Kaucukovnik wrote: ↑Wed Jan 16, 2019 4:21 pm
If replacing a bunch of town buildings is task bordering with impossible (an not planned to be improved on, that's why you suggested looking for a game/engine with different goals), what is the intended scope of modding? 1:1 asset replacers and minor cosmetic additions only? Just adding more of the same?
Interkarma, always an extremely pragmatic person from all that I've observed from him, is merely shooting the minimum possible boundary here. He is the kind of person to save people time if something goes wrong rather than let them run into mistakes themselves.
The fact is that Daggerfall Unity
can reach the point of a Total Conversion. We can replace town blocks, change buildings, change entire systems, and replace practically anything. As long as Unity can do it, Daggerfall Unity can do it. If we wanted to turn Daggerfall Unity into a merchant simulator where you barter the best prices in the morning and try to sell your stock by the afternoon, that's completely possible. A massive array of things are possible because it's Unity.
Now the important question is
who would do it. Interkarma has made abundantly clear that he is
excluding all possible deviations from the core game at this stage of development, at least until 1.0. Considering that he has invested 5 years of a productive life in a completely free game on top of every other responsibility he has (which he only hints at but are clearly not trivial), I have every reason to believe his post-1.0 engagement will be a fraction of what it is now. I do not blame him.
No one else has promised a massive, mod-based deviation from Daggerfall based on the requests of the community either. If after 1.0 (that's the key phrase here: we're setting up the scaffolding that can later be modded) someone else wanted to come in and write enormous mods spanning several GBs to satisfy community wishes, I don't see why that couldn't happen. Once 1.0 is finished we will have a game that can be modded drastically. DFU devs know very well the frustration of writing a paragraph of new code that invalidates 25 pages of previous code, which necessitates first having the game finished and then adding ambitious mods that will alter the internal organs of it.
So yes, what you ask is possible. No one will dispute it. I don't want anyone to believe Unity as an engine is somehow hobbled or deficient in its capabilities because it isn't. The question is who will invest the time into reinventing city blocks, which will alter the quest system and possibly invalidate many already-existing stores and residences, without mentioning the task of actually modeling and programming them into the game in a flawless way that ensures compatibility with DFU's streaming world.
If you find someone who is willing to come here after 1.0 and invest that time into it, then that would be a great idea for a mod. Many people would enjoy it, I believe.
To a far lesser degree is your concern about the paper doll, but still related. Who will invest the time to ensure that it fits properly onto the screen, that it is compatible with every one of Daggerfall's pieces of clothing and armor and weaponry, and other similar concerns? Find the dev and bring him/her here and there will be plenty to do.
I myself have had to wait about 18 months for certain quest actions to come into play so I can continue my work modding DFU, which still haven't all appeared. There are some that I would very much like to use but I can't. What I do in those cases is I store away the ideas in a separate file in the hopes that someday I will be able to implement them. If you want to implement your work immediately on the risk that no dev will volunteer to make your artwork a part of a DFU mod, you are free to do so. If you wish to wait until it's a sure guarantee that it can become reality, that is certainly a good idea.