Mod Suggestions

Discuss modding questions and implementation details.
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Interkarma
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Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 1:51 am

Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by Interkarma »

Daggerfall Explorer could do in-place interior rendering.
Spoiler!
dfexplorer-exterior.jpg
dfexplorer-exterior.jpg (115.89 KiB) Viewed 2520 times
dfexplorer-interior.jpg
dfexplorer-interior.jpg (114.37 KiB) Viewed 2520 times
There are many serious issues with trying to render interiors as visible from the outside. Ignoring the many technical issues, the art assets simply weren't designed to work this way. Interior spaces only loosely correlate to their exterior shell and windows don't even line up between inside and out. Some interiors are larger than their exterior. There are ways you could solve engineer around these problems, but it still wouldn't look great.

Overall, the payoff would be quite small for the amount of work involved. I'm not sure anyone capable of doing this would go much beyond the cost/benefit analysis, even if the cost is just personal time.

charlieg
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Joined: Tue Jul 21, 2015 1:12 pm

Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by charlieg »

Interkarma wrote:Ignoring the many technical issues, the art assets simply weren't designed to work this way. Interior spaces only loosely correlate to their exterior shell and windows don't even line up between inside and out. Some interiors are larger than their exterior. There are ways you could solve engineer around these problems, but it still wouldn't look great.
Square pegs, rounds holes. The solution, the real solution, would be to make the pegs or holes the right shape i.e. a mod that replaces the interiors/exteriors so they do fit 1:1 and perhaps longer term that is the solution that would take the game to the next level anyway as it allows for additional detail for both.

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NikitaTheTanner
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by NikitaTheTanner »

Square pegs, rounds holes. The solution, the real solution, would be to make the pegs or holes the right shape i.e. a mod that replaces the interiors/exteriors so they do fit 1:1 and perhaps longer term that is the solution that would take the game to the next level anyway as it allows for additional detail for both.
If that is the case, then it would be even better to replace exteriors with better models as well, considering how much work it would take. Not sure about next level though - I can see some benefits to the whole idea, but they aren't that big to consider doing such amount of work. Even latest Skyrim/Fallout games still rely on interiors being their own separate things.

While there are benefits to immersion/some gameplay mechanics potentially to fully open world with no loading screens - I am afraid to even imagine amount of time it would take to undertake. Plus, there is also a question of optimization - how the hell to render giant cities when all interiors are loaded. Some modern games utilize smart optimization techniques when it comes to open interiors, but I've never seen anything close to the scale of Daggerfall.

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Jay_H
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by Jay_H »

Some people have mentioned a degree of slowdown when in certain taverns in Daggerfall.

Can you imagine loading all taverns, all guilds, all residences, and all shops and their textures and objects simultaneously while moving around? :P

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