Mod Suggestions

Discuss modding questions and implementation details.
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Ziune Wolf
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Mod Suggestions

Post by Ziune Wolf »

I mentioned some time ago that I had some ideas for mods, and that I would post them here on the forums. I have four ideas so far, and here's what I've come up with:

Enhanced Spellmaker

Daggerfall's original spellmaker was great, and allowed you to customize your spells to a great degree of precision, but there are certainly aspects to spellmaking that were not able to be integrated into the game. With the new engine however, it would be possible to add extra detail to the spellmaker. Here are a few of my ideas.

- For multiple targets at range (i.e. an explosion like for the fireball spell), or a spell centered on self within a radius, add variable radius to the spell. Originally, this had a static radius, but having a variable radius would certainly add more customization for spell attacks.

- Less important, but fun to consider would be adding different shapes for your spells. For the same category of spells as above, perhaps instead a sphere, you could make a cone effect in front of you, whose range and width can be manipulated in the spellmaker.

Also, just something to consider: I remember ranged spells almost always missing when cast at targets in external environments (like guards, per say). I very highly doubt that that will be a difficult issue for Unity to handle properly, I just thought I would mention it, since it made ranged spells nearly useless outside unless they were area of effect.

Dark Dungeons

When I played Arena, I felt that the way the game handled light was quite good despite its age. Dungeons were not lit up as well as they were in Daggerfall. Perhaps the ambient lighting can be reduced while inside dungeons to reflect their dark nature and necessitate the use of items to light up the environment. Beyond this, there would also need to be a way, beyond the light spell, to create light, such as lighting a torch and placing it on the side of your pack for those who don't use spells. Additionally, if light plays a bigger role through this mod, there is a possibility of adding an enhanced stealth system that takes into account light level when checking whether or not the player is seen.

Animals in the Wilderness

Outside of towns, while the terrain looks quite good in my opinion, something that would add to that would be the possibility of wild animal spawns. I would think that the best way to implement this would be to spawn enemies in the wilderness every 5 minutes, per say, with a certain chance of success. Similar to how enemies are spawned in quests. Maybe the easiest way to implement this would to actually have an additional background quest that simply spawned in these enemies indefinitely while the player was outside a town.

Additional Creatures

The bestiary of Daggerfall was quite extensive, but the ability to add additional monsters to the bestiary would be great for mods. Some monsters that I would consider interesting to be added would be wolves and goblins, but those are just two out of many possibilities. In addition, you could have multiple versions of the same monster, such as different colored bears (brown vs. black) or wolves (snow vs. grey).

Let me know what you all think about these mods. If you have additional suggestions, here would also be a good place to put them.

Edit: I realize now that this is posted on the wrong section of the forum. Is there any way of moving this while not having to make another copy of the same post?

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Jay_H
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by Jay_H »

A couple of your ideas sound similar to what I put in my general thread. The implementation of additional enemies is pretty foggy for now, since Daggerfall uses hard-coded tables to determine what enemies are going to be in what dungeons, so it's not quite so easy to just add them to the tables. Adding them as specific quest monsters would likely be easier but I don't know anything about it.

There should be a great deal more of human enemies, such as Peasant and Merchant, since it just doesn't make sense that ordinary enemies I fight are always going to be a Bard, an Acrobat, and so on. There should also be high-power enemies such as warriors who cast spells and so on, and Wizards as dangerous as Vampire Ancients.

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Ziune Wolf
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by Ziune Wolf »

The addition of high-level characters of a specific monster type (like, a tougher ancient lich, or a very experienced archer) would be interesting. In fact, for a quest-line I had outlined in my head, tougher spellcaster's or tougher undead would fit in very nicely.

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NikitaTheTanner
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by NikitaTheTanner »

Regarding enemies, I think it would be awesome to make enemies more unique, depending on their type. So that the Liches would summon undead, vampires turn into bats, Daedra Lords teleport and summon daedroths, etc. Just make enemies more dynamic and interesting, so you need to learn their weaknesses and behavior. Werewolves and wereboars definitely need to be buffed. Other types can also be made more interesting.

I am also definitely not a fan of the default weapon material system, which I think is quite rubbish. It would make sense certain weapons hurt enemies more, but making enemies immune to other materials feels like a cheap way to increase difficulty. At least for common enemies such as harpies, that's not even funny. :o

By the way, can we utilize scripts to spawn new enemies instead of the old ones? Kinda like Doom mods randomly replace default enemies and weapons with someting new, there is a certain chance it would happen when the map loads. It might be a workaround for the fixed lists until a better solution is found.

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Dark Dungeons is a great idea and something a lot of us are waiting for. Torches, light and cat-eye(though not OP) spells and potions, hope to see them in the game.

Another thing, maybe in some dungeon types there should be no artificial sorces of light lit, like in abandoned crypts, caves, ruins, but the player might be able to light them up when he sees them. It would give a feeling of progression, but also make you feel like you are exploring a truly desolate place. Idea comes to mind from a great mod Dungeons of Ivellon for Oblivion.


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Magic systems - some of the most fun and often most broken systems in TES games. I think modders will make magic in Daggerfall more fun than it was in any other TES game, the possibilities are endless, but I am hoping that some semblance of balance will be preserved.

Al-Khwarizmi
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

A mod with some other live action footage for other plot points apart from the intro would be rather cool, no?

(this was inspired by the suggestion viewtopic.php?f=23&p=6806#p6806 although it's in a way the opposite) :)

Th3AustralianGam3r
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by Th3AustralianGam3r »

Is it possible to make a mod to have see through Windows on buildings for outside and inside?

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username
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by username »

Th3AustralianGam3r wrote:Is it possible to make a mod to have see through Windows on buildings for outside and inside?
I probably don't have the best answer but here's mine anyway;

(This is assuming you mean seeing the actual interiors)
Basically there are two/three things that make this hard

1.It might cause some performance issues
2.I'm not sure if Daggerfall Unity supports stationary NPCs in the open
3.Not all buildings are the same on the inside as they are on the out

Oh and BTW, hi it's Channel1!
Check out my patch to remove nudity, it's a WIP but it's coming along quite nicely.

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NikitaTheTanner
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by NikitaTheTanner »

The main reason why it is HIGHLY unlikely is the fact that interior and exteriors are essentially 2 separate worlds with doors acting as portals between them. There is no other connection! To bring interiors outside would be a tremendous amount of work, I am not even sure it's humanly possible and will lead to many, many, many difficulties.

One might try to create an illusion of some sorts that there is something behind the window, maybe emulate lighting depending on the time of the day, show weather and sky, etc. But not actually bring two exteriors and interiors together. Not in Daggerfall, at least, without rebuilding the world from scratch.

If somebody rebuilds the world with their own models and programs interiors to be outside, sure, it might happen. But that's essentially a new game.

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username
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by username »

NikitaTheTanner wrote:The main reason why it is HIGHLY unlikely is the fact that interior and exteriors are essentially 2 separate worlds with doors acting as portals between them. There is no other connection! To bring interiors outside would be a tremendous amount of work, I am not even sure it's humanly possible and will lead to many, many, many difficulties.

One might try to create an illusion of some sorts that there is something behind the window, maybe emulate lighting depending on the time of the day, show weather and sky, etc. But not actually bring two exteriors and interiors together. Not in Daggerfall, at least, without rebuilding the world from scratch.

If somebody rebuilds the world with their own models and programs interiors to be outside, sure, it might happen. But that's essentially a new game.
I remember reading one of Gav's old blog posts about Daggerfall Cartographer, apparently he actually had it setup so that the buildings interiors were actually part of the scene as the exterior, but this caused some issues due to some having different internal dimensions.
Check out my patch to remove nudity, it's a WIP but it's coming along quite nicely.

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Jay_H
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Re: Mod Suggestions

Post by Jay_H »

If the Cartographer idea doesn't work, the most functional counterfeit, IMO, would be to surround each interior cell with an outer box that has walls and floors painted on like outside scenery, with houses and so on. Peasants would also walk around in the outer section but would probably not be interactive. This precludes a 1:1 fit with actual scenery but it'd get close enough for realism purposes... unless someone actually found a way to plan for every block combination in Daggerfall.

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