Will ever have fully 3D models???

[Seferoth]

I might be one of the few who really enjoys nearly everything about Daggerfall. I love how it looks and sounds, I love the dungeons(especially with smaller dungeon option), i love it's insanely large size, i love the messy reputation and politics systems, i love the factions and quests, i love weapons and the armor system, i love the stats and skills, even language skills(which i actually use), class creation is the best thing ever and i even enjoy combat more then in any other TES game. It might be because i 100% roleplay and use my imagination when playing(bit old school), my mind makes my adventures far more epic than what they actually are. My biggest problems were RNG based level up bonuses and the spawn system, but with No Dice and Unleveled Mobs mods these things were fixed perfectly for me. I can say without any doubt that Daggerfall Unity is the best game ever made for me, it has now surpassed Oblivion(which was my favorite game for 13 years!) a game that i have played more than 5500 hours. For me Daggerfall Unity pretty much is a dream come true, it was 2011 when i first played classic Daggerfall and thought to myself that if Daggerfall was ever remade and actually fixed it would be the best game ever...and here we are.

[Corsair]

Daggerfall's one of those games with a harsh learning curve at first, but once you push through it, it's very rewarding. Personally, I love the dungeons, it's an adventure trying to find everything and explore a "new" setup, some are really baffling and some are very interesting. DF's dungeon are very atmospheric, creepy, and unlike any other TES game, truly conveyed a sense of dread; a sense that "I might die in here. . ." However, as stated before, to get what you want is a massive, massive undertaking, and this is coming from someone who's been modding several TES games for several years now.

1. "Smaller Dungeons" is the best option available at the moment, but getting them smaller is gonna take more work, and to be honest most of the modders I've met, love Daggerfall as it is; big dungeons and all.
2. As for the writing, Daggerfall's quest system is nothing like Morrowind, and though I can imagine it might be doable, not everyone is as crafty at it as Jehuty (if only we could clone him. . .)
3. A lot of people in the DF modding community like the vanilla aesthetics, so finding someone who'll convert this massive game to 3D is an undertaking beyond belief - 2D sprites are easy to make; 3D involves skeletons, rigging, texturing, etc. All of this is what powers these models in later games. It's already hard enough to do it in Morrowind, so I dread to imagine rigging a body into Daggerfall.

Will we ever have full 3D models? I doubt it, and if so, it won't be for many, many years to come. Just look at Morrowind as an example, modders have been trying to extend animations and try to push the limits for over a decade, and just now are they reaching that feasibility. DFU is still new, still a small community. Me, personally, each day there's a new mod, I'm overjoyed to try it out. In the end, Daggerfall isn't all about graphics. . .

[BadLuckBurt]

If everyone who ever complained about Daggerfall needing to be fully 3D, made one model, we'd be done already. I doubt we'll ever see 3D NPCs etc. unless they can be generated automatically.

Big dungeons are NOT a problem, the layouts just need to make more sense. Pango is right, the latest version of DFU supports custom dungeon blocks and also lets you overwrite existing blocks so a complete layout overhaul of those things is a possibility. Question is, who's going to put in the work?

Redoing quests is possible too so your biggest gripes can be addressed.

Modding for DFU is just taking off so if you don't like what Daggerfall is at the moment, come back in a few years and try again.

[King of Worms]

I think that the ppl who cant stand the sprites cant enjoy DFU anyway... The fact that the npc changes to 3d would gain like 3 minutes to their attention span. My opinion. I might be wrong.

[Firebrand]

I think that the ppl who cant stand the sprites cant enjoy DFU anyway... The fact that the npc changes to 3d would gain like 3 minutes to their attention span. My opinion. I might be wrong.

You can of course enjoy DFU with sprites, but everytime I go back to my modded Oblivion (and I don't even mention Skyrim) my jaw drops because with hires Ai remade texture, remade grass and vegetation, Oblivion Character Overhaul and so on, it feels so real in comparison. It's like stepping in an another world.

Making more realistic graphics and sounds greatly improve immersion, and, to be honest, I'm not sure that I would have even played DFU so much, for example, without a mod like DREAM

[King of Worms]

I think that the ppl who cant stand the sprites cant enjoy DFU anyway... The fact that the npc changes to 3d would gain like 3 minutes to their attention span. My opinion. I might be wrong.

You can of course enjoy DFU with sprites, but everytime I go back to my modded Oblivion (and I don't even mention Skyrim) my jaw drops because with hires Ai remade texture, remade grass and vegetation, Oblivion Character Overhaul and so on, it feels so real in comparison. It's like stepping in an another world.

Making more realistic graphics and sounds greatly improve immersion, and, to be honest, I'm not sure that I would have even played DFU so much, for example, without a mod like DREAM

Im all for a better graphics, and I hope some parts of DFu gain more traction.

What I want to see is better scene lightning, the scheme it uses now it really bad for me, that super sharp light during the mid of the day for example is killing me. Id like to see much better weather systems with smoother transitions and particles and effects like air shimmering on the deserts and functional DOF at the edge of visibility, god rays, maybe indirect lightning...

I like the sprites honestly. To replace a nicely drawn NPC with a model will be hard in a sense that that model will have to be artisticaly quite nice to portrait the mood/atmosphere the flat npcs have. Generic 3d model will not cut it for ME at all. Same with 3d MOBs..

So in my personal opinion, the way to make the game look much better now lies in the postprocessing and lightning improvements and improved weather system. Plus adding new detail to the world, like the Improved Inns are doing. I visited few of them and it looks 10/10. Lets extend it to shops, residences, castles...

Than lets do the main quest dungeon exteriors and make em look awesome..

etc etc...

[Jeoshua]

If I were better at modeling I would be trying to recreate the original NPC model, low detailed and all, to give a base for creating full 3d models. It would be cool to see an original-like model rigged up, animated very crudely, and programmed to face only at quarter angles, so that it looked like the original with higher fidelity.

But I am not a modeler or an animator.

[SirDetSilent]

I think that the ppl who cant stand the sprites cant enjoy DFU anyway... The fact that the npc changes to 3d would gain like 3 minutes to their attention span. My opinion. I might be wrong.

You can of course enjoy DFU with sprites, but everytime I go back to my modded Oblivion (and I don't even mention Skyrim) my jaw drops because with hires Ai remade texture, remade grass and vegetation, Oblivion Character Overhaul and so on, it feels so real in comparison. It's like stepping in an another world.

Making more realistic graphics and sounds greatly improve immersion, and, to be honest, I'm not sure that I would have even played DFU so much, for example, without a mod like DREAM

Im all for a better graphics, and I hope some parts of DFu gain more traction.

What I want to see is better scene lightning, the scheme it uses now it really bad for me, that super sharp light during the mid of the day for example is killing me. Id like to see much better weather systems with smoother transitions and particles and effects like air shimmering on the deserts and functional DOF at the edge of visibility, god rays, maybe indirect lightning...

I like the sprites honestly. To replace a nicely drawn NPC with a model will be hard in a sense that that model will have to be artisticaly quite nice to portrait the mood/atmosphere the flat npcs have. Generic 3d model will not cut it for ME at all. Same with 3d MOBs..

So in my personal opinion, the way to make the game look much better now lies in the postprocessing and lightning improvements and improved weather system. Plus adding new detail to the world, like the Improved Inns are doing. I visited few of them and it looks 10/10. Lets extend it to shops, residences, castles...

Than lets do the main quest dungeon exteriors and make em look awesome..

etc etc...

But they really arent nicely drawn at all even with mods, they still are very low detail and break any immersion as they have extremely bad animations, i hesitate to really call them animations, the reality is a game is an illusion, the game world is an illusion and sprites that only face in 8 directions and all look the same take away from that illusion, same as the dungeons, even if we only had 7 3D models for NPC's it would be better than the sprites as atleast they would look like people.

Surely its possible to take all of the sprites and just replace them all together since there really that many different sprites.

[Classic1985]

If everybody can make at least one basic base model for others to work on then sure this game will have full 3d. for example: a few months ago with 2 weeks worth of time I created a base Argonian model for you all. check it out. making the 3d models aint too hard with basic blender knowledge, we just need coders to insert it into the game.

argonian model: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2923

plus this project thread: viewtopic.php?f=22&t=2738



Classic1985

[SirDetSilent]

I think that the ppl who cant stand the sprites cant enjoy DFU anyway... The fact that the npc changes to 3d would gain like 3 minutes to their attention span. My opinion. I might be wrong.

As i said the game world is an illusion, and you should try and make that illusion as believable as possible, Morrowind gives me issues even though i love it because NPC's just stay in the same place, thats not anything close to how humans are, we sleep we eat we move, we go to work, we go home, it makes the world feel alive, id like to maybe see some sort of radiant AI scripts for this at some point, you combine that with 3D models instead of sprites and you have a much more believable world, then layer on some stories, not every faction has to have them, then make the dungeons smaller and all of a sudden you have a game thats 50 times better and probably the greatest RPG ever.