Something interesting about the "Random" nature of Daggerfall I realized

Discuss Daggerfall Unity and Daggerfall Tools for Unity.
Post Reply
User avatar
Magicono43
Posts: 1139
Joined: Tue Nov 06, 2018 7:06 am

Something interesting about the "Random" nature of Daggerfall I realized

Post by Magicono43 »

A lot of the following is a conversation I mostly had with myself in a Discord channel, but it applies to the topic of the post, just in maybe a slightly scattered fashion.

Part 1.
"So here is a query
The buildings in Daggerfall towns and cities are all pre-determined in terms of their specifications as a building and such
But is it the same for the NPCs that generate inside these buildings?
Like if I go to the same shop in Daggerfall City, will it always be the shop owner of the same name and such?
This is honestly something I could really easily test
Well, it does seem to be the case that even the NPCs and their names are pre-determined as well.
Enter and re-enter still the same person as you would expect, and also the same if you make a new character and go to the same places."

Part 2.
"Yeah, that's very interesting what that really entails when you think about it. Like even though people look at Daggerfall as such a "randomly generated" game, it really could not be further from the truth.
Almost everything is pre-determined in the world just like in the later games, but loot, individual enemies, and quest objectives/quest NPC targets are the only things that are "on the fly" randomly generated.
The rest has already been generated once during development and is the same for every player
Which has its advantages and disadvantages for modding as well, just an interesting thing to really realize."

Sorry if that was a bit lazy, but I did not feel like retyping what I did and I figured it worked for what i'm trying to get across.

But with that in mind, that Daggerfall is mostly pre-determined in many of it's aspects, such as things even as mundane as the name and billboard sprite and position chosen for an NPC inside a building of any town/city in the game. This also means that the attributes of said NPCs is attached to that specific building block data as well correct? Like can I get the name of the NPC/NPCs inside of a specific building in Daggerfall city and determine their gender and billboard sprite used? I was thinking that I could use this to somewhat alter the "private property" inside some of these buildings to more match with the residence in some way. Like if a house is owned by a woman, have the private property items only generate proper female clothing, and the opposite for men, etc.

This also has disadvantages as well if I was ever going to make some sort of "aging" mod or something, since one with a note-pad or a keen memory would realize that the NPCs in a building never seem to age, die, move away, etc that sort of deal.

Just some food for thought, that maybe not many people would have thought of or realized without taking a second glance at the idea of the NPCs inside buildings, not just the buildings themselves and their properties.

Post Reply