Happy New Year everyone! It’s great to be here in 2019 at last. This will be the year that Daggerfall Unity steps out of pre-alpha into alpha, and reaches feature parity with classic Daggerfall. If you haven’t seen the Roadmap page lately, it’s time to take another look. There aren’t too many items left now and no major systems remain to be developed. Everything that’s still to do is just a small part of an otherwise finished system. Even the Quest System and Effect System roadmap pages are looking very green these days.

With a busy end to 2018, I didn’t make time to put up change notes for the Live Builds released on 20 December 2018. I think its a good idea to address these changes before dropping the next release, or solid contributions from our developers aren’t going properly credited. Let’s start with the highlights of new features from 0.6.1 Stable and 0.7.2 builds. I’ve tagged anything introduced in 0.7.2 with [0.7].

Highlights

Hanging Mode for Advanced Climbing [0.7] [Meteoric Dragon]

Upgrades to the optional Advanced Climbing system allows skilled climbers to hang from ceilings and eaves, and climb around on ceilings. This rounds out the other Advanced Climbing features such as sideways movement on walls and climbing around corners.

direct link to gfy

[gfycat data_id=”HarshSlimyCowbird”]

AI Obstacle & Fall Avoidance [Allofich]

Enemy mobiles have learned a few new tricks, and it’s a bit harder to trap them on the environment now. In addition to moving around static and dynamic obstacles, they’re smart enough not to walk off high places. While this isn’t perfect yet, it’s still a big improvement over classic AI. In other news, enemy AI is now capable of bashing open locked doors to reach the player!

direct link to gfy

[gfycat data_id=”BlissfulFeminineBobcat”]

Personal Light Sources [Hazelnut]

If you enable “item based player torch” in startup settings > Advanced > Enhancements, you can finally make use of those lanterns, torches, and candles in General Stores. Lanterns and torches can be refuelled using oil, also found in General Stores. If you make dungeons darker with the ambient light settings on the same Enhancements page, this adds a nice RP touch to dungeon delving. It can be quite tense knowing you’re running out of lantern oil and about to be lost in the dark.

Potions [0.7] [Hazelnut]

This is a big one! All potion recipes and effects are now supported in game, along with the crafting UI to make them. As a Daggerfall Unity quality of life feature, like-kind potion will stack.

Change Notes

Combined change notes for 0.6.1 Stable and 0.7.2 follow. I’ve sorted by author this time rather than tag each item individually.

Allofich

• Fix for imported classic characters levelling up on every rest
• Fix AI trying to open locked doors, and player will not see “door is locked” for AI
• Fix castle guards detecting unseen foes
• Fix for enemy motor falling too quickly
• Fix preventing magic/bow use
• Fix for running skill increasing too quickly
• Fix guards spawning in dungeons
• Fix aquatic enemies spawning out of water
• Fix exception when talking to some NPCs
• Fix to up/down swimming exploit when player over-encumbered
• Fix for being stuck in crouch in water
• Fix for magic item rewards
• Implemented initial AI obstacle avoidance
• Enhanced enemy AI will now attempt to bash down locked doors to path to player (horrifying!)
• Fall avoidance for enemy AI
• Multiple enemy AI fixes
• Implement mobile NPC guards in towns
• Ambient sounds and water effects now use a random 3D position around player

Hazelnut

• Fixes to trade window interface
• Fix politic index for Alik’r Desert
• Fix missing transition event for dungeons
• Fix searching for undiscovered locations from notebook
• Fix arrow materials being assigned when they should not be
• Ability to register custom activations to individual models using their ID
• Book costs now calculated like classic
• Light sources such as lanterns and candles can now be equipped and refuelled
• Initial potion support with effects, stacking, and potion maker integration [0.7]

Pango

• Fix for certain world objects not being cleaned up properly
• Fix for foliage billboards not casting shadows in afternoon
• Fix volume scale of horse (affecting Tedious Travel mod)
• Fix for spell purchasing window closing when clicking Buy button
• Fix level-up display issue in enhanced vitals indicators
• Fix modern conversation style setting not persisted
• Fix debuff blinking
• Fix trying to sleep while levitating
• Fix for item weight precision errors
• Stack splitting
• Player will now spawn on correct side of location after fast travel (relative to source point)
• Can always put arrows in cart
• Sound effects can now support delayed loaded
• Ogg songs can now be streamed from disk
• Add mousewheel support to books [0.7]
• Clicking scroller trough now scrolls by one page in many interfaces [0.7]

TheLacus

• Fix exception when no preset is selected [0.7]
• Fix modding NPCs blinking on and off [0.7]
• Support for spells casting animation texture replacement [0.7]
• Improvements to FPSWeapon modding [0.7]
• Import textures for BillboardBatch atlas from mods [0.7]
• Several smaller fixes and refinements to modding system [0.7]

Lypyl

• Fix for “help” command in console overflowing text buffer
• Fix for NEW models not being added as action doors [0.7]
• Fix for city locations disappearing [0.7]
• Travel map window state now part of save games

Nystul

• Fix hotkey collision for exterior automap
• Improvements and fixes to fog system [0.7]
• New experimental INI setting “TerrainHeightmapPixelError”, reducing this improves terrain resolution at distance [0.7]

Numidium

• Fix proficiency flags being added to custom classes
• Fix social group reaction adjustment
• Fix for talk menu becoming unresponsive
• Group reputations are now serialized with player
• Only flash crosshair twice after selecting location [0.7]

Interkarma

• Fix “magery” Place selection for “guard the mages guild” quest
• Fix specific spell readiness and load game concurrency issues
• Fix loss of building discovery state in saves
• Fix certain message boxes opening and closing instantly (e.g. guild promotions, shop flavour text)
• Fix “give item” not removing item from player inventory
• Fix null entity target exception
• Fix version text not showing – now only displays on pause menu not across entire UI [0.7]
• Fix fog shaders not being included in builds [0.7]
• Magic rounds are now synced to game minutes, so effects will expire correctly during fast travel or rest
• M0B00Y16 (Giant Killing) – Revenge wave of giants now only spawn in target dungeon
• Allow HUD toggle with LeftShift+F10
• Implement “cast effect do” quest action, an effect-specific variant of “cast spell do”
• Add “saying nnnn” support to GetItem quest action
• Added additional guild support for quests
• Start work on vampire support, currently only available from console for testing [0.7]
• Trigger actions can now fire spells at player [0.7]
• Disable collider on empty corpse containers once clicked on, preventing corpses from blocking quest objects

Meteoric Dragon

• Upgrades and fixes to advanced climing, including new hanging mode for climbing ceilings and eaves [0.7]
• Note: Advanced climbing upgrades are still a WIP and include some new bugs to be resolved

That’s it for now! A new release will be available soon with a whole new round of fixes and new content.

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