Fun

Now that you know how to get around, it's time to try some of the more interesting features in Daggerfall Explorer. Most of these are easy enough to work out for yourself, but are covered here for completeness. In case you're familiar with these already, here are links to the topics covered so you can go directly to items of interest.

Setting Animation Frequency
Increasing View Area
Changing Render Mode
Exploring Inside Buildings
Changing Scenery and Seasons
Optimising Performance
Cool Blocks

If you know it all already, try hopping into the Reference page and see if you've missed anything.

Setting Animation Frequency

You can set the speed at which Daggerfall Explorer redraws animations in the media view. When viewing a bitmap, select the Bitmap > Animation... menu option. You will be presented with this dialog:

The default frequency is 6 frames per second. This can be set to anything between 0 and 30. Setting this number to 0 will stop animation, but preserve the display format. Animation frequencies 10 and higher are rather comical. The Enable Animation check box is identical to the Toggle Animation button on the toolbar.

Increasing View Area

Those docking windows are for more than just show. They're designed to drop away so you can maximise your visible space. If you want to increase your screen real estate, every docking window has an icon in the corner. Click this to make the window vanish.

If you want to bring back a window after closing it, click on the View menu. You will find a list of all available views and may select the one you want to make visible again. Daggerfall Explorer stores all window state on closing, so your layout is preserved between sessions.

Changing Render Mode

Daggerfall Explorer can render 3D scenes in four modes. These are: Pure Faces, Wireframe, Solid, Textured. The best way to demonstrate the difference is with some screenshots.

Pure Faces Wire Frame
Solid Textured

The Pure Faces mode renders the scene using line primitives to simulate how Daggerfall stores content. When viewing 3D Objects, the currently selected face will be highlighted in blue and its vertices numbered.

Before it can do anything useful with the 3D objects, Daggerfall Explorer must triangulate them. Selecting Wireframe displays the object after this triangulation has been applied. If you keep an eye on the Properties View, you will notice the face count almost double.

Once we have triangles, Daggerfall Explorer can apply a surface to the object. The Solid mode is for viewing this surface without any textures applied. Presently this is quite useless, but will prove worthwhile once a lighting model is implemented. For now all objects are drawn at maximum ambient light, which makes them look flat.

Triangles, surface and textures all rolled into one, the Textured mode is the default render mode and the most useful. It has also been the most difficult to implement. Some minor and rare texture issues persist, but these should be resolved by the next release.

Exploring Inside Buildings

When viewing 3D Blocks, it's possible to turn a building inside-out and view the interior. Almost every exterior object in the block view has an interior, even some the game does not let you enter. To change to an inside view, click the button on the toolbar. If the current object has no interior it will simply vanish. If there are interior records, you will see something like this:

Outside Inside

At this point you can fly the camera inside and have a look around. Use the Next Block and Previous Block buttons to cycle between interiors.

Tip: If you have a low-end system, you may notice a large performance hit when viewing interiors. Read on to the Optimising Performance section for some tricks to smooth things out a little.

Changing Scenery and Seasons

This is one of the coolest features in Daggerfall Explorer. When viewing 3D Blocks, you can force the texture processor to use a different region and weather type when drawing building and the ground plane.

Have a look under the Object > Texture Set menu. There you will see options relating to terrain and weather. There are five terrain types: None, Desert, Mountain, Temperate, and Swamp. These are all self-explanatory with the exception of None. Selecting this option will disable the terrain processor and texture the blocks exactly as they appear in the archive. Other than architecture, this is your best clue as to which region a block could belong to.

You can also change the weather, for which there are three settings: Sunny, Winter, and Rain. The default weather type is Sunny, which effectively does not change anything. Selecting Rain will simply darken the ground to supposedly give it a "wet" look. The most interesting of the three is Winter, which adds a blanket of snow to everything. Please note that desert regions do not experience snow, so selecting Winter in combination with Desert will have no effect to buildings.

To give you an idea what the terrain processor does, here are some screenshots:

Desert Swamp Swamp + Winter

Tip: Some terrain-weather combinations are unsuitable for certain blocks. The general guideline is that if doesn't look right, it probably isn't.

Optimising Performance

With all the polygons flying around, things can get a little ragged on slower systems. If you find that you drop to 5fps when viewing interiors, try the following tricks to speed things back up again.

1. Disable the ground plane. If you deselect the button on your toolbar, the ground plane will vanish. This is recommended if you are inside a building.

2. Draw only one block at a time. If you deselect the button on your toolbar, Daggerfall Explorer will only draw the currently selected block. This is perfect when exploring inside buildings.

3. Change to wireframe. It may not look great, but it allows to get where you're going at top speed and change back to textured mode when you get there.

Note: The next three tips will have minimal impact. They are presented here as guidelines in case you feel performance is a serious issue.

4. Reduce window size. By default, Daggerfall Explorer maximizes the window to fill your entire view. If you have a particularly slow video card, "restoring" the window and reducing its dimensions may help.

5. Reduce desktop size and resolution. Not really recommended, but some video cards perform better at 16 bits than at 32 bits, and at 1024x768 rather than 1280x1024. The short answer for this is that fewer bytes are being drawn. This is similar to above, but more intrusive. It's your call.

6. Update your drivers. This is something you should be doing on a regular basis. I would not recommend doing this unless you are comfortable with making changes to your system, and feel you are capable of troubleshooting problems. Once again, it's your call.

Cool Blocks

Some blocks are just plain interesting. Here's a table of some that have turned up during exploring.

Block # Description Terrain
60 Castle Daggerfall Temperate
61 Direnni Tower Mountain
64 Orsinium Mountain
267 Castle Wayrest Temperate
390 Small Ship N/A
509 Scourg Barrow Mountain
510 Shedungent Mountain
577 Castle Sentinel Desert
624 Cute Graveyard None
630 Large Ship N/A
687 Odd Dungeon Entrance None
746 Castle With Catapults None
778 Tree Dungeon Entrance None

* Thanks to oRGy for spotting many of these blocks.

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