linked sounds to their correct actions, fixed clothing and item problems, and so on. Check out his full list of commits here. It’s hard to show these off properly in screenshot form because the changes are either subtle improvements or related to audio, but below is one of the UIs he has cleaned up. Note the poor texture joins in the “before” image (circled). Huge props to Allofich for his work!

 

Thanks To: AnKor

OK this is embarrassing. I was looking everywhere for the animations used when player was riding horse or cart. These turned out to be in the overlooked CFA image file format. Somehow, I had completely disregarded these files which are a format holdover from Arena. Yep, I’m only human. Fortunately, AnKor pointed this out on the forums and I was able to implement CFA support in no time. Now we have this:


It’s only a short jump from here to having these transport options in the game.

 

Thanks To: Testers

I also want to send out a huge thanks to all the amazing people who tested Daggerfall Unity in 2016 and reported the bugs and problems you found. There are simply too many people to list, but you know who you are. You’re on the forums, and Twitter, and Reddit, and sending me emails. You guys rock!

 

Bugs and Problems

Yep, we got ’em! Any large update like this will bring its fair share of new bugs. If you come across a bug during tests and would like to report it, please lodge this in the Bug Reports forum. Don’t forget to read the Guidelines to help you provide the best information to developers.

Contributors, please keep an eye on the Bug Reports forum for anything that might fall into your wheelhouse.

 

Where To Download?

You can always download the latest version of Daggerfall Unity from the Live Builds page. If this is your first time downloading Daggerfall Unity, welcome! Other information on Live Builds page should also help you get started. If you have any troubles, or just want to discuss updates, please go to the December 2016 Test Builds Updated thread on forums.

 

That’s it for 2016! Thank you everyone for visiting and all your kind words of support. Here’s wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and all the best for 2017!

 

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