Tools for Unity Roadmap

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I’ve been thinking about the release structure leading up to v1.0 of Daggerfall Tools for Unity. Up until now, I’ve been building new features right across the spectrum. I’ll be working on monsters one day, then lighting the next, then improving the editor, then working on action scripts in dungeons, and so on. Each of these pieces must be worked over a few times before I’m happy. However, I’d like to keep the releases coming and can’t let myself become too distracted. I need to step up a little.

I’ve decided there are certain groups of features that work well together, and I’d like to zoom in on these features based on where they fit. There will be a little crossover, as some features like basic monsters are already in.

Here is the release schedule for the next few weeks.

Release1 – This is already out. Has all the fundamentals of importing Daggerfall content into Unity.

Release2 – Includes lighting update, a player controller, enemies import, building interiors, dungeon texture swaps, new editor stuff, and a bunch of small bug fixes and other improvements. Basically everything I’ve been working on up until now. Release2 will be ready in about a week. I’m also working on a Unity Web Player demo to go along with it.

Release3 – Targets dungeons. I will build out action records (e.g. opening doors, clicking levers, moving platforms, etc.), another pass at enemies, improving navmesh support, etc. The goal is to make it possible to fully explore a dungeon. This release will be up in about 2-3 weeks, and will include another Unity Web Player demo.

Release4 – This will be version 1.0. I will concentrate on improving content browsing, fixing bugs, and tightening up code. The only new features will in the editor, everything else is just polish. This will be ready in approximately 4 weeks. No further demos are planned at this stage.

Release5 and Beyond – We now enter post-1.0 updates. What happens here will be determined by my available time and interest shown in the tools. These will typically be small maintenance releases to fix bugs and the like. I will also be chipping away on some more demos and extensions to show off what is possible with Daggerfall Tools for Unity. This will be stuff like simple AI behaviours, adding weapons, adding spells, and using the API. I am also hoping to create a few tutorials to help you get started.

Light Import

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I have nearly completed light import options for cities and dungeons. The Inspector panel for lights is below. Here you can choose to animate lights (a basic range flicker like Daggerfall), set a custom tag, and attach a custom script.

lightimportsettings

Part of getting lights working is setting the correct window texture in outdoor locations. The glass area of windows has a reserved index of 255 which needs to be substituted with appropriate daytime or nighttime colours. This is set using the climate panel of the location Inspector. This will also apply a self-illuminated shader to the windows so the right areas glow at night and appear slightly brighter by day. The window options are Day, Night, or Disabled.

windowsettings_night

Just like climate texture swaps and dungeon texture swaps, your window swaps can be set at any time in the editor or by script. You can easily change this while the game is running to simulate the change from night to day. Below is the same scene with day windows (single directional light) and night windows (full point lights).

windows_night

Enemy Import

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The next version will be able to import fixed and random enemies in dungeons. You could also just create all the enemies you want. I would hate to stumble into the room below…

 

Dungeons & Dragonlings

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Besides constructing horrible puns, I’ve been working on adding Daggerfall’s enemies into the toolkit. My first idea was to add something fast, but it turned into one of those rabbit-hole situations.

Sure it would be easy to just add basic monster templates, but wouldn’t it be great to actually import the correct enemies? Not just the fixed monsters like that first rat or imp in Privateer’s Hold, but support proper random encounter tables like those outlined in the Daggerfall Chronicles guide. And it all had to be easy to change once inside Unity, not just static information pulled from Daggerfall’s files.

The first thing I needed to work out was how did Daggerfall know which monster to spawn where? There are basically two kinds of enemy spawns, fixed and random. Both have an editor marker flat (from TEXTURE.199) in RDB blocks, so this was a good place to start. Fortunately, there’s only a few bytes of data in the record defining these flats, and for fixed monsters this was easy to find. The FactionID in flat resource structures also defines a monster (or mobile) ID. Basically, (FactionID & 0xFF) = MobileID. Range 0-42 are monsters like rat, imp, spriggan, etc. Range 128-146 are enemy adventurer types like Mage, Spellsword, etc.

Just to be sure I had this right, I wrote a quick tool to change IDs of every monster in S0000999.RDB (central dungeon block of Privateer’s Hold) then started a new game. As hoped, the first rat (ID=0) was now an Ancient Lich (ID=33), which promptly ate my level one character for breakfast. I tried not to think about all the ancient liches between myself and the dungeon exit.

I then documented everything into a spreadsheet by spawning each ID in turn, checking them in-game. This allowed me to build a starting template for each and every enemy’s texture file (male and female), animations, behaviour, affinity, corpse marker, and so on. The end result is EnemyBasics.cs where mobile enemies are simply defined. There are also new enumerations in DaggerfallUnityEnums.cs for MobileEnemies, MobileStates, MobileBehaviour, and MobileAffinity. This will be my foundation for adding enemy mobiles to the toolkit moving forward. I’m trying to keep everything just simple enough to get the job done. It’s up to you to build on from here.

I have added a new enemy name field to the DaggerfallBillboard editor script when you have a fixed enemy editor marker selected.

NewEnemyNameField

Next, I turned my sights on random encounters. Any Daggerfall nut knows about the various dungeon types (Crypt, Human Stronghold, Vampire Haunt, and so on), and that each dungeon type has a random encounter table described in the Daggerfall Chronicles guide book. I just had to work out which value defined the dungeon type.

Fortunately this was easy to find also. The upper 8 bits of the “Unknown2” value in a location’s MapTable data actually defines the dungeon type. It follows the same order as listed in the Chronicles, with Crypt=0x0033, Orc Stronghold=0x0133, Human Stronghold=0x0233 and so on. You can just shift right by 8 bits (DungeonType >> 8) to get the index. I’ve added this information back to the API in DFRegion.cs and MapsFile.cs so it’s all read in for you when loading a location. I have also added a field to the DaggerfallLocation editor script to display the dungeon type in your Inspector.

NewDungeonTypeField

 

With that squared away, I created a basic set of random encounter tables, one per dungeon type, matching those described in Daggerfall Chronicles. This can be found in RandomEncounters.cs.

There’s obviously more to this, as the player’s level is also used to determine which monsters spawn from the encounter table, but this should be a good start and easy to build on. Like the enemy mobiles, my goal here is to make something just functional enough for you to build on with Unity. The more independent you are of the game files, the better.

Now that Daggerfall Tools for Unity has a good foundation of enemy definitions and encounter tables, I’ll be adding a foundation mobile type to the toolkit for ready-made enemies. When starting play mode (or instancing a dungeon from code) the editor markers will spawn an appropriate monster in-place. I’m going to help with this by setting up all the initial animation smarts, but it’s up to you to extend with spells, AI behaviours, pathfinding, and so on. The good news is that you can use all the typical Unity features and there’s a ton of great resources for scripting enemies in the Unity tutorials and on the Asset Store.

Time to wrap this post up. I’ll show more of Daggerfall Tools for Unity very soon, once the above data starts becoming visual.

Daggerfall Tools for Unity

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The first release of Daggerfall Tools for Unity is now available. The package includes full source for my Daggerfall API and editor scripts for Unity.

You can download from the main download page, or from download links on the right of home page.

There is also a PDF manual available if you would just like to see how the package works.

I will be adding more features to Daggerfall Tools for Unity soon. The next release will focus on lighting and action scripts in dungeons. Enhancements to the editor scripts are also incoming.

Thank you for taking the time to download. Have fun!

Daggerfall Unity – Climate Swaps

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I wasn’t happy with needing to set climate properties before importing cities. I remember being able to change climates at run-time in Daggerfall Explorer and decided that’s how things should work in Daggerfall Tools for Unity.

After a solid few hours work, it’s now possible to set your city’s climate directly from the editor and have materials change immediately. No need to rebuild scene, it all happens procedurally like magic.

dfunity-59-1

 

I also completed mesh import options for adding tangents (useful for normal maps) and secondary UVs (handy for light mapping). Everything is starting to feel nice and functional.