Update from 2024/07/09: There is also now an optional chain mail fix/update, available separately here.
tl;dr (scroll down for a much more detailed description)
What is this? This is a patch that fixes some very annoying errors with how some clothes, armour and inventory items are displayed in unmodded (vanilla) DOS Daggerfall and in DFU (if used with the Steam version of DF, for example).
What does it do? Here's some examples of what gets fixed:
- dagfix-new-8.png (22.2 KiB) Viewed 9686 times
- dagfix-new-14.png (32.45 KiB) Viewed 9686 times
Detailed mod description
This is a complete revision/overhaul of my previous paperdoll and inventory fixes, aimed at staying as accurate as possible to the source material and minimizing edits to Bethesda art, unless absolutely necessary.
While the original release had attempted to fix all the various errors with paperdoll clothes, armour and inventory items, I had overlooked some things, and in some cases had taken a little too many liberties with the source material, which I tried to rectify this time.
With this release, the main objective is to fix the most obvious errors, like distorted colours on armour or missing parts of cloaks. Unlike previous releases, I also took care to make sure that in Childguard mode, which is the default in Daggerfall Unity, human male and female clothes always cover the underwear, i.e. no blue pixels are visible because of sloppily drawn hand shapes on Bethesda's part.
For those unfamiliar with the previous fixes, or with vanilla Daggerfall, here's a brief description of what the fix does (please see the readme file for a detailed description of what was modified in each file): in short, Bethesda left a lot of small errors in sprites for player character paperdoll clothes and armour. There's a total of eight sets of clothes, covering male and female versions of Argonian, Elf, Human and Khajiit, with about 100 different sprites for clothes (some representing different states of the same item, e.g. a cloak or a shirt worn in different ways), and eight sets of armour/shields. Each of these had at least one small error that needed to be corrected.
Looking at Daggerfall's development, it appears that originally all races were intended to have the same body shape for each sex, like in Arena (Arena also uses the paperdoll system, but you can't change your character's clothes, only armour and equipment). However, as development progressed, each race got an almost unique body shape for either sex. The original clothes were then adjusted by Bethesda artists to match these new shapes, with varying success. Also, certain errors were introduced during editing that affected palette swapping.
The very noticeable errors that I've addressed first and foremost are as follows:
- many human female armour pieces have areas that never palswap and remain very dark, regardless of the material; this error affected all types of greaves, some gauntlets and boots, and also Argonian female chain/plate boots as well
- female Elves used clothes and armour similar to that of Argonians, which does not match their body shape (which is identical to human female bodies)
- male Elves also used clothes similar to those of male Argonians, although this was less noticeable than with females
- female Argonians and Khajiit had parts of their cloaks missing
- male Argonians also had unintended "holes" in the back of their cloaks
- all cloaks with capes, and some other items have a similar error: the darkest colour remains the same regardless of the cloak's colour
- non-palswapping colours were used on some clothes items, resulting in areas of out-of-place bluish pixels regardless of the actual colour of an item
- some clothes erroneously used a special type of transparent pixel that shows the background image of the paperdoll; this was intended to only be used on cloak cape and helm "masks" to conceal a character's hair when a cape or helm is worn, but ended up in many unexpected places
There is one thing I need to note: while both male and female Argonians and Khajiit have a uniform hand shape (the "hole" through which the paperdoll's hand/arm is visible) on all clothes and armour items, this is not the case with human/elf male and female sets. In previous releases, I attempted to figure out the optimal hand shape for these characters too, but this time I decided to only make edits when it is absolutely necessary, e.g. when the Childguard mode underwear is partially visible because of the imperfect hand shape (one of the screenshots below shows an example).
Download: Alternate download link: df-dos-paperdoll-fix-12a.zip
Here are some more screenshot comparisons (left is vanilla Daggerfall, right is the current fix):
You should release it on Nexus as well. Also, making a GIF from the image comparison would help some blind ppl.. I used this page to do that, very simple 
