Random Big Feature Ideas

[Interkarma]

I wonder whether a playable remake of Daggerfall is ever going to happen. Argh, that would be sooo nice.

Agreed. The thing to keep in mind with DFTFU is that it's an open source toolkit. Part of the process for everyone is getting started, adding things, playing around, learning. As the tools improve (and everyone's shared knowledge of them expands) then more and more will become possible. Some people are into sound, others into visual elements, and others into setting up quests and gameplay (InconsolableCellist). The trick is nurturing them and seeing what they create, and more will follow.

I think we'll get there eventually, I really do. Look at everything that's been accomplished so far and consider that Daggerfall Tools for Unity didn't even exist this time last year. And most of this has happened in the last few months. I think there's a lot more to come.

[ifkopifko]

Daschluba> With the immersion and realism I meant graphical realism together with the world being "alive". Or feeling like it was alive. The world of Daggerfall is vast, but empty and dead, and the type of interaction (the dialogues, the NPCs, etc.) does not help it either, however, it is a very old game and that's how things were at the time. There is a reason why today's games do not have such a large playing area with so many cities... it's impossible to make it feel "alive". But I am OK with the game being the way it was, and with all these improvements going on, it is getting even better.

Interkarma> Yeah, I just fear that trying to reverse engineer the game mechanics is too great a challenge for anyone. But who knows...

[Interkarma]

Interkarma> Yeah, I just fear that trying to reverse engineer the game mechanics is too great a challenge for anyone. But who knows...

What mechanics are you thinking of in particular? I might be able to offer some insight into how that information can be obtained, or at least approximated in a reasonable manner.

[Daschluba]

Ok i think i get what you mean with realism and immersion.

The world of Daggerfall is vast, but empty and dead, and the type of interaction (the dialogues, the NPCs, etc.) does not help it either, however, it is a very old game and that's how things were at the time. There is a reason why today's games do not have such a large playing area with so many cities... it's impossible to make it feel "alive".

It is possible to make it feel alive. That's why i made this thread.
Of course it depends on what you see as alive. One could say that a world like skyrim is alive, but for my part i would like a world where you can't travel over the complete map in 30 minutes and don't have a super big dungoen behind every tree, but of course a big world with not to much in it is as you say empty and dead but that's why im talking about things that would add immersion to make this feeling of a dead and empty world go away.

[ifkopifko]

Interkarma> I was under the impression, that just to make the "questing system" with all the quests (however monotone the quests are) work, requires an awful lot of manual work. I thought it's all in the original .exe file, so it can not be easily extracted to work on it. I'd be happy to hear it's in a better shape.

Daschluba> Yeah, I know what you mean, actually, none of the Elder Scrolls games ever seemed alive to me. Alive for me is, for example, Gothic 2 (that is one of my favorite games). The NPCs are acting like alive, even if it's just simple scripts.
But as I have said, your ideas are good ones, but everything in it's own time, so to speak. Ice on rivers during winter sounds good, but first we would need the rivers themselves. But I do hope this project (or something that emerges from this project) will eventually get there.

[Daschluba]

Ok now i see even more how you meant it. The ideas i made are of course only meant to be made if someone want's to make them and when it's possibly to make them(like you said for the ice thing we would first need rivers).

[Interkarma]

Interkarma> I was under the impression, that just to make the "questing system" with all the quests (however monotone the quests are) work, requires an awful lot of manual work. I thought it's all in the original .exe file, so it can not be easily extracted to work on it. I'd be happy to hear it's in a better shape.

I have some great news for you. You'll be happy to know that quest text and logic is totally decoupled from the .exe (in the QRC and QBN files respectively). Even better, these file formats are well-understood. It's really just a matter of writing code to support quest logic, which InconsolableCellist has made a start on. His early work may not look like much right now, but it's an important part of the process.

Beyond questing, many other details are laid out in the Daggerfall Chronicles. This guide book has a cornucopia of tables, formulas, and other information related to the combat and game systems. It will be necessary to fill in the blanks in several places, but nothing that can't be worked out through testing or approximated very closely.

I don't see many obstacles to implementing the majority of Daggerfall's gameplay. It will be rough at first of course, but should come together nicely after a few iterations. And don't forget: this is an open source project the whole community can get behind. With more than two million Unity developers and growing, some of them are bound to be Daggerfall fans. That's a huge pool of potential contributors.

I think that's what make DFTFU unique. I'm not setting out to recreate Daggerfall myself, or with a small team that gets burned out after a while. In fact, the goal of DFTFU has never been to remake Daggerfall at all. Rather, the goal has been to create a bridge from Daggerfall into a major game engine. The remastering will grow organically from the community's desire to see it happen.

[ifkopifko]

Yay, thank you for the good news.

[Hoon]

You know, Daggerfall is probably one of the only games that could actually pull off destructible environments. From breaking up billboards or furniture (and maybe even completely destroying doors instead of bashing them open), to razing villages. The tricky part would be how the game could remember what you've destroyed, and what it should/shouldn't remember.

[FlinchCat]

You know, Daggerfall is probably one of the only games that could actually pull off destructible environments. From breaking up billboards or furniture (and maybe even completely destroying doors instead of bashing them open), to razing villages. The tricky part would be how the game could remember what you've destroyed, and what it should/shouldn't remember.

Nice idea. Maybe you could cut signs like you could in Ocarina of Time XD

I was thinking of possibly adding expanded and more detailed dialogue. Not personalized, considering the 100,000+ denizens of the Iliac Bay. A blacksmithing feature would be nice as well, along with wilderness encounters (traveling merchants, bandits, etc.) Maybe if you become famous enough, the Dark Brotherhood might even attack you