I push against the Workshop’s iron-banded door. It sticks for a moment then creaks open as if welcoming me home. Dry air blows past my cheeks. With a final look to the outside world, I descend a thousand steps into darkness, stopping only to light torches along the way. Far above the heavy door slams closed, sealing me in the depths. I look around, satisfied everything is how I left it, and sit down to work. It’s great to be back.
As you can probably guess, I’ve had to step away from the Workshop for real life reasons and other projects. I’m deeply sorry for not posting at all during this time. Thankfully, Lucius has continued working his usual magic with DaggerXL. If you’ve been living under a rock like me for the last several months, make sure you go check it out. It’s way more interesting than anything going on around here (not counting that escaped Imp I can hear scratching around inside the walls).
The good news for anyone following Daggerfall Connect is that I’m going to be active again for a while. First order of business is to get my subversion repository at Google Code populated. This has been done now, with the main trunk currently versioned at 0.4.9.
The main changes in 0.4.9 are:
- Several bugfixes and other minor improvements to the core DaggerfallConnect library and DaggerfallImaging2.
- Map support for outdoor locations and dungeons. This is nearly complete, but needs a bit of work to finish up and get some bugs under control. If you want to play with this, please don’t be disheartened that not all maps load properly (or just throw exceptions). I’m working on fixing this now and updates will be committed to the 0.5.0 branch before long.
- XNA support. There is now an XNALibrary project demonstrating the basics of using DaggerfallConnect to load Daggerfall’s textures, 3D objects, blocks, and maps into XNA. There are also a few XNA tutorials underway that call this library. Disclaimer: This is exactly how I left it when I had to walk away from the Workshop last year. The XNA stuff is very rough and unfinished. I’ll be fixing all this up and posting to the 0.5.0 branch over the next week or two. All XNA code is currently based on XNA Framework 3.1.
The next full release will be 0.5.0. I also need to get all the written tutorials and other stuff moved over to my Google Code project wiki.
That’s it for now. If you’ve been interested in Daggerfall Connect in the past, but lost interest due to my infrequent updates, now is a good time to have another look. Things are finally coming together enough to be interesting.