DFU is done. Now what?

[jayhova]

What is the future of Daggerfall Unity? Will it be expanded beyond simply duplicating the original game? Who will take over if there is to be a DFU 1.1? What new features should be added?

[Kaga]

I personally hope no more because 1.0 after long development should be complete. It also gives modder some space to finally mod the game further without worrying about changes.

[jayhova]

I personally would like to see an expansion of the quest system to create among other things a better tutorial experience. For instance, I would like to see the tutorial advance based on actions, locations, etc. I would like to see the ability to have multiple travel locations in a quest so you can quickly advance to the next location in a quest.

[jayhova]

Daggerfall Unity Mission Statement
Post by Interkarma » Wed Aug 19, 2015 8:11 pm

Throughout the development process this is the mission statement that will define my goals and priorities:

“To create a playable build of Daggerfall in the Unity engine, and to provide a scaffold for future improvements.”

It really seems like we are at the scaffold for future improvements stage. There was of course a freeze on new features in development. However, the base game is 100% done. What future improvements should be added to the base game? My thought right away is better mod support and better quest support.

[numidium3rd]

We're currently working on a few bug fixes and performance optimizations. I agree with the poster above that we should keep impact to modders to a minimum (ideally zero). We're keeping all the public interfaces intact so everyone's mods should still work in theory.

[jayhova]

We're currently working on a few bug fixes and performance optimizations. I agree with the poster above that we should keep impact to modders to a minimum (ideally zero). We're keeping all the public interfaces intact so everyone's mods should still work in theory.

Exactly my thought now that we are at 1.0 backward compatibility should be a priority. I am however perfectly fine with newer mods requiring a newer version.

Two other things come to mind. An installer and better mod handling. A built-in mod hander that takes a mod zip file and installs it would be ideal. It would be nice if DFU had a means of checking for updated versions of itself and mods. There are a number of free installer programs. https://alternativeto.net/software/inst ... opensource

[Kab the Bird Ranger]

As Interkarma announced on his Twitter, I've been leading the charge on the next version. The goal is not for me to become the new one making all the decisions, but rather to keep things running while we develop a more decentralized process.

v1.1 probably won't change much: bugfixes, minor mod features, minor setup improvements. I've listed my plan for the version (which I called 1.0.1 at the time) here: https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfal ... ssues/2572

We're testing the waters for our capabilities. By my estimation, DFU development is currently more limited by code reviewers. We've established a process where rather than wait on Interkarma to merge contributions into the main repo, we instead rely on the approval of two maintainers. However, the availability of maintainers is limited, and losing just one of the more active maintainers would probably halt all new development for some time. We need newcomers who are willing to contribute reviews to existing Pull Requests (the Git way of handling contributions), to eventually promote as trusted maintainers we can rely on for new development. Without it, trying to add new features to DFU will just get added to a pile that is not getting anywhere.

Once we have enough maintainers for features to get approved, then we can start doing bigger features.

On that note, unlike Interkarma, I am not personally very active on these forums. I prefer using Github as an issue tracker for bugs and DFU setup problems, even modding support requests, though I'd probably still refuse support for someone's personal mod configuration problems.

[jayhova]

As Interkarma announced on his Twitter, I've been leading the charge on the next version. The goal is not for me to become the new one making all the decisions, but rather to keep things running while we develop a more decentralized process.
...

On that note, unlike Interkarma, I am not personally very active on these forums. I prefer using Github as an issue tracker for bugs and DFU setup problems, even modding support requests, though I'd probably still refuse support for someone's personal mod configuration problems.

Good to hear from you. I am not very active on Twitter but it's good to hear a tweet from the new bird. What are your thoughts on things outside the code base (version independent) e.g. an installer/updater?

[Kab the Bird Ranger]

Open to it. Contributions welcome. However, I think those features can be difficult to get right from an external contributor. For example, we got someone working on a "portable" mode for DFU, where no files outside the installation folder are used. Every update, I have to go through and test everything, and it has issues due to Unity engine limitations. With a lot of other types of features, I can just trust the code.