Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Talk about the mods you'd like to see in Daggerfall Unity. Give mod creators some ideas!
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carademono
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Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by carademono »

Ok, I'm sure I'm not the first one with this completely crazy mod idea... but how much work would it take to recreate all of Tamriel in the Daggerfall Unity engine? Is the game map hard-coded, or could it be expanded? What about people and town names? Could new textures, environments, and monster types be imported into the engine? I'm just curious how totally impractical this all would be.

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WhiskeyTangoWoodElf
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Joined: Thu Jul 16, 2020 3:16 pm

Re: Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by WhiskeyTangoWoodElf »

I was thinking about this idea the other day. I think it could be possible. With all the mods out there I'm not seeing any real limiters to the variety of content that could populate other provinces.

I personally think the only issue could be the map: can it be expanded? Can we add in new terrain space and rope in the procedural generation system continent-wide? Would we start hitting seriously weird generation events if we spread the game into that wide a space? I like these questions.

Once we get into full release I know the attempt for a continent-wide map. I am looking forward to roaming Darrgerfall lore accurate Skyrim/Morrowind/Cyradil.

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BadLuckBurt
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Re: Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by BadLuckBurt »

What procedural generation are you referring to? The game map and all of the locations (15.000+) are static data, you could alter DFU's source code to handle bigger maps but you would have to create new locations too for the rest of Tamriel. And if you don't want it to be a carbon copy of Daggerfall itself, you'll need new sprites, models, exteriors, interiors, quests, dialogue, textures, etc.

The only thing being generated is the finer detail of the terrain mesh and vegetation in the wilderness, the rest is all present in the game's files.

Something like this is 'technically possible' but in practice, I don't see it happening because of the amount of work involved. How long has Tamriel Rebuilt been in development and how many people have worked on that? Then the next question is, how big is the DFU modding community even compared to just those people, not even the TES modding community as a whole.

If you just want to walk about the landscapes of Tamriel (without extra content), that could probably be hacked together but you'd need a heightmap that fits Daggerfall's dimensions since they rotated the map to make it fit better. It still wouldn't be a high detail representation since each Daggerfall map pixel is 800x800 meters of generated terrain.
DFU on UESP: https://en.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=T ... fall_Unity
DFU Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity
My github repositories with mostly DFU related stuff: https://github.com/BadLuckBurt

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Jarlyjarljarl
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Re: Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by Jarlyjarljarl »

BadLuckBurt wrote: Mon Apr 19, 2021 9:51 pm What procedural generation are you referring to? The game map and all of the locations (15.000+) are static data, you could alter DFU's source code to handle bigger maps but you would have to create new locations too for the rest of Tamriel. And if you don't want it to be a carbon copy of Daggerfall itself, you'll need new sprites, models, exteriors, interiors, quests, dialogue, textures, etc.

The only thing being generated is the finer detail of the terrain mesh and vegetation in the wilderness, the rest is all present in the game's files.

Something like this is 'technically possible' but in practice, I don't see it happening because of the amount of work involved. How long has Tamriel Rebuilt been in development and how many people have worked on that? Then the next question is, how big is the DFU modding community even compared to just those people, not even the TES modding community as a whole.

If you just want to walk about the landscapes of Tamriel (without extra content), that could probably be hacked together but you'd need a heightmap that fits Daggerfall's dimensions since they rotated the map to make it fit better. It still wouldn't be a high detail representation since each Daggerfall map pixel is 800x800 meters of generated terrain.
I was under the impression that the world map size couldn't be changed? It would be possible right to recreate Tamriel on a map the size of Daggerfalls map though I believe? Which would still he massive compared to any other tes game.

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BadLuckBurt
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Re: Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by BadLuckBurt »

Jarlyjarljarl wrote: Tue Apr 20, 2021 6:25 am I was under the impression that the world map size couldn't be changed? It would be possible right to recreate Tamriel on a map the size of Daggerfalls map though I believe? Which would still he massive compared to any other tes game.
Not without changes to the code but since DFU source is available, you can make it do whatever you want. Technically, you could change the terrain rendering to the point where you could load Tamriel on a Daggerfall scale into the engine but it's more work than it's worth it.

As for recreating Tamriel on Daggerfall's map:

Daggerfall has a rectangular map (1000x500 pixels), as I said earlier, each map pixel is about 800x800 meters so the entire map is 800km x 400km. If you squeeze Tamriel itself into it, there's either going to be a lot of water or it's going to get stretched. That is ignoring the fact that it will feel even more like a theme-park sized landmass than the later TES games.
DFU on UESP: https://en.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=T ... fall_Unity
DFU Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity
My github repositories with mostly DFU related stuff: https://github.com/BadLuckBurt

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11th_defender
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Re: Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by 11th_defender »

Skyrim had the world size of 37.6 square kilometres. Daggerfall had 209,331 square kilometres. The illiac bay could be traversed in around a 5th of the time if all of tamriel was in the game. Considering the huge size of it normally, I don't think anyone would really notice(expect if they had mods like tedious travel). If it would take a 5th of the time, the illiac bay would be 41866.2 square kilometres. I'm wondering how exactly this would feel like a theme park.

edit: my math was somewhat incorrect. It's actually 161,600 kilometres, but my point still stands. No one playing the game would think of it as theme-park sized.

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BadLuckBurt
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Re: Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by BadLuckBurt »

11th_defender wrote: Sat Dec 25, 2021 11:25 pm Skyrim had the world size of 37.6 square kilometres. Daggerfall had 209,331 square kilometres. The illiac bay could be traversed in around a 5th of the time if all of tamriel was in the game. Considering the huge size of it normally, I don't think anyone would really notice(expect if they had mods like tedious travel). If it would take a 5th of the time, the illiac bay would be 41866.2 square kilometres. I'm wondering how exactly this would feel like a theme park.

edit: my math was somewhat incorrect. It's actually 161,600 kilometres, but my point still stands. No one playing the game would think of it as theme-park sized.
Scaled down

Squeezing Tamriel into the current Daggerfall map dimensions (1000x500) will feel like a themepark, look at this image: Image.

How many locations does Skyrim have in total? Daggerfall has around 50.000 for the entire Illiac Bay.

You can't compare Skyrim's world size to Daggerfall's, if you look at the image of Tamriel, Skyrim should be bigger than Daggerfall. Due to the aspect ratio of Tamriel, you will have a lot of water to the west and east if you shrunk it down to fit Daggerfall's map dimensions.

If you then consider that a location in Daggerfall is a map pixel, in theory you'd only have 500.000 locations available in the entire world of Tamriel and in practice, you would only be able to use about 300.000 because of water and other things and that's being generous :D. For comparison, Daggerfall itself has around 50.000 locations in the entire Iliac Bay. This includes dungeons etc.

As long as people use fast travel, they probably won't notice but if anyone were to decide to walk, it would be immediately noticeable. For example, Seyda Neen and Balmora would probably end up right next to each other.

Also, when you scale down a terrain, you will lose a lot of height in the process so there won't be any real mountains. For reference, in Arena, you get to see Red Mountain from other provinces because it's supposed to be that big. In Morrowind, Red Mountain is a hill that you can't even see from Solstheim, had they made Vvardenfell on the same scale as Daggerfall, Red Mountain would've been the huge mountain it's supposed to be.

True to scale

Expanding the map size in Daggerfall Unity beyond the 1000x500 dimensions would allow a true-to-scale Tamriel but you'd need a decent quality heightmap of Tamriel and add in the locations per province. It's all possible on a technical level, maybe moreso now that Carademono has made the GIS tool to populate the world with things. But even using procedural generation like Bethesda did when they made Daggerfall, it would still be a massive undertaking and I'm not even touching on creating new quests, models, etc.
DFU on UESP: https://en.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=T ... fall_Unity
DFU Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity
My github repositories with mostly DFU related stuff: https://github.com/BadLuckBurt

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daggerdude
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Re: Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by daggerdude »

If a person decided to simply remake the original arena map locations: the cities, the towns, and the villages from Arena (with any lore patching necessary) https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Maps, https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Arena:Places

If the game where made into just cities, towns, and villages (and currently generated places horseshoed to fit and simply renamed) theoretically the game could be shrunk down to renamed settlements with themes that exist in the game. 388 locations.
Then there's the wilderness problem - theres too much of it and no real justification for itself. I think the problem may be solved by shrinking wilderness blocks on the map to a more manageable size - really, 1/8 of the size would probably be plenty still. This would also of course mean that daggerfall and hammerfell would vastly shrink, their locations almost all stripped clean, ect.

I have no idea on how complicated the wilderness code would be to manipulate block sizes and such, but i do know that settlements come in blocks and were, at one time, randomly generated. theoretically, it could be done again and each random settlement can sit in a temperate zone, of which there seems to be three: mountain, temperate, and desert.
Assuming these locations were made and given climate information, it could be done, but would feel pretty random.

If all the textures in the game were evaluated and fit to a theme for each province, still using the random blocks, that still takes a lot of work. There has been work on villager sprites, but work would have to be done on character flats... Would any of that be worth it? no, and at that point, you really would almost need to make another game.

I could have sworn Interkarma said he wanted to work on his own game, i would be tickled pink if it were something with the same spirit as the elder scrolls 1 and 2, but, of course, with original content.

Who knows? now that modding is open, perhaps someone could tweak the engine to a new IP, or make an overhaul mod, or a mod like what you're saying.

11th_defender
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Re: Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by 11th_defender »

BadLuckBurt wrote: Sun Dec 26, 2021 9:43 am
11th_defender wrote: Sat Dec 25, 2021 11:25 pm Skyrim had the world size of 37.6 square kilometres. Daggerfall had 209,331 square kilometres. The illiac bay could be traversed in around a 5th of the time if all of tamriel was in the game. Considering the huge size of it normally, I don't think anyone would really notice(expect if they had mods like tedious travel). If it would take a 5th of the time, the illiac bay would be 41866.2 square kilometres. I'm wondering how exactly this would feel like a theme park.

edit: my math was somewhat incorrect. It's actually 161,600 kilometres, but my point still stands. No one playing the game would think of it as theme-park sized.
Scaled down

Squeezing Tamriel into the current Daggerfall map dimensions (1000x500) will feel like a themepark, look at this image: Image.

How many locations does Skyrim have in total? Daggerfall has around 50.000 for the entire Illiac Bay.

You can't compare Skyrim's world size to Daggerfall's, if you look at the image of Tamriel, Skyrim should be bigger than Daggerfall. Due to the aspect ratio of Tamriel, you will have a lot of water to the west and east if you shrunk it down to fit Daggerfall's map dimensions.

If you then consider that a location in Daggerfall is a map pixel, in theory you'd only have 500.000 locations available in the entire world of Tamriel and in practice, you would only be able to use about 300.000 because of water and other things and that's being generous :D. For comparison, Daggerfall itself has around 50.000 locations in the entire Iliac Bay. This includes dungeons etc.

As long as people use fast travel, they probably won't notice but if anyone were to decide to walk, it would be immediately noticeable. For example, Seyda Neen and Balmora would probably end up right next to each other.

Also, when you scale down a terrain, you will lose a lot of height in the process so there won't be any real mountains. For reference, in Arena, you get to see Red Mountain from other provinces because it's supposed to be that big. In Morrowind, Red Mountain is a hill that you can't even see from Solstheim, had they made Vvardenfell on the same scale as Daggerfall, Red Mountain would've been the huge mountain it's supposed to be.

True to scale

Expanding the map size in Daggerfall Unity beyond the 1000x500 dimensions would allow a true-to-scale Tamriel but you'd need a decent quality heightmap of Tamriel and add in the locations per province. It's all possible on a technical level, maybe moreso now that Carademono has made the GIS tool to populate the world with things. But even using procedural generation like Bethesda did when they made Daggerfall, it would still be a massive undertaking and I'm not even touching on creating new quests, models, etc.
You are correct, it would be much smaller than the og canon sizes. But calling it a theme park seems to be sort of an exaggeration. You would still have a game the size of daggerfall. I don't think it including all of tamriel would automatically make it feel very small. Sure, you are somewhat correct that anyone would notice how small it is by just walking around for a while, but it is nothing compared to the size the new bethesda games are.

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BadLuckBurt
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Re: Arena / Tamriel Rebuilt... in Daggerfall!

Post by BadLuckBurt »

11th_defender wrote: Sun Dec 26, 2021 4:22 pm You are correct, it would be much smaller than the og canon sizes. But calling it a theme park seems to be sort of an exaggeration. You would still have a game the size of daggerfall. I don't think it including all of tamriel would automatically make it feel very small. Sure, you are somewhat correct that anyone would notice how small it is by just walking around for a while, but it is nothing compared to the size the new bethesda games are.
The themepark feel is just my opinion so please, don't read too much into it :) The later games all feel like theme parks to me, mostly because they scale the world down so much so doing that to Tamriel would probably give me the same feeling when you take into account how big it's supposed to be.
DFU on UESP: https://en.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=T ... fall_Unity
DFU Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity
My github repositories with mostly DFU related stuff: https://github.com/BadLuckBurt

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