Experimental Smaller Dungeons

[Cyman]

This is the only reason I play the Daggerfall again!

[InconsolableCellist]

I just learned about this and think it's a great idea! So far I've only seen one dungeon with it, but those massive dungeons can feel poorly matched with simple fetch quests, yet appropriate for mainline ones.

Does the size of the dungeon vary, so that you sometimes still get the huge ones?

Also I'm amazed at how well this project is going and how great the community's mods are! I'm watching my friend play Daggerfall for the first time (vanilla-style DFU first) and we just picked out a ton of mods, and they're all fantastic improvements. Many help to fill in the gaps and make the world feel more alive and dynamic. I'd love to see this continue, and one day work on my idea for a courier's guild (transporting goods/people along major roads, offering protection, being a highway man, etc.)

[pango]

Hi

Does the size of the dungeon vary, so that you sometimes still get the huge ones?

No, it makes all "normal" dungeons the size of one inner module and 4 border modules surrounding one (like Privateer's Hold); That just excludes the main quest dungeons, because they're made of unique handcrafted modules.

[TalonHatesNames]

I must confess I've not read the entire thread, and so I apologize if this has already been brought up.
I was wondering about the feasibility of doing the opposite. That is to say increasing the size of dungeons.
Personally, the dungeon crawling is the reason I play Daggerfall and I would love trudging through a dungeon that took several hours by itself. I find that I will typically enjoy the 4 (inner) module dungeons far more than the smaller ones and find myself somewhat disappointed entering a dungeon with only 2.
I can imagine that I may be part of a minority in this sense, with most players preferring classic or smaller dungeons, but I imagine that there are others who feel similarly.
Finally, I yet again apologize if this has been brought up prior, and thank you for your time.

[Interkarma]

Hey welcome to the forums. It's feasible to make larger dungeons, but the complexity of handling things escalates quickly. Just having smaller dungeons gave me a lot of headaches and needed special handling across a few systems. Never say never, but I'm not sure I have it left in me to add bigger dungeons into the mix as well.

[TalonHatesNames]

Thanks for the welcome!
Like I said, I was mostly asking about the feasibility, and so it's great to hear that it would be a possibility.
I certainly don't think it should be particularly high on your priority list. There's certainly plenty of Daggerfall to last one for a while without adding even more.
Thanks for the reply and, again, thanks for your time.

[Gingerbreadman]

This feature is great!
How does it works exactly, and where is its source code located in the DG_unity files?
The reason that I'm asking is because I do wish to tinker with it. I don't know if its feasible, but I was hoping to add some randomization in the dungeon size while maintaining it on a smaller scale than vanilla (5-10 blocks).

cheers

[Interkarma]

The smaller dungeons work happens at a low level as block data is read from MAPS.BSA. The feature reads in all the blocks as normal then remixes layout data to create 1x internal block surrounded by 4x border blocks. The blocks are selected randomly but deterministically using MapID as a seed. All this work is done in MapsFile.GenerateSmallerDungeon().

Changing the dungeon block topology to make more variable sized dungeons is possible but it greatly amplifies the work and potential for problems. My original vision was to have a slider that allowed for smaller/larger dungeons. It was too much of a headache to handle all the ways this can break things (save/load, enter/exit, quest placement to name a few). That's why I just stuck with smaller dungeons as a binary on/off and I'm still working through fixing some gaps even after reducing the scope.

[Gingerbreadman]

I was able to generate medium sized dungeon that has 11 blocks instead of 5. Unfortunately, it does have unconnected blocks; I think I forgot to set some as being the "border". I'll see what I can do and might make a post in the creator corner section later on.

[SerGoldenhandtheJust]

So I was playing around with this and was wondering. Is it possible to turn this feature on/off in the same playthrough?
I don't want to potentially screw up my saves, but I'd like the choice of doing a smaller dungeon, then turning off smaller dungeons and doing the bigger normal Daggerfall one. I figure as long as I'm outside of the dungeon it should be fine right?