First of all, I thank you all for the points you've raised, I'm totally open for confrontation.
This is very different than I had assumed. The vision and direction of the project seems to be going FAR beyond just adding Tamriel continent to Daggerfall. Appears to include hardcoding whatever subjective gameplay additions, mechanics and major changes (possibly lore-breaking) that are "essential" to the creator's playstyle. No disrespect whatsoever about this, all cool, I just didn't realize.
Up to this point in development, the only things that's been added outside what was strictly necessary for the expanded map to work have been roads and tracks, and even that is still activated through a modified version on Hazelnut's Basic Roads mod, mainly because it was easier that way
(What I mean is, it's still a mod that can be enabled in the mod window. But I'm not sure that, when I'll have made all that I intend to build around roads and tracks, disabling it wouldn't break anything)
There are other subjective gameplay additions that will work the same way, and for the same reasons, and Climate&Calories will probably be among those.
The idea behind the eventual changes is that the aim of the project is to add Tamriel continent (and beyond) to Daggerfall
and to make it feel like a real, huge space, and I that like fast travel is the contrary of what I'm trying to attain. What is the purpose of a landmass the size of Europe if what I'm doing is just teleporting from one location to the other? I understand this was perfectly reasonable in vanilla DF since the wilderness had literally nothing to offer, but what if that wilderness was interesting to explore?
And, what would be lore-breaking in removing fast-travel?
I'd just create the Tamriel landmass, keep it as vanilla, lore-friendly and compatible as reasonably possible - let mods to do the rest.
As I wrote before, I highly doubt anyone will ever make mods for this project. On top of that, I'm not even sure, when I'll be finished slaughtering IK's code, that this fork will still be mod-firendly
My interpretation of what has been proposed so far:
Quest objective located 5 days travel-time from town
+ 1000s of square miles of space
+ Real-Time Travel Only
+ NPCs only provide vague directions
+ No navigational aids (no compass, map, etc.)
+ Foggy weather
If this happens in real life you're dead lol.
This is an impossible scenario. Never knowing what direction you're facing, when even with a compass you can easily be off by a little and miss a location by miles. Climate, weather, time of day, terrain, etc. all play a big factor, can make anything impossible to find - on top of dealing with wilderness encounters and attempting any kind of exploration along the way.
Almost everything right, aside from a couple of fundamental points: roads and tracks would be there, giving some basic but useful ways to find some kind of settlement; maps would be for sale in General Stores, and if you know that a certain road leads to a certain town, well, all you need to do is follow that road; some kind of fast-travel in the form of coaches, ships, Mage Guild to Mage Guild teleport, and so on; and climate-survival advantages that bring back the old good compass.
Filling the wilderness with enough encounters and small areas to explore to make walking for 100s of miles bearable or creating/adding more dungeons and towns closer together so distance between things is more reasonable for walking would put a significant strain on realism and make the world feel extremely small - potentially defeating the purpose of the game.
I admit the idea is to fill
every pixel left empty with some kind of location, but this is still in development, and at the moment I have to take a few thing into consideration. But in any case, those location would not appear on the map even when discovered, and would be so small to be not intrusive, and not easy to find either.
Still much more to say, but not enough time to keep writing. But please keep the discussion going, it does help me reason on what I'm doing. Just remember, when (legitimately) complaining about the subjectivity of some choices, that this whole project is and will be extremely subjective: I draw the political and climate map based loosely on what I read on the UESP, but I made some totally arbitrary choices; right now I'm the only one working on this, with the only, super-important contributions being assets developed by modders for DFU, plus the open source code for said mods I'm scavenging here and there. And much more.