Inaccessible parts in dungeon with doors to blackness..

[ruthan]

I was experimenting with tcl cheat and find out that one of my generated dungeon Perywyr Laboratory include some strange, throw away parts with enemies spawned inside, there are not connected with the rest of dungeon not even with some teleporter and they include some strange door connected to nothing so will start to fall.

Its probably bug is level generation, they should be deleted.I looked for some command to dumpt, but i dont know what is blockname, so i cant. But im adding some screenshots..

[Jay_H]

Those are called "border blocks." You can read more about them here: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Dun ... n_Features

[ruthan]

Ok its very strange design instead just some big cube with skybox.

But why spawn enemies in them? Even texture them with anything else than some simple texture?

[mcarss]

Its probably bug is level generation, they should be deleted.

It's not a bug, it's how the game generates dungeons. It uses large building blocks, which sometimes results in orphan sections that are inaccessible.

But why spawn enemies in them? Even texture them with anything else than some simple texture?

Because in cases where those building blocks are connected, you want enemies to spawn and the correct textures to appear. Sure, it's not an ideal solution, but for a game this large that was released in 1996, it's a minor quibble.

[ruthan]

Make sense to replicate these bugs? Its really strange solution. Other bugs where solved, so why not these..

[pango]

It's not a bug, it's not visible during normal gameplay and has negligible performance impact, if any.
Changing that would require to attach each wall inside border blocks to the side they're reachable from, to be able to filter them at load time; which is not, as far as I know, something stored in the blocks themselves.

[Interkarma]

It's not a bug, this is how Daggerfall's dungeons are constructed. These border blocks are a topological loopback which seal the exterior edges of dungeon from any direction. The connected sides are perfectly accessible play areas from the interior dungeon, which is why they have monster spawn markers. The disconnected sides are not visible during normal play and have no impact on the game.

Ruthan, when you get to peek behind the scenes like this in a video game, what you should experience is curiosity and wonder at how something was created. If you want to take a journey and improve your understanding of all this, here are a few resources to help you get started.

Daggerfall Modelling - view any dungeon layout and double click on block layout to load individual blocks. This should help see how the individual pieces all fit together. You will need XNA 3.1, so note the orange text at bottom of the linked page.
https://www.dfworkshop.net/downloads/da ... modelling/

MAPS.BSA file format - this is the gamedata DFU is building dungeons from. Blocks are laid out as a series of individual tiles in a grid. Here you will find these tiling elements do not have any orientation or regard to connecting side. They are simply laid out on a single plane with offset values.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall_Mod:MAPS.BSA

BLOCKS.BSA file format - this is how the various 3D models are assembled into each individual block. Unpack this to see how dungeon blocks are laid out as an homogenous set of models. Once assembled, these models form a container with fixed opening positions. The border blocks close off these opening positions from any direction, forming a sealed container.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall_Mod:BLOCKS.BSA

For extra credit, search around for Dungeon Geomorphs. This is the concept Daggerfalls dungeons are based on, except they operate in 3D space and have connection points at different elevations too. It's incredibly cool to see how this concept was adapted to create a 2D grid of 3D volumes and reusable dungeon parts.

[Ham]

The disconnected sides are not visible during normal play and have no impact on the game.

That's not entirely accurate, I believe the enemies in these spaces can still be heard, especially with acute hearing and in some cases can be close enough to cause resting to give you the enemies nearby popup. Generally not a big deal, and arguably part of the unsettling nature of daggerfalls dungeon delving and not knowing if you've killed everything or are safe at any turn.

[pango]

Right, that means you can't rest in most border modules, and if you try you take the risk of increasing "dungeon alert level" and get interrupted in your next sleep.
So it's not totally without consequence, it prevents most of border modules from being "safe places" by default.
A good reason for not fixing that non-bug.