Chocolate Daggerfall?

[mikeprichard]

I'm not a dev, but I'm also confused about this topic. Are there specific aspects of DFU that need work to match vanilla? If so, the various other forums here can be used to report issues/discuss ideas. Otherwise, DFU is as close to "Chocolate Daggerfall" as will ever be possible (i.e. vanilla Daggerfall with bugfixes and updated for modern systems, with the added benefit of many (mostly) optional QOL features and extensive modding support), as was always its intent.

[afritz1]

I think it's more of a low-level discrepancy. Some people appreciate the novelty of using the original engine's systems for rendering, UI, physics, and so on, as quirky as those features may be. Having gameplay- and application-level parity is not interesting enough. Maybe it's Unity with its own quirks that sets it apart enough from what some players are looking for.

From my understanding of "Chocolate", it's the exact same systems as the original engine, with clean-ups and non-functional revisions of game code. So the ideal Chocolate Daggerfall would have to be compiled from Daggerfall's source code (plus any small fixes or whatever).

Just throwing ideas out here for what some people might be wanting from DF Unity:
- 1-to-1 camera motion, jumping, and bob
- 256-color paletted renderer
- 4:3 aspect ratio
- Glitchy behavior of actor motion (I'm imagining giant bats changing their facing several times a second and generally being "weird". This also applies to townspeople)
- Limits on looking all the way up or down
- Quirks of UI elements, like tile artifacts around pop-up edges or the cursor, etc. (things you wouldn't want in a remake like DF Unity)

For some people, these things are what make Daggerfall what it is. Even then, I don't know if it's a matter of whack-a-mole because having modern improvements at all may not be what someone wants. You can't make everyone happy. :shrug:

[mikeprichard]

Ah, I think I see now. In that case, as the Daggerfall source code is apparently lost to time and/or was incinerated in Todd Howard's backyard, the goal of returning twerking giant bats to DFU will need to be achieved through mods.

[Hazelnut]

Yep that makes more sense, and I think as Mike points out, there's little chance of a Choccy DF. Best option is DOSBox and the original game.

[dashyr89]

Ah, I think I see now. In that case, as the Daggerfall source code is apparently lost to time and/or was incinerated in Todd Howard's backyard, the goal of returning twerking giant bats to DFU will need to be achieved through mods.

Mistakes have been made.

Jokes aside. Daggerfallsetup is most likely the closest thing to a "chocolate daggerfall" youll ever get.

[MrFlibble]

I gotta say guys, I really don't get this topic at all? DFU is configurable to be almost identical (as far as we have been able to achieve) to classic. What is missing exactly?

Well, I downloaded the latest build, and out of the box, it plays markedly different from simply being Daggerfall with a better renderer and high resolution/mod support. The way the player moves (and sometimes the monsters too, strafing rats look odd), the combat, even how the first dungeon spawns monsters while you rest is not the same as it would be in vanilla DF. It's very evidently not a 1:1 implementation of the original gameplay.

I understand that DFU is still in development, and that it is not based on the source code, and further I do understand that to make the game more accessible, the default configuration will probably be always aimed at quality of life improvements rather than keeping the classic look and feel. I love the stuff like shadows and the enhanced soundfont for MIDI music and all, but for now it seems that DFU remains a remake that is not as accurate as a result of reverse engineering from top to bottom would be (in the absence of available source code).

Don't get me wrong, a remake is a good thing, especially if it eventually allows to add mods and enhance the game with high-resolution art etc. But it is not the same as playing the original game, at least to me. (by "the original game", I don't mean the original DOS binary, but the entirety of mechanics, behaviours and interactive elements as they are presented and work in the original game)

For example, you might now that the source code for Blood (a Build engine game), while not lost, was never made available to public, hence the only way to play it for a long time was DOSBox (and Blood is very resource intensive if you want to play at high resolutions, which is supported by the DOS binary), and a fan remake based on the eDuke32 source port called BloodCM. From what I can tell, the latter was intensely disliked (to say the least) by dedicated Blood fans for being inaccurate to the original game while at the same time being more accessible to new gamers as it runs natively in Windows. Thankfully its author later reverse-engineered the DOS binary, which, along with the leaked source for Blood alpha, allowed to create an accurate source port of the game (and latter another developer made a different port based on eDuke32 which is also accurate, and without resorting to leaked materials).

When I started this thread I was kind of hoping that reverse engineering had already produced an accurate recreation of all game mechanics and behaviours (akin to what luciusDXL claimed before the project stalled), but apparently this is not the case so far. I hope that future releases will get DFU closer to the original than it is now.

I appreciate all the effort that goes into DFU, both on the coders' side and the modders' side with high-res graphics and high-quality sounds and whatnot. There's already a lot of amazing stuff done and more is on the horizon, which is very exciting. But in the absence of a source port or other ways of playing the game except by the way of emulation, I do believe that a recreation of all the vanilla behaviours is highly desirable.

Ideally, everything the player does (except falling into the void and other bugs), and how the game reacts to it, must be exactly the same as in the DOS version. E.g., in Privateer's Hold, the first rat does not get stuck in the corner; the bat near the archer room does not hear you and fly down the stairs and down the corridor to attack you elsewhere; you can hit the archer across the table without jumping over it (and you can't jump over it like you do in DFU now, unless you're an Acrobat); the skeleton warrior does not rush at you from the top of the stairs in the throne room; and the game does not spawn random enemies while you rest anywhere in Privateer's Hold. And yes, that also includes the aspect ratio correction, at least as a configurable option (haven't found one).

Apologies if this came out too lengthy.

[Ralzar]

Some of the issues you mention I believe are still being tweaked now that the game is feature complete. For example the jumping and climbing mechanic.
And notice that when you start up DFU it has a bunch of QoL option that are by default activated, like improved AI. You might get an experience closer tothe original if you deactivate some, or all, of those.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around why you would want this though. Personally I would have preferred it if DFU actually took a long hard look at the game and changed a BUNCH of stuff for the better. Oh well, I guess that's what modding is for. But Daggerfall was always a glorious disaster of a game that I played as much for the appreciation of what it tried to be as what it actually manged to be.

[Ferital]

When I started this thread I was kind of hoping that reverse engineering had already produced an accurate recreation of all game mechanics and behaviours (akin to what luciusDXL claimed before the project stalled), but apparently this is not the case so far. I hope that future releases will get DFU closer to the original than it is now.

You're very harsh. A good amount of classic Daggerfall original behavior was reverse-engineered and is used in DFU codebase. Of course, it is not perfectly accurate, but we're working on it. After all, DFU is only in alpha stage while already entirely playable and is being polished nearly every day (there are 24 PR on GitHub right now). As an example of these improvements, until recently, we didn't know the exact formula behind the Masque of Clavicus, so we used an approximate one. I finally found the original because I reverse engineered the entire talk system, and by chance the formula was located inside one of the talk functions.

So of course, you can still stumble on mechanics which don't match classic exactly, but not as many as you might think (R.D./Allofich did a huge job regarding this, thanks to him you can even load classic saves in DFU). Furthermore, if someone thinks there is an issue with a particular behavior, he usually opens a thread on this forum or an issue on GitHub. Of course, rendering and AI will never be the same, but they are so much more polished in general that this cannot really be considered an issue. After all, it is perfectly normal for a Giant Bat or a Skeleton to rush at your character once they hear or see him. Classic enemies were clearly too static. Regarding rat strafing, you could open a thread or an issue like I said, it will certainly be corrected. On jumping, this was already discussed a lot there and Interkarma is planning to work on it.

Finally, I would suggest that you play a little more with DFU, it is a big improvement over the original, while still being very accurate. And this is from a huge and long-time classic Daggerfall fan.

[MrFlibble]

You're very harsh.

My apologies then, I did not mean my inquiries to be offensive or sound like unjust criticism.

I had only sporadically followed DFUs development and it was not clear to me to what extent the reverse-engineered code was implemented. But in the posts above I reported what I observed when playing the current build.

Also my previous post was mostly in response to the apparent confusion about what I meant by a "Chocolate" version for a game with no preserved original source code.

Finally, I would suggest that you play a little more with DFU, it is a big improvement over the original, while still being very accurate. And this is from a huge and long-time classic Daggerfall fan.

I would never contest the improvements made in DFU. In fact, I'm perfectly fine with inaccuracies because I understand how hard it is to recreate any game accurately, especially such a complex one as Daggerfall. And please believe me, this thread was never intended as an attack on the project.

It's just that since reverse engineering was resorted to during development, I probably had too high expectations because recently, there has been a notable increase in successful reverse-engineering of DOS games that allowed to create 1:1 "source port" accurate implementations of games, including openDUNE, OpenFodder, SDLPoP, Omnispeak, the aforementioned Blood and Redneck Rampage ports, the numerous binary executable reconstruction projects. I know maybe it's a quirk of mine but I feel it's always good to run a game natively and without emulators (I have no problem setting up DOSBox and running Daggerfall from there), so I just wanted to know how far the reverse engineering went, and if it would be possible to have a "conservative engine recreation" (that is, minimal innovation) for the game. Ideally, in my opinion, this hypothetical Choco version would coexist and be complimentary to the more mod- and advanced feature-oriented DFU.

In fact, I hope that one day DFU gets its own complete "canonic" set of high-res graphics etc. and becomes a true HD remake of the game. It's not hard to imagine this coming true in foreseeable future. And if you guys at the same time succeed in perfectly recreating the original mechanics as closely as running it on Unity permits, that, of course, will be an excellent improvement as well and I wish you best of luck with it.

Again, I apologise if some of my statements came across as harsh, it was not at all the intention!

My questions are hereby answered and if a mod/admin thinks it's appropriate the thread can be closed I guess.

[Jay_H]

Only because you requested it. I don't have any issue with the thread