Changing cities/towns?

[TheUnderking]

I apologize if any of these questions have been asked before, I was wondering how possible/difficult it would be to change different aspects of the cities/towns. I understand that each of these issues are fairly complex in their own right. Im not expecting people to have answers for all of them.At the end of the day what I'm hoping to do is make the 3 big cities a bit more interesting to set them apart from the others

1. Is it possible to change the overall shapes of the cities/ towns from big squares to something that feels more natural?
2. Is it possible to have height variation within a city/town, as opposed to having all of them be flat planes?
3. Is it possible to edit one city without changing others? As far as i understand, cities/towns are made up of a shared pool of blocks, and, say, adding a building to a city would actually involve adding that building to every city/town that uses that block.
4. Is it possible to move a town/city to a different location? I dont really have a reason for this one, its just something im curious about
5. Is it possible to make hand crafted one-off quests more like the main quest instead of making randomly generated quests like the faction quests? This would allow me/others to add a little bit of that handcrafted charm that gets lost when everything is generated procedurally. It would give people a reason to go to these important cities, to set them apart from the rest

If I could make at least one or two of those changes happen, then I would see it really helping to alleviate the repetitive nature of a lot of the content. The only thing that sets apart the cities from the towns is how big the square is, and whether or not they have a wall around them. Daggerfall, Wayrest, and Sentinel are supposed to be powerful players in the Iliac, but they feel pretty much the same as everywhere else. The only thing that sets those cities apart is the castles. Aside from the main quest, what reason does someone have to go Daggerfall? Its basically the same as every other city in the game, except at night the game wants to kill you. Shaking these important cities up in some way would give people an actual reason to go to them. This will definitely turn into a big project if I do end up attempting this, but I took the username "TheUnderking" from anyone else who may have wanted it, so I want to at least try to live up to it.

Im sorry this ended up being so long. Thank you for reading, and for any help you may have.

[Pollskii]

5 especially would be amazing, would love to see people fleshing out locations with unique characters lore and questlines, would be extra cool for this game cos it's so vast

[BadLuckBurt]

There's a lot of manual labour involved but the answer to most if not all questions is yes. I'll elaborate per question:

1. Is it possible to change the overall shapes of the cities/ towns from big squares to something that feels more natural?
Yes, in the future. I'm working on some tools to help with this but those are not finished yet, I doubt anyone would want to do this by hand.

2. Is it possible to have height variation within a city/town, as opposed to having all of them be flat planes?
In theory, yes. In practice, no, not at the moment. DFU is built to act like classic Daggerfall which has no height variation, code would have to be added / changed to allow you to do this.

3. Is it possible to edit one city without changing others? As far as i understand, cities/towns are made up of a shared pool of blocks, and, say, adding a building to a city would actually involve adding that building to every city/town that uses that block.
Yes but you would need custom RMB blocks to stop the building(s) you add from popping up in every town, Daggerfall, Wayrest and Sentinel all have unique blocks that are not used elsewhere in the game.

4. Is it possible to move a town/city to a different location? I dont really have a reason for this one, its just something im curious about
Not that I know of, locations are determined from map pixel coordinates. I might be wrong, it's been a while since I've butted heads with locations.

5. Is it possible to make hand crafted one-off quests more like the main quest instead of making randomly generated quests like the faction quests? This would allow me/others to add a little bit of that handcrafted charm that gets lost when everything is generated procedurally. It would give people a reason to go to these important cities, to set them apart from the rest
This is definitely possible, although it depends on how far you want to take this. The original main quest is basically a series of quests that are strung together using conditions and global variables. Kamer has done a lot of crazy stuff in Warm Ashes using quests.

I know these answers probably only raise more questions so fire away, I'll try to answer what I can

[imsobadatnicknames]

5. Is it possible to make hand crafted one-off quests more like the main quest instead of making randomly generated quests like the faction quests? This would allow me/others to add a little bit of that handcrafted charm that gets lost when everything is generated procedurally. It would give people a reason to go to these important cities, to set them apart from the rest

Im sorry this ended up being so long. Thank you for reading, and for any help you may have.

To further elaborate on what BadLuckBurt said: You can create quests that send the player to a specific town or dungeon, but only if that town or dungeon is defined as a permanent site. Afaik, Daggerfall city and all the main quest dungeons (Including Castle Daggerfall, Castle Sentinel and Castle Wayrest) are defined as permanent sites. I'm not sure if Sentinel and Wayrest (as in the cities, not the castles) are permanent too or not. so if you create a custom city or dungeon and want a quest that only takes place there, you'll have to define it as a permanent site. I'm not sure how to do that or if it's even possible at the moment, but Hazelnut should probably know the answer.

If aside from specific places you also want your handcrafted quests to feature specific NPCs (Like Queen Aubk-i, King Gothryd etc.) I think you can do that through their faction designation.

[TheUnderking]

Thank you both for your help. I just had one more question, before I start planning what I actually want to do

3. Yes but you would need custom RMB blocks to stop the building(s) you add from popping up in every town, Daggerfall, Wayrest and Sentinel all have unique blocks that are not used elsewhere in the game.
Is it possible to make new RMB blocks, or would I be restricted to working inside the blocks that already exist? If it is possible, is that a difficult/complicated process?

I'm sorry if these questions are obvious/ have already been answered elsewhere. There's just a lot of information out there and I'm struggling to get to grips with all of it.

For right now I'm going to just start with a small quest mod in Daggerfall, while I learn how everything works. If its possible to make new blocks, I also might add/ make some changes to the city to get practice with that for down the line. My pipe dream is to make a Tamriel Rebuilt sort of mod that adds in other provinces, which from what I understand from previous discussions on the topic should theoretically be possible, but I dont see much point in doing something like that if I cant make the locations in those towns interesting enough to warrant going to them.

Again, thank you both for your help. This community is one of the friendliest I've ever encountered. It's very refreshing to see.

[imsobadatnicknames]

3. Yes but you would need custom RMB blocks to stop the building(s) you add from popping up in every town, Daggerfall, Wayrest and Sentinel all have unique blocks that are not used elsewhere in the game.
Is it possible to make new RMB blocks, or would I be restricted to working inside the blocks that already exist? If it is possible, is that a difficult/complicated process?

Again, thank you both for your help. This community is one of the friendliest I've ever encountered. It's very refreshing to see.

Someone more experienced with the issue correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's perfectly possible to make new RMB and RDB blocks, however they're very hard to make from scratch, and as far as I'm aware there hasn't been any released mod project that involves creating new ones so far. It's also possible to create different variations of a block, and changes between different variants can be triggered through both C# scripts and the quest system. I don't know how to do any of it myself but Hazelnut has a WorldData overrides tutorial that explains it.

Edit: there's another detail I just remembered. If you're going to be modifying cities, I think a problem you may into is that each site can only have one dungeon associated with it. There's a WIP project that turns the crypts in towns into actual visitable dungeons, but the author was unable to make the Daggerfall crypt visitable because Castle Daggerfall is already a dungeon so it's impossible to put the entrance to another dungeon anywhere in the city.

[Daniel87]

3. Yes but you would need custom RMB blocks to stop the building(s) you add from popping up in every town, Daggerfall, Wayrest and Sentinel all have unique blocks that are not used elsewhere in the game.
Is it possible to make new RMB blocks, or would I be restricted to working inside the blocks that already exist? If it is possible, is that a difficult/complicated process?

Again, thank you both for your help. This community is one of the friendliest I've ever encountered. It's very refreshing to see.

Someone more experienced with the issue correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's perfectly possible to make new RMB and RDB blocks, however they're very hard to make from scratch, and as far as I'm aware there hasn't been any released mod project that involves creating new ones so far. It's also possible to create different variations of a block, and changes between different variants can be triggered through both C# scripts and the quest system. I don't know how to do any of it myself but Hazelnut has a WorldData overrides tutorial that explains it.

Edit: there's another detail I just remembered. If you're going to be modifying cities, I think a problem you may into is that each site can only have one dungeon associated with it. There's a WIP project that turns the crypts in towns into actual visitable dungeons, but the author was unable to make the Daggerfall crypt visitable because Castle Daggerfall is already a dungeon so it's impossible to put the entrance to another dungeon anywhere in the city.

Could the Daggerfall Castle dungeon and the Daggerfall Crypt dungeon be the same dungeon and connected by a secred locked door, one cannot open?
Then they would be crammed into the same space and coexist but could be explored independently.

[imsobadatnicknames]

3. Yes but you would need custom RMB blocks to stop the building(s) you add from popping up in every town, Daggerfall, Wayrest and Sentinel all have unique blocks that are not used elsewhere in the game.
Is it possible to make new RMB blocks, or would I be restricted to working inside the blocks that already exist? If it is possible, is that a difficult/complicated process?

Again, thank you both for your help. This community is one of the friendliest I've ever encountered. It's very refreshing to see.

Someone more experienced with the issue correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's perfectly possible to make new RMB and RDB blocks, however they're very hard to make from scratch, and as far as I'm aware there hasn't been any released mod project that involves creating new ones so far. It's also possible to create different variations of a block, and changes between different variants can be triggered through both C# scripts and the quest system. I don't know how to do any of it myself but Hazelnut has a WorldData overrides tutorial that explains it.

Edit: there's another detail I just remembered. If you're going to be modifying cities, I think a problem you may into is that each site can only have one dungeon associated with it. There's a WIP project that turns the crypts in towns into actual visitable dungeons, but the author was unable to make the Daggerfall crypt visitable because Castle Daggerfall is already a dungeon so it's impossible to put the entrance to another dungeon anywhere in the city.

Could the Daggerfall Castle dungeon and the Daggerfall Crypt dungeon be the same dungeon and connected by a secred locked door, one cannot open?
Then they would be crammed into the same space and coexist but could be explored independently.

Dungeons can have multiple entrances so I guess it would be possible to modify Daggerfall castle to add an additional crypt dungeon module that doesn't connect to the rest of the dungeon, and turn the crypt model in the town cementery into another entrance. However, a problem with multi-entrance dungeons is that no matter where you enter trough, you'll appear in the same part of the dungeon, so if you did that entering through the crypt door would still end up with you appearing in the main room in Castle Daggerfall.

[Daniel87]

Arg, okay I didn't know that :/

[Hazelnut]

I apologize if any of these questions have been asked before, I was wondering how possible/difficult it would be to change different aspects of the cities/towns. I understand that each of these issues are fairly complex in their own right. Im not expecting people to have answers for all of them.At the end of the day what I'm hoping to do is make the 3 big cities a bit more interesting to set them apart from the others

1. Is it possible to change the overall shapes of the cities/ towns from big squares to something that feels more natural?
2. Is it possible to have height variation within a city/town, as opposed to having all of them be flat planes?
3. Is it possible to edit one city without changing others? As far as i understand, cities/towns are made up of a shared pool of blocks, and, say, adding a building to a city would actually involve adding that building to every city/town that uses that block.
4. Is it possible to move a town/city to a different location? I dont really have a reason for this one, its just something im curious about
5. Is it possible to make hand crafted one-off quests more like the main quest instead of making randomly generated quests like the faction quests? This would allow me/others to add a little bit of that handcrafted charm that gets lost when everything is generated procedurally. It would give people a reason to go to these important cities, to set them apart from the rest

I've done a lot of work on enabling a lot of this, please read the documentation threads on here about WorldData overrides. To answer your questions:

1) Yes.
2) No, this would require a massive overhaul of the DFU code that constructs locations. Well, you can do it but you will have a lot of floating and/or buried buildings.
3) Yes, you can do this by creating custom RMB blocks and only use them in your modified location. An example of this is in my Mountain Rumors quest from Roleplay & Realism mod, although with a new location but the same could be done for an existing one.
4) Yes, this is very easy to do. See the world data override documentation.
5) Yes, and there's an example of this with my Mountain Rumors quest from Roleplay & Realism mod. It uses a new custom location, as well as an existing city which is fixed, mixed with random locations. It also has multiple paths and choices. Just be aware that dialog is difficult with the quest system. I'm a programmer and found it tricky, but proved it can be done. (note that the latest version in github will only work once my PR#2012 is merged into DFU, or you apply it yourself - otherwise 'pay gold' will need changing to 'pay money' for it to work with current build)


See my sig below for a link to the code for all my mods. Most of them were written as examples of how to do various things with DFU, and then just grew to full fledged mods that people use.