[Overhaul Project] Daggerfall Unity Re-imagined
Posted: Fri Oct 16, 2020 11:49 pm
So since i'm currently working on this, I figure I may as well start a thread for those that might be interested, and to have a place to post any of my progress in a somewhat organized fashion. In a similar fashion to l3lessed's "Combat Overhaul Alpha" Project, I recently started working on my own project in this way, that being I have forked the main DFU github repo and am working on an overhaul project of my own. The main reason I did this was that of impatience and laziness on my part to be honest, I was getting tired of trying to wrestle with things I have no clue how to work on myself, that being lots of the back-end work required to make more complex mods that don't already have support framework made by the many amazing contributors to the DFU project. These things I am sure will come with time, but clearly not in short enough order for my personal creative fervor to wait for. So that's why I started this personal fork, so I can edit the code directly without having to wait on PR commits to go through and constantly wrestle with the back-end coding that I have very little experience and confidence doing myself.
Now with that introduction context out of the way, i'll try and explain what my general plan is with this project. It's fairly vague and very broad, as I don't really have a specific end-goal in mind for this overhaul, as I pretty much would like to use this as the playground that I can hopefully make Daggerfall to be the game I always wanted it to be, as well as a place to hopefully hone my own skills along the way as well. But as of right now, i'm currently working on the base combat mechanics, which are basically going to be a more detailed extension of the ideas that my "Physical Combat And Armor Overhaul" had added through the proper modding system. I still plan on keeping the dice rolling system and skill checks and such, but much more detailed and hopefully more logical to my own rational.
One of the basic designs I am working toward is to make all the materials currently in the game to have some unique purpose or function, instead of just a straight linear equipment progression like the base Daggerfall has. After some discussion with Ralzar who has more actual Table-top RPG experience than I have by a wide margin, for now I have decided to go with a system that is not completely non-linear, but is much more open than the vanilla system.
The current system I have in mind has most of the damage dealt broken down into different "damage types" for the physical aspect it is currently Bludgeoning, Slashing, Piercing, and based on a bunch of other factors that I have not yet 100% worked out yet, this will all culminate into a system where some materials are best at dealing one damage type, and weak to other damage types in terms of the materials of armors as well. With this I added six new properties to weapons and armors.
Density = Blunt
Shear = Slashing/Cutting
Fracture = Piercing
Melting Point = Extra condition/damage from fire if low
Conductivity = Extra damage from electrical attacks if high
Brittleness = Extra condition/damage from ice attacks when high
With these, I can hopefully make all the materials in the game fill a different purpose to some degree and feel different from one another, instead of one just being a straight upgrade from another in every way. With this added emphasis on materials being different, I also wanted to make these various materials feel more "real" in the world like these is some supply and demand sort of thing going on. So I will likely add new items that will serve this purpose, likely ingots or chunks of material of some kind that will be necessary to repair equipment at black-smiths and the like. So maybe it will take 3 orcish ingots to repair that orcish chest-plate of yours, and 1 to repair that orcish dagger. But, if you can't supply the material yourself, perhaps the black-smith can pull from their "emergency supply" at a cost premium, something around those lines.
Also with this, I will try and do something similar with the magic damage types as well, basically giving each enemy unique damage resistances/weaknesses to different types of magic and damage types and such, which is something I have already played around with in my PCO mod with Iron Atronachs and Gargoyles for example being weak to certain weapons, but very resistant to others, but in this case I can hopefully also tack this onto the magic system, not just the physical combat part.
Now, there are obviously hundreds of other ideas and "improvements" that I will be adding to this project, such as my currently WIP skills and training improvements, something I can only currently do by editing the base code in this way, or even changing how the AI functions to hopefully be more challenging and add more spells to their pools and such, lots and lots of potential things I will be working on here.
As I said, i'll be updating this thread periodically, as well as occasionally making commits to the github fork itself which you can find here, Magicono's DFU Overhaul Project. So if you are interested in this, feel free to give any input or questions, as I plan to eventually release this to the public as well for use for those interested in this sort of Daggerfall Overhaul, thanks for reading!
Now with that introduction context out of the way, i'll try and explain what my general plan is with this project. It's fairly vague and very broad, as I don't really have a specific end-goal in mind for this overhaul, as I pretty much would like to use this as the playground that I can hopefully make Daggerfall to be the game I always wanted it to be, as well as a place to hopefully hone my own skills along the way as well. But as of right now, i'm currently working on the base combat mechanics, which are basically going to be a more detailed extension of the ideas that my "Physical Combat And Armor Overhaul" had added through the proper modding system. I still plan on keeping the dice rolling system and skill checks and such, but much more detailed and hopefully more logical to my own rational.
One of the basic designs I am working toward is to make all the materials currently in the game to have some unique purpose or function, instead of just a straight linear equipment progression like the base Daggerfall has. After some discussion with Ralzar who has more actual Table-top RPG experience than I have by a wide margin, for now I have decided to go with a system that is not completely non-linear, but is much more open than the vanilla system.
The current system I have in mind has most of the damage dealt broken down into different "damage types" for the physical aspect it is currently Bludgeoning, Slashing, Piercing, and based on a bunch of other factors that I have not yet 100% worked out yet, this will all culminate into a system where some materials are best at dealing one damage type, and weak to other damage types in terms of the materials of armors as well. With this I added six new properties to weapons and armors.
Density = Blunt
Shear = Slashing/Cutting
Fracture = Piercing
Melting Point = Extra condition/damage from fire if low
Conductivity = Extra damage from electrical attacks if high
Brittleness = Extra condition/damage from ice attacks when high
With these, I can hopefully make all the materials in the game fill a different purpose to some degree and feel different from one another, instead of one just being a straight upgrade from another in every way. With this added emphasis on materials being different, I also wanted to make these various materials feel more "real" in the world like these is some supply and demand sort of thing going on. So I will likely add new items that will serve this purpose, likely ingots or chunks of material of some kind that will be necessary to repair equipment at black-smiths and the like. So maybe it will take 3 orcish ingots to repair that orcish chest-plate of yours, and 1 to repair that orcish dagger. But, if you can't supply the material yourself, perhaps the black-smith can pull from their "emergency supply" at a cost premium, something around those lines.
Also with this, I will try and do something similar with the magic damage types as well, basically giving each enemy unique damage resistances/weaknesses to different types of magic and damage types and such, which is something I have already played around with in my PCO mod with Iron Atronachs and Gargoyles for example being weak to certain weapons, but very resistant to others, but in this case I can hopefully also tack this onto the magic system, not just the physical combat part.
Now, there are obviously hundreds of other ideas and "improvements" that I will be adding to this project, such as my currently WIP skills and training improvements, something I can only currently do by editing the base code in this way, or even changing how the AI functions to hopefully be more challenging and add more spells to their pools and such, lots and lots of potential things I will be working on here.
As I said, i'll be updating this thread periodically, as well as occasionally making commits to the github fork itself which you can find here, Magicono's DFU Overhaul Project. So if you are interested in this, feel free to give any input or questions, as I plan to eventually release this to the public as well for use for those interested in this sort of Daggerfall Overhaul, thanks for reading!