Daggerfall Workshop Forums

That's okay I just mean in the future, an open-source repository would be great, so it can always be continued as it seems like a major undertaking

One of the things that makes TR so slow (20+ years so far) is the choice to go all hand-built. A DFU Tamriel mod would use much of the same creative devices used to create the current game. Most of this is based around 90s technology. As things like roads, rivers, etc. are improved the generated content will improve. We have a rough idea of where mountains and lakes and rivers and cities are. We just need to fill in details. Daggerfall did this for the most part.

Daggerfall only included the end result of the procedural generation (not the algorithms). The source code on the development systems was lost years ago. DFU can read the end result in the distributed game files, but you can't use it to input a new seed, press a button and have a new world map filled with new locations. Therefore, any effort to use procedural generation for additional provinces would have to be written from scratch. It took Julian's team about two years working full-time on a commercial product to create the technology in the first place.

Yep, it took them 2 years to create the whole game: graphics, system, everything in C++ (or was it C?).

We have everything they already made, and we have Unity, but more important than everything else, we have DFU.

Am I saying that's gonna be easy and quick? No, especially because I'm not InterKarma, and I'm no InterKarma either.
Do I think that, to make what I'm trying to, will take the same skill and proficiency that would be required to make a game from scratch in the '90s? That I don't believe either. But I could be very wrong.

I agree with you, except that they didn't create the whole game: it was built upon XnGine, which was developed by another team for Terminator: Future Shock.

My replies were intended to address other forum users who seem to overestimate the tools that are currently available, but I could be misinterpreting here. I'm not trying to discourage you. I just want you to be prepared for what you're getting into, because I've been burned in the past for taking on projects that were more involved than I anticipated. As long as you know what tools you have and a solid plan, I'm sure that you can do this.

It’s unknown how exactly the Daggerfall team generated the world and dungeons. How did they generate the landmass and towns? Dungeons most likely used seeds but what about the game’s landmass? And although Daggerfall has a realistic scale, how did the team achieve it? Like how did they have towns have a realistic distance from one another? It’s not like the devs aren’t around anymore, someone could ask Julian.

Another thing is I’m pretty sure Daggerfall was supposed to have different dungeon types, like Arena. In Daggerfall all dungeons use the same blocks and textures even though there are supposed to be different types like mines and ruined castles, like in Arena. Wonder why Daggerfall’s dungeons ended to the way they ended up. For example Daggerfall dungeons technically have floors that constantly interconnect. On paper this would be the natural progression of Arena’s dungeons as unlike Arena you would be able to travel to another floor more easily but in Daggerfall it is completely messy and nonsensical in how each floor has zero structure. So on paper Daggerfall’s dungeons having multiple paths to another floor instead of one would make the dungeons more open and even easier to get to the floor you’d need to get to but in practice the dungeons ended up as disjointed messes. Again, Julian might remember

Consider that the playable area of Daggerfall is immense to the size found in other Elder Scrolls games.

If Daggerfall is around 161,000km2 and Cyrodil about 41km2, Skyrim at 37km2, and Morrowind at 16km2 I have a question.

Why not recreate the other games landmass to scale as an Island/s far out into the mouth of the bay. Shrouded by fog and unreachable except through a specific travel quest?

The idea is that you get to have the other games landmass available to mess around with. Slam down some Daggerfall style villages, throw in some must have dungeons and Voila!

It's just an idea and not even a complete one.
Tell me what you guys think?

I'll merge this with the other topic about recreating Tamriel in Unity

It seems pretty clear that what we will be seeing in the near future is AI-assisted terrain generation. The AI can correlate all sorts of data to create a very high level of verisimilitude that does not exist in current models.

jayhova wrote: ↑Wed Feb 01, 2023 2:40 pm It seems pretty clear that what we will be seeing in the near future is AI-assisted terrain generation. The AI can correlate all sorts of data to create a very high level of verisimilitude that does not exist in current models.

AI is the future of open-world games.