A question of terrain

[jayhova]

I wanted to be clear what point I was trying to make and in particular what I was not saying.

The current terrain is the single largest departure from original Daggerfall in DFU. I think this is pretty self-evident. I am not saying that that in of itself is a good or bad thing. I am saying that it makes DFU depart from the original significantly. My personal opinion is that to a great extent it is a vast improvement over the original in look and feel. I think almost everyone would agree with that.

I felt very bad that Interkarma felt I was attacking the quality of his code or methodology (so much so that I felt unable to deal with the anxiety of even visiting DFWorkshop for many months). That was most certainly not my intention and again my opinion is that the terrain looks quite good on the whole. On the other hand, generaing terrain in this manner creates problems that simply did not exist in the original. Julian LeFey did not have to worry that coastal cities would wind up hundreds of feet above sea level. As it sits now this is the case. Again, this is a large departure from the original Daggerfall. This brings to mind the obvious question: Does it matter? To many, no, it doesn't.

Why then should anyone be concerned? If we look at how people play Daggerfall we can get a pretty good idea why most players might think it just does not matter. To the vast majority of these players, terrain exists just to occupy the space between locations. That being the case, all it needs to do is look pretty. If we look at TES games that came after Daggerfall they totally gave up on the notion that they should even attempt to generate a realistically sized world. Funny enough the exception to this was Todd Howard's first game Redguard. Redguard was on a landmass small enough that it could be handcrafted. The reason most people don't care about the terrain being so very different from ODF is that no one in their right mind traveled that terrain when they played the original game. I did. I was astounded that someone would actually place locations on an actual map that was realistic in scale. When Morrowind came out, this feature disappeared. I played Morrowind and liked it but was not impressed by the fact that Bethsoft was no longer trying to make large expansive worlds but were instead condensing down the world to the point where there was nowhere you could go where something was not happening.

I first noticed the departure of DFU from ODF when I was watching a video of someone walking to Gothway Gardens from Privateers Hold. The video showed pretty much what I remembered from ODF, walking through fog about a mile or so until I came to the town. In DFU the experience is very different. There's no longer a need to create distance limiting fog, but now the entire trip to Gothway Gardens is uphill. So my thought is why is the player experience so very different between ODF and DFU? The truth is that for 90%+ of players there is no difference because when they get out of Privateers Hold, they immediately fast travel to Gothway Garden or wherever.

So again, we're back to 'Why should it matter?'. First, in my eyes, the player experience should try to remain close to the original. If the player experience departs from the original it should be because the change represents a movement towards a more realistic simulation. Here we come to the real problem for me in particular. The current terrain generation certainly makes hills etc. that look more realistic. However, the way it is implemented creates situations that are less realistic. The situation is that IRL settlements generally always exist at or near the lowest level of the prevailing terrain. That is to say, if Gothway Gardens is a town near the coast it should be within tens of feet of sea level, not hundreds or more. The first, most basic, reason for this is a town must have a source of clean water and sanitation. It makes no sense to build a town where wells are a thousand feet or more above the water table. The second reason is that of food. Soil for farming exists primarily in valleys and in river basins. In addition, if the settlement is near the ocean it will likely be built near a river or stream. Again near sea level. Fish would again be brought in from the sea and it would make no sense to build a town high up so carts of that day's catch would be difficult to bring in. The third is commerce. Wagons are not good at climbing hills and neither are boats.

It has been suggested that none of this needs to be addressed in the base game because anyone can resample the terrain. While that is certainly true, there is a reasonable argument for good, consistent, and official baseline terrain. That reason is mods, in particular, a waterway and road mod. Roads need to be reasonably level. This is a necessity for the movement of goods in animal-drawn carts (less so for horse and foot paths). In order for a roadway to maintain a moderate climb rate, it must go around hills rather than over them. Without fixed terrain it is impossible to path roads as they would have to be redrawn were the terrain to change. The larger the town the higher the necessity for good roads and waterways. A mod that creates roads and waterways must use either the existing (official) terrain or generate its own. Having multiple terrain modifying mods seems, at the very least, problematic to me.

Again, I don't wish to be seen as a guy saying these things for no reason other than to criticize the work that has been done. From my point of view, I'd like to see a future DFU with farms and country homes and a real environment outside of the existing mapped locations, wagonloads of goods and patrols, and travelers moving up and down the roads. In order to even start, settlements need to be placed in a reasonable fashion. Since the locations of settlements in DFU is fixed, the elevation of those settlements should likewise remain fixed IMHO. You could do this by sampling the original elevation in Daggerfall and placing the cities, towns, etc. at those elevations. Another way would be to find the lowest elevation in the surrounding area and placing the town at that elevation and slowly decrease the suppression of variation as you get farther from the settlement. Since cities are flat, the ground elevation varies 0%. This variation should increase as you move away from the city. This would prevent the effect of having the ground rise or fall 45 degrees in a perfect line 10 feet from the city wall.

I understand that fixing terrain is a significant undertaking. I don't think fixing it should delay movement toward beta. But as I have said the change in city elevation is the single greatest departure from original Daggerfall and is unrealistic. Perhaps someone could create a mod to test the idea of suppressing elevation near cities and towns, especially when near the coast.

[jayhova]

Jayhova - You’ve been asking the same questions over and over again when you have been presented with MANY complete and reasonable answers from Actual Developers who are FAR MORE Familiar with Daggerfall Classic and Unity and it's History, Code and Development than You or I. They've even been in contact with the original Daggerfall developers.

So let's take Your basic questions one by one with the answers you've been given from the Real Experts.

Question 1:

Is correcting terrain to match classic on the roadmap?

Answer: NO. For future Daggerfall Unity development there will be NO plans to return the terrain back to how Classic Daggerfall rendered the terrain (read previous posts from Interkarma and Jay_H).

It was decided very early that DFU was going to use Daggerfall's unused heightmaps. I don't know of any reason why DFU would become a flat world like classic was. A mod could accomplish that, but I've only heard overwhelming praise for DFU's terrain from new players.

Question 2:

I'm kinda curious where the terrain data for classic came from if not from the heightmap. I'm also curious as to why the terrain was as it was in classic and why it was done that way.

Answer: Both Classic Daggerfall and DFUnity use the same Heightmap file called “WOODS.WLD” to render terrain (it’s in the Arena2 folder of the original DF). The game engine technology of the 1990s could not render the heightmap file as the ClassicDF developers wanted or intended. So all we get is the mostly flat terrain in Classic DF.

Both classic and DFU use the exact same heightmap data (WOODS.WLD). However, classic has a less sophisticated terrain engine and can only produce very basic angular shapes. Procedurally generating smooth transitions and finer details at runtime takes a lot of CPU time that most consumer PCs of the day simply did not possess.

Question 3:

In classic terrain is not the same as in DFU. It is not clear to me as to why this is the case. Somehow I doubt it was the fact that Julian LeFay was incapable of making the terrain match the heightmap. I could be wrong, that could be exactly the reason. However, it occurs to me that there is a possibility that certain terrain was purposely flattened.

Answer: WRONG. As explained before, terrain was NOT purposefully flattened and is NOT what the Classic DF developers wanted or intended. YES the Classic DF developers in the 90s were INCAPABLE producing and rendering the terrain they wanted from the Heightmap file they created.

Again as before, DFU uses the WOODS.WLD from Classic DF to render it's terrain to create all those Hills and Mountains we see in DFU. But since DFU is using the new up-to-date Unity engine, it can now properly render the terrain from the file as it was intended.
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I hope that helps explain it for you.
Daggerfall Unity is rendering the terrain pretty much exactly how the original Classic Daggerfall Developers intended!
Everyone but You seems to be satisfied with how terrain is rendered in DFU. Even developers and modders (who know code and DFU's capabilities better than you or I) on this forum are perfectly fine with DFU terrain as it is, particularly when comes down to adding in roads and river, etc.
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"Terrain Realism" is a differant argument entirely and can be discussed with modders. Remember we are also talking about a FANTASY world, so not all rules have to apply. Also Modding can now literally change any and every aspect of the terrain in DFU, so skies are the limit.

Good day

The 'why' is not really germane to the discussion. The fact that the terrain was as flat as it was, in places, meant he did not have to flatten/lower it for cities. Coastal cities many hundreds of feet above sea level might have been avoided by coincidence. He, however, did not have the cities on the coast far above sea level. It is possible that his code choices reflected a desire to avoid this outcome or perhaps not. I don't know. The problem was avoided either by accident or design. IRL population centers are in valleys, basins, plains, etc.

However the effect was achieved in the original, it is appropriate for these places to exist in low-lying areas where water is available. Especially since these places have wells, pumps, fountains, etc. indicating the presence of a nearby water table.