Project N - a.k.a. what Daggerfall totally *doesn’t* need? Ok, I’ll do exactly that!

[jayhova]

I could certainly see having several game modes out of the box

• Standard
• Survival
• Ironman
• Custom

each with a greater level of difficulty. Traveling to islands etc. requires a travel system or magic. If you wanted to travel to the other side of the map that might literally take weeks of real time.

[C0rg1]

In regards to roads and fast travel:
In another thread about fast travel systems I made this suggestion.
Morrowind had 2 fast travel systems that did not overlap. A ship system and a land system.
Why not simulate this with the following concept.
You would have three separate fast travel systems. One for local cities and one the capital cities and one for waterways.
The Local city network would not cross kingdom boundaries.
The local city network does not connect smaller locals such as farms, manors, towns, hamlets, villages, dungeons, etc.
The Capital city network only connects the capitals of each kingdom.
An option is the capital city network also includes the LARGEST cities as well.
Since many capital cities are not in the center of their kingdoms it might be faster to take a local city network to the border then hop the border into the neighboring kingdom and use their local city network to get to your intended destination.
It's just an idea but it does not required laying down a road network like "basic roads" does.
It allows for fast travel but a fair amount of exploration as well without breaking immersion.
Just my two coppers.

[Jagget]

Morrowind has 4 fast travel systems.

Mages Guild, Silt Strider, Boats, Propylon Indices

[C0rg1]

My bad about the number of travel systems within Morrowind. I've never played that one. Just Daggerfall and Oblivion. I still believe that the concept I proposed could work as a method of balancing fast travel and free exploration. Especially at such an enormous scale.

[GXL225]

Everyone tries to equal the travel system that is in TES III, but for some reason they don't take into account the fact that this is the only game in the series where there is no fast travel and the fact that there is a very small map itself.

Personally, I'm one of those who would prefer a vanilla DF with an expanded Tamriel.

[jayhova]

Morrowind has 4 fast travel systems.

Mages Guild, Silt Strider, Boats, Propylon Indices

Perhaps you could have fast travel between certain points like in Morrowind. There are specific cities in Daggerfall from which you can travel by ship. There aren't any docks in the game but this could be fixed.

[CrashmanTheKook]

I created an account so I could give some feedback on this project. Arneb, I think you have some great ideas & this project has a lot of potential to be something special. That said, I think doing away with fast travel is a huge mistake. I understand the appeal of going out exploring & getting lost in the world, but what if the random town a player's character starts in doesn't have a mage's guild? What if the closest dungeon is 8 real-life hours away & there isn't anything interesting along the way? That's a real risk with procedurally generated content, especially with something on this scale. What if a player starts in Morrowind, has their fun but then wants to see Black Marsh or Cyrodiil, but they did a quest that made the mage's guild hate them? Daggerfall is actually a little less than the size of Great Britain (not the full British Isles as some people think) and it still needs fast travel to be playable. A whole continent has a lot of space to try to fill with content.

[Arneb]

I could certainly see having several game modes out of the box

• Standard
• Survival
• Ironman
• Custom

each with a greater level of difficulty. Traveling to islands etc. requires a travel system or magic. If you wanted to travel to the other side of the map that might literally take weeks of real time.

That would certainly be great, but I’m afraid I lack the time/manpower to work on so many aspects of the project at the same time. I’m almost finished with roads generation, and that alone took something like three months. Different play modes will have to wait for better, less busy times.

In regards to roads and fast travel:
In another thread about fast travel systems I made this suggestion.
Morrowind had 2 fast travel systems that did not overlap. A ship system and a land system.
Why not simulate this with the following concept.
You would have three separate fast travel systems. One for local cities and one the capital cities and one for waterways.
The Local city network would not cross kingdom boundaries.
The local city network does not connect smaller locals such as farms, manors, towns, hamlets, villages, dungeons, etc.
The Capital city network only connects the capitals of each kingdom.
An option is the capital city network also includes the LARGEST cities as well.
Since many capital cities are not in the center of their kingdoms it might be faster to take a local city network to the border then hop the border into the neighboring kingdom and use their local city network to get to your intended destination.
It's just an idea but it does not required laying down a road network like "basic roads" does.
It allows for fast travel but a fair amount of exploration as well without breaking immersion.
Just my two coppers.

I created an account so I could give some feedback on this project. Arneb, I think you have some great ideas & this project has a lot of potential to be something special. That said, I think doing away with fast travel is a huge mistake. I understand the appeal of going out exploring & getting lost in the world, but what if the random town a player's character starts in doesn't have a mage's guild? What if the closest dungeon is 8 real-life hours away & there isn't anything interesting along the way? That's a real risk with procedurally generated content, especially with something on this scale. What if a player starts in Morrowind, has their fun but then wants to see Black Marsh or Cyrodiil, but they did a quest that made the mage's guild hate them? Daggerfall is actually a little less than the size of Great Britain (not the full British Isles as some people think) and it still needs fast travel to be playable. A whole continent has a lot of space to try to fill with content.

I think I pointed to some kind of fast travel tied to local services when I wrote about removing fast travel from the game, and that’s still how I think to bring the project onward. Payed fast travel will still be there in different shapes, and not only as teleportation provided by the Mage Guild, therefore will be open to anyone willing and able to pay for it.
What I feel necessary to remove is the totally free form fast travel present in vanilla, I feel it ruins the sense of danger and risk travelling to some lost ruin in the wilderness should entail.
On top of that, what’s the point of having a map three times the size of Europe if the player will just “teleport” from one location to the next?

[Arneb]

The thread you linked to was started by Carademono, one of the brilliant minds behind World of Daggerfall, but back at the time he wasn't exactly conscious of how much work would that actually need, to the point that for a couple of years that thread had become a sort of meme in the DFU community. Another great modder and coder, BadLuckBurt, posts various messages in which he describes the various difficulties of implementing the whole Tamriel in the Daggerfall engine. Let's just say that, while developing the bare skeleton of what I did up to this point I encountered many more problems than what was already foreseen.

All that to say that I don't think that thread can be used as a reference to what one could expect from this project. Back when I started all this I wasn't sure either if I would have ever developed anything functional.

After around a year and thousands of lines of code, I think it's quite normal to develop new implementation ideas. And as every implementation choice, not everyone will like it. But I still think this is the way to go: having a huge map is pretty useless if everything the player will do is teleporting from one location to the other.

If I'm not misunderstanding, as I believe you've stated recently, the aim of your project is not just a 'TES 2 Daggerfall Expanded' by simply adding Tamriel landmass in the game, as assumed (led to believe?) in the beginning. The goal is essentially more to be a near completely different, custom Elder Scrolls game, based on DF files and DFU engine. Correct me if wrong.

Well, I wouldn't be that extreme, since I wouldn't be able to change that much. The whole project wouldn't exist if DFU wasn't here, since I don't have Interkarma skills. But sure, I'm gonna change what I think doesn't work well in a "Tamriel-in-DFU" version of the game. You don't like it? You have two ways to proceed: convince me to make it differently; or, grab the latest ProjectN repository on GitHub and change what you don't like. This is still an open source project, after all.

Edit: I replied to a post that I can't see anymore, but I have a small excerpt quoted in this answer. Whatever, I think this clarification still stands.

[jayhova]

I could certainly see having several game modes out of the box

• Standard
• Survival
• Ironman
• Custom

each with a greater level of difficulty. Traveling to islands etc. requires a travel system or magic. If you wanted to travel to the other side of the map that might literally take weeks of real time.

That would certainly be great, but I’m afraid I lack the time/manpower to work on so many aspects of the project at the same time. I’m almost finished with roads generation, and that alone took something like three months. Different play modes will have to wait for better, less busy times.

It should not be such a great difficulty. All of this already exists. Standard is the game as it sits. Survival would be like you are talking. Ironman would be like the current Ironman mod that makes in-game death permanent. Custom would be some mode that turns on or off some combination of these or future features i.g. 10x travel along roads etc.