Daggerfall Workshop Forums

Sorry for not replying to this thred for a long time, since it is summer time here in Europe, I have little time for things like this (or rather not enough dedication).

However, I have been able to follow your testing, albeit only sketchily. From what I have gathered, the best approach might be to build the combat system from scratch, but we shall see once I (or someone else) will dive deeper into the data you have kindly provided. A big cudos to you for undergoing that laborous and monotonous work man.

Thank you, and don't worry about not following the thread more closely. I wouldn't have continued it if I had more recognition either. There are periods when I'm in the mood to test things, and I don't want to get burned out by testing something irrelevant to the current phase. If we're all working in the same direction, things'll go quickly.

Regarding your conclusion, I think that's accurate. If we just threw together about 4 variables (strength, weapon skill, armor rating, and dodging), we'd probably be able to get a generally accurate simulation of Daggerfall combat. Just the data we have now is sufficient for that, and we could fine-tune it with more experience.

I want to echo that I really appreciate the work done here. It's very likely that Daggerfall Unity's combat system will not end up 1:1 with classic Daggerfall. But thanks to everyone's efforts in this thread, it should be possible to get very close, and absolutely nail the feel.

I had said I'd be pausing my work in general on this thread, and that remains the case, but there's one simple thing I forgot to test while I was confused about the changing prices in shops. Using one shop and one item, I decided to test variations in Personality and Mercantile, selling a Daedric Saber to a shopkeeper. The findings were fairly enlightening and simple to understand, which I'm attaching to this post. Nothing in it is a surprise but it shows just how little Personality mattered in vanilla. Progression appears to be additive rather than multiplicative. I'm imagining a working formula for this would therefore be somewhat easy to create.

EDIT: One quick analysis shows that increasing from 1 to 10 Personality raises the price by 1.17%, from 10 to 50 by 6.98%, and from 50 to 100 by 6.98%. So the real intended range is from 10 to 100, though some minor data still points to values 1-9, which in vanilla would not be valid. The equivalents for Mercantile are 4.65%, 22.09%, and 25.59%, a much more natural progression, since mercantile can naturally be below 10.

EDIT 2: Also, while running my unarmored character, a human enemy at level 5 only did 1 damage to me with a successful hit. That'd be a very unusual number if they had a set range, so I'm thinking Daggerfall may use a system of dice rolls for melee damage values.

Good thread I've submitted some code for review that implements hand-to-hand damage and healing rate on resting using stats instead of the temporary values being used now. In the process I looked into these and found out some information you might want to add to the front page.

1. I think maximum hand-to-hand damage is (hand-to-hand skill / 5)(rounded down) + 1 at all skill levels, it does not change to +2 at 80 and above as written on the UESP. They seem to have written that because in the Daggerfall Chronicles, which show values up to skill 44 and then skip to skill 80 and above, the 80 and above are written as if 2 is being added. But in-game the hand-to-hand damage shown in the character sheet uses + 1 even at those higher values, and I consider that to be more reliable.

Hand-to-hand damage is unaffected by the strength modifier unlike weapon damage, and despite what the strength attribute description says. There also seems to be no difference in damage from the different hand-to-hand strikes.

2. Healing rate is correct as written on the first page, but you may want to rewrite it as Healing Rate = (((medical/10)+6)% of maximum health) + endurance modifier. Also there seems to be a bug in original Daggerfall's application of negative endurance modifiers here. It's written on the first page that the negative endurance modifier is limited to -4, but really what happens is that negative endurance modifiers are treated as (modifier + 1). This means a -1 modifier and a 0 modifier are the same, a -5 modifier acts like a -4 modifier, etc.

Wonderful! I've added them both in to the index. Thank you!

The first page says

Endurance modifier appears to be (modifier + 1)

but as far as I saw that's only for negative modifiers. Positive modifiers (or a 0 modifier) are the same as they show when you click on the Endurance attribute.

Sorry about that. I've changed it again. If you can think of a better way to explain it, I can paste it in. The challenge I have is being concise, since the post is so big it'll run into forum character limits soon.

Just wanted to bump this thread and say how useful the discussion here is for me now that I'm working through spells.

Thank you to everyone involved, and particularly Jay for starting it.

With all the reverse engineering Allofich has done, I believed a lot of what we did here would become obsolete. But I expected the spells to be a different story, and it sounds like that's the case