GUI

Talk about the mods you'd like to see in Daggerfall Unity. Give mod creators some ideas!
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Ceruulean
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Apr 23, 2015 2:25 am

GUI

Post by Ceruulean »

Hi, I'm new to this forum so I hope you'll be patient. I've been playing Daggerfall for a little and while I love the game, the prospect of DFTFU is even more exciting since it can bring the famous modability of the later TES titles to Daggerfall.

What I want to know most is if there's any planned UI changes for DFUnity, and how easy would it be to implement such changes. I don't know much about Unity or programming for that matter, but perhaps one day I will learn when I have time. So where does UI fall in the game production pipeline (or i guess porting content pipeline)? I have a couple gripes with the original's UI but only because I know modern monitors are capable of showing higher resolutions and have the luxury of additional space.
  • The Inventory screen is alright, but it is hard to check on items quickly and distinguish between books, silver from chain, etc. The "Info" and "Gold" buttons are also pretty clunky. Can the different aspects of the inventory be shifted around or rearranged into tabs? Can the items be listed by name instead of by icon? Can there be hotkeys for Equip, Use and Remove/Select similar to Skyrim?
  • Is it possible to change Daggerfall's font from yellow to black as an option? There's no guides online on how to mod the original game's font so DFTU is probably the only chance to do so.
Oh, and does anyone know where the player horse graphics are located? I have Daggerfall Imaging 2 but the horse graphics I found look different from the ones in-game, and I can't seem to find them anywhere. I had an idea for the horses but i can't even find the originals.

Anyway, this is all I have to ask and I do hope that you find more support for DFTU and DFUnity!

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Interkarma
Posts: 7236
Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 1:51 am

Re: GUI

Post by Interkarma »

Hi Ceruulean, welcome to the forums and thank you for your input! :)

I believe that InconsolableCellist has started work on UI implementation and has plans to continue development on this as the gameplay features expand. He will probably drop in before long to tell you more.

There's bound to be a few different viewpoints on the UI front, as some people will want the perfect vanilla Daggerfall experience and others would prefer a more modern modable interface. Fortunately with Unity having great GUI tools built-in, there is scope for both outcomes. Probably the best compromise is to design a "vanilla-styled" UI but using modern techniques. That way the interface will look old-school but still be fully modable and support large screens with high resolutions.

From my end as the DFTFU programmer, I'll provide access to the native UI bitmaps, text (plus translation features), bitmap fonts, and some layout examples for the original TTY-styled markup. Personally, I think the monolithic UI bitmaps and TTY markup don't have much future and should reworked from the start. They're basically hard-coded for 320x200 and doesn't have a whole lot of flexibility.

You've got me really intrigued about the horse! I've never paid attention to this before but now you point it out the IMG bitmaps are clearly not the horse graphic used in game. Fascinating, I must look into this. Inredible how Daggerfall continues to spit up surprises and mysteries after all this time.

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