So in
2016 I made a account solely for the purpose of cheering ppl up for the work they do. Because it felt bad to me, that the achievements presented here were quite often welcomed with silence. And I thought if I show here that outside ppl care about the project, it could motivate the devs to just carry on and deliver the game
I was hoping that maybe one day, the opportunity to add some "monkey job" type of contribution would arise, like... press Enter 1000000 times and I would probably do it
Instead of that, Alexander Sig told me about the old buried Drop Box which was alive since DaggerXL forums. It was a place where the ancient modders shared the texture assets in a hope they will basically remaster Daggerfall one day. And he needed me to rename the files to the format DFU will accept.
So I started renaming the files manually, like a proper noob. One after another, the textures went thru my hands and the maniac idea started to materialize in my head. I renamed em all, placed em in the streaming assets and saw the game is upgraded with them. But the results were not stellar. Too many artists, too many bugs and inconsistencies...."So if these textures can be injected into the DFU... and I can view the originals in the Imaging... I can remake em on my own, in a better quality."
Only issue was, I did not know how to create a texture and use Photoshop. I had no idea about seamless tiling, I created a texture by cutting out a image and it looks bad in-game. So I learned how to make it tile seamlessly, use brightness, colors...
And that takes us to
2017 here, with my 1st re-texturing thread
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=632
That took one year, and it ended up with me completely reaching the limits of DFU and stalling any PC. Injecting the textures as a loose files has reached its limits.
And at the limits, progress is being made! This is what was going on always with this mod, pioneering my way forward, reaching the limits, and overcome them with the support of the core devs.
So at that time, compression of the loose files was created by Interkarma and you have that option in game settings till today. It also made me to better understand textures, VRAM, RAM, bit depth, size....
There was a side project, where I messed up with NPC sprites, this happened at the same time as textures, and the thread from
2017 can be find here:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=817 That quickly turned to my desire to REMASTER EVERYTHING!!!
I started to work on HUD, menus, game sprites, MOBS up-scaling, But also a better knowledge of all the files which are in the Daggerfall, so I started to pick the unused assets with better quality as a base etc... Again, LOTS of technical issues to overcome, hitting the PC limits... but at the end of 2018 some NPCs started to resemble the quality we have now at the end of 2020..
Somewhere around
2018 the XML files for texture properties started to be a thing. With that text file you could setup basic smoothness of the texture... and you could provide a normal map, which made the texture look semi 3d. With all this new data, the already overburdened engine/PC definitely hit its limits the hard way no matter what optimization I have utilized.
Around that time, Lacus told me I should move from loose files in the Unity editor. The thing I wanted to avoid so much. Another scary program. Strange empty windows which did nothing but frustrate me. He told me, I could create a materials from the loose textures. Showed me the awesome pictures of the 3d textures in the editor. That made me do it. And the transition to Unity also made me almost destroy my PC in rage. It was painful process.. in my desperation, where I wanted to end everything, including my life, the person called Quasifex came from heavens above and created a 1st set of materials, and a instruction video of the process..
Than the next chapter of Dream started, creating the physically based materials, separating the files in the DFMOD packages like you know them today, huge optimization processes in the background. This took at least a year, but realistically its a process which never stopped since than.
Around
2019 Ive realized, I have basically all graphical assets and that Im not too far away from COMPLETE REMASTER. I "just" needed to get the SOUNDS, MUSIC, CINEMATICS under the hood. And the dreaded and feared PAPERDOLL PROJECT.
Sound was relatively easy, because I got a permission to use Cleaned sound clips from Pango, and I had just to take it up to the level I wanted Dream to sound. Created lots of new sounds, tweaked the existing ones..
Cinematics were harder, but I managed to get the ppl using AI interested in it and the results came quickly. Pango than cleaned the sound of the vids, I created the new vids which were bad and done.
Music, relatively easy - I managed to get a permission to use Bytemixers score as a official DREAM music.
I packed it all in Unity, as I was already quite good at it.
Last step was paperdoll. That is a story... of pain and suffering. And I dont want to spend much time on it. Lets say, I never wanted to do it, because I knew its insane. More than "remastaring daggerfall alone" insane. More like "build a house with a pitchfork" insane, as I once said... but... somehow I got into it... and one eternity later its almost done in 2020/r3.. 16 000 files.