Tedious Travel 0.4.2 (2019-10-16)

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jedidia
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Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2018 9:49 am

Tedious Travel 0.4.2 (2019-10-16)

Post by jedidia »

Tedious Travel

A travel mod for daggerfall unity to make traveling more tedious. Because there's weirdoes like me who find that strangely immersive.

In explicit, the classic daggerfall "click-and-be-there" style of fast travel is removed from the game.
Instead, you'll actually be traversing daggerfall, with a convienient "autopilot" and adjustable time compression.

important: When you load your first save after activating the mod, it will export some data to the Mods/TediousData folder.
This might take a minute or two, during which the screen remains black and the game appears to have frozen, but is only necessary the first time around.


also important for 0.4.2: Will export data even if you had a prior version installed. DFUnity now provides a standard folder for mods to store persistent data in, so Tedious Travel now uses that folder.

Download TediousTravel 0.4.2
Source code on GitHub
Image


New in 0.4.2
Now interrupts on non-hostile quest encounters (thanks Pango for laying the groundwork).
Improved interruption reaction time on encounters.
Disables weather effects while fast traveling (thanks DFIronman for the inspiration).
Added two new dungeons as port towns on some prior unreachable island. Requires you have your own boat to get there, though.
Interrupts when player picks up a disease while traveling (untested!)
Merged changes from default travel map.
Uses proper data folder to export port town data (Data will be re-exported on first launch, even if exported by prior versions).

How to play

You can open the travel map normally and click on a destination you want to travel to.
Instead of ye olde travel options, you'll see an estimated travel time and a prompt whether to start travelling or not.
If you answer yes, you'll be taken back to the game, where your character starts heading in the right direction.

In the top you'll see a menu where you can adjust your time compression, interrupt your travel (stop, but do not clear the selected destination),
cancel (stop and clear the destination) or take you back to the map to see where you are. Pressing esc will do the same as the interrupt button.
You can at any time select a new destination in the map. If you exit the map without setting a new destination, any old destination you might have set will be preserved.

If you interrupted your travels, or got interrupted by enemies, and press the button for your travel map, you will first be asked if you want to resume travel to your current destination.
If you answer no, you will be taken to the map as usual, if you answer yes, you will immediately resume travel without going to the map first.

About travel duration

First off, the estimated travel duration will depend on your base speed when you open the map.
If you sit on a horse, the duration will be a lot less (usually about half) of what it would be if you opened the map on your feet.
If you are currently on performance enhancing drugs (aka potions) that will wear of in a few minutes, the estimated time will be highly misleading.
Self-overestimation is a common sideeffect of drug use, after all... ;)

The travel time for the first 24 hours will be shown as hours of *pure travel time* (no rest). Times above 24 hours will be shown in days, but assuming 8 hours of actual travel per day.
This is because...

Endurance matters!

Daggerfall has an endurance cost for just walking, and it also applies while riding. You don't really notice this during the game, but this mod brings it up rather painfully.
A low-level character with an endurance of 50 will in fact be able to walk just shy above 8 (in-game) hours straight before kissing the ground.
Plan your trip according to your abilities, and use ins and towns to rest.
Or just travel as the crow flies and rest in the open, where you'll more likely than not get chewed on by a grue.

Horses matter, too!

No, seriously. If you're starting a new character and plan on using this mod, a Horse should be at the absolute top of your list of things to buy before going anywhere much.



Fast Travel by ship

As of 0.2.0, Tedious Travel has a limited form of fast-travel. Fast-Travel by ship is now offered between port towns.

Port Towns

In case you didn't know, Daggerfall, while not having any visual representation for ports, does actually know which towns have a port.
I'm not sure what exactly that is used for other than letting you buy ships only in port towns.
A bt counterintuitively, there are actually many port towns inland. I'll just assume that those are mostly located at navigable rivers, since Daggerfall has absolutely
no representation or awareness of those. Also, there's not only towns having that feature. Some farmsteads and homes, even some dungeons, appear to have a port, though the DFUnity
sourcecode tells me that this flag is also used for some as of yet unknown purpose. So it's possible I'm counting some locations as having a port that were not intended to, but it's fine,
since that allowed me to put a little bit more complexity in (see Travel times and accessability).

Finding and traveling between port towns

There is a new filter button labeled "ports" on the *world* map. It will vanish as soon as you zoom into a location, because it takes up the space some locations need for the navigation buttons.
So if you want to see port towns, press that button in the world map, *then* zoom in to a desired location. The other filter buttons will vanish, as this is a global override.
You will see all ports on the map, regardless of their type, and no locations without a port, also regardless of their type. Those types still have some significant influence though, see
"Travel times and accessability".

In any case, when you click on a port town *when* the port filter is active, and *when* you are currently in a location with a port yourself, you will get a popup with a travel time and a fare.
If you click yes, and have the money, you will travel to the targeted port instantly (in-game time will still pass, of course). If you are not in a location with a port, you will get the normal
travel popup and continue your journey over land. If you are in a port town, and your destination is a port town, but the ports filter is not active, tedious travel will assume that you want
to travel there the standard, tedious way.

Travel times and accessability

Travel times depend on how "accessible" both your start and destination port are. Which right now is just estimated by their type and size.
This is to emulate the fact that from a small village, there might not be many ships available sailing to or from it. You might have to wait a while, or lay over and jump ship along the way.
So your journey will take longer, and be more expensive. Both start and destination modify the time. So your voyage will take longest when traveling from a hamlet to a hamlet, and fastest when traveling from city to city.

But not all types of ports even have regular traffic. Homes (except wealthy) and dungeons are not visited by merchant ships regularly, so you won't find any ships sailing for these ports or leaving them. For all intents and purposes, they are useless to you. That is, unless you have your own ship, with which you can sail wherever the winds can take you. Time penalties for inaccessible locations as well as fares
also don't apply in this case. I thought this was a nice opportunity to give ship owners a bit more advantages for their considerable investment.

Port accessibility is as follows (obviously, this only applies to locations of this type that *have* a port):

* Cities: Highly accessible, no time penalties.
* Inns: Quite accessible, only slight time penalties.
* Villages and temples: Reasonably accessible, medium time penalties.
* Hamlets and wealthy homes: Only sporadic traffic, high time penalties.
* Other homes, dungeons, cults: No regular shipping, only accessible with own ship.

Travel times are otherwise still calculated by the default travel time calculator. I'm not yet sure how smart this is, but it does lead to travel to and from locations far inland taking longer
than between locations at the coast, or at least appears to be, which seems reasonable. If you've ever navigated rivers, you know why (Yes, I have a few times, even with a sailing boat).

Additional port towns

For some weird reason, the main island in the Isle of Balfiera region doesn't have a single port town, as well as Betony and Mournoth, while all other (smaller) islands in the game have several.
I had to promote a port for each of these islands to a port, or the island would be inaccessible when using tedious travel. I'm mentioning this because these Towns (Blackhead, Zagoparia and Whitefort) are port towns only in the context of Tedious Travel.
Daggerfall doesn't know anything about the promotion, so you won't be able to buy a ship there, for example.

Known issues

* If your travel path takes you straight through another town, it can happen that you get stuck on an L-shaped building. Just interrupt your travel, dislocate yourself from the wall
(which by now you'll be attempting to climb), walk out of the town and resume your travel.
* The mod is not water-aware. If you run into a lake, you'll just keep going.
* High time acceleration can lead to outrunning encounters or falling off the edge of the world.

I'm keeping an additional list with known issues pending fixing on the issue tracker. Feel free to post bugs there directly or here.


Recent Changelog
0.4.1
Now interrupts when loading a savegame (Pango).
Fixed player look direction not being set properly on interrupt (Pango)
Fixed an issue with encounter avoidance chance calculation (Pango)

0.4.0
Fixed travel map buttons being all messed up when used with modded maps (Kaedius)
Now respects mod overrides for map images (Jedidia)
Endurance now updates correctly during travel (Kaedius)
Travel is now interrupted instead of canceled when pressing ESC (Kaedius)
Configurable setting to use certain skills to avoid encounters (Kaedius)
Last edited by jedidia on Wed Oct 16, 2019 10:04 pm, edited 14 times in total.

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Interkarma
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Re: Tedious Travel

Post by Interkarma »

This is really something. Well done getting your mod concept working a game never built for such a travel design, I know how challenging that must have been.

I'll test this out soon and move into Realeased Mods forum. Great work. :)

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Jay_H
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Re: Tedious Travel

Post by Jay_H »

Couldn't help but download this and give it a shot. I'll mention that my computer is one of the lowest-ends on the forum, and I handled 10x movement very capably.

Problem!

1. Start traveling towards anywhere.
2. Click the Map button during travel.
3. Exit out of the map. The travel menu is still on top, but I'm not moving and my horse isn't visible.
4. Click Cancel. I'm back in ordinary gameplay.
5. Attempt to travel again, and the mod has ceased working. I now use Daggerfall fast travel, not Tedious Travel.

Smaller issue:

Fatigue appears not to display in real time. I had to interrupt travel to see it change.

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King of Worms
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Re: Tedious Travel

Post by King of Worms »

This is very nice and interresting mod, great! I will check it out during the weekend and I will post back about the performance with time compression.
Thanks for this contribution!

jedidia
Posts: 201
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2018 9:49 am

Re: Tedious Travel

Post by jedidia »

1. Start traveling towards anywhere.
2. Click the Map button during travel.
3. Exit out of the map. The travel menu is still on top, but I'm not moving and my horse isn't visible.
4. Click Cancel. I'm back in ordinary gameplay.
5. Attempt to travel again, and the mod has ceased working. I now use Daggerfall fast travel, not Tedious Travel.
Thanks for the repro. I can confirm the bug, will fix.
Fatigue appears not to display in real time. I had to interrupt travel to see it change.
It does update from time to time even without interrupting, but yes, not in real time, I noticed that too. No idea why exactly.
Well done getting your mod concept working a game never built for such a travel design, I know how challenging that must have been.
Not as challenging as I'd expected, actually, you've built a decent API. Hacking turn-based combat into fallout 3 with nothing but Bethesdas crappy in-house scripting language was much, much harder back in the day! :lol:

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Hazelnut
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Re: Tedious Travel

Post by Hazelnut »

Looks great, good work.
See my mod code for examples of how to change various aspects of DFU: https://github.com/ajrb/dfunity-mods

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pango
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Re: Tedious Travel

Post by pango »

Hi jedidia,
This is a very intriguing concept, and the implementation is surprisingly usable already! Impressive.
My bug report: something fishy is happening with map search, sometimes I had to zoom the map region to get it working (otherwise the cursor would stay on my current location). I'm not exactly sure what's going on. And of course it would be perfect if search could trigger your new traveling mode, but I assume you ran in some current limitation that prevented that.
When traveling, on my computer at least, the view tends to go down, at a speed that varies from travel to travel. After a while or when you're looking straight down the camera level is reset, but this is weird. Is your brave adventurer dozing off on horseback or what? :lol:

I found dungeons while traveling (even stumbled upon Woodborne Hall, what a strange building when you're not expecting it!), did bad encounters (travel mode was interrupted automatically in this case, as it should), that was great. Handling of cities is basic, specially walled cities, as it is I feel that travel could just as well be interrupted when you encounter a city. And water is not handled specifically at all, but that's another can of worms I guess.

Yeah, the first thing I tried when playing Daggerfall Unity was to play without using fast travel. It's very tempting.
First, specially with a few mods, it's a beautiful place, and wandering around is nicely soothing, if very time consuming.
Also, serendipity! This is a way to find new dungeons, or simply to visit more shops, dialog with more NPCs... For example in few consecutive towns in Daggerfall region I could ask people about a claymore artifact. I didn't follow that trail, so I hope I didn't 'imagine that ;)
Some strange things can happen, my first quest received in Gothway Garden was some smugling quest to Deerwich, and soon enough I found Deerwych on my path! Containing a residence by the same name as my quest target, but nobody knew anything about the quest (and the residence was actually inhabited by a witch), I was totally confused.
But the main problem I faced is that most (side) quests are timed and randomly located, so you can't really accept quests as you go around...

Regards,
Pierre.
Mastodon: @pango@fosstodon.org
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
-- Charles Goodhart

jedidia
Posts: 201
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2018 9:49 am

Re: Tedious Travel

Post by jedidia »

something fishy is happening with map search, sometimes I had to zoom the map region to get it working (otherwise the cursor would stay on my current location). I'm not exactly sure what's going on.
Thanks, I'll have a look.
And of course it would be perfect if search could trigger your new traveling mode, but I assume you ran in some current limitation that prevented that.
No, that's easy as pi. I just simply forgot about the darn thing. :lol:
When traveling, on my computer at least, the view tends to go down, at a speed that varies from travel to travel.
Interesting, I had that happen once, and I assumed it was from a mouseclick. Didn't bother since I couldn't repro, but should be easily fixable by resetting pitch along with yaw at course updates.
And water is not handled specifically at all, but that's another can of worms I guess.
Oops, yes, that's not yet in. Guess I should mention that somewhere.

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Midknightprince
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Re: Tedious Travel

Post by Midknightprince »

Yes please fix the looking down thing, Ill try not to click down, but it was every time when I first played it.
That's the only thing, your guy, constantly wants to look down.
I took it up to 55, and I found an abandoned graveyard, and I dig the fact that you actually have to leave the city gates to do it, kind of some role play stuff right there, it's cool.
Check out my YouTube Channel!

jedidia
Posts: 201
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2018 9:49 am

Re: Tedious Travel

Post by jedidia »

I took it up to 55
Wow, I can't get anywhere near that. Do you mind telling me your specs, and a rough estimate at your framerate?

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