I dunno, from my time doing architectural visualisations we were told to use 50 degrees to mimic the human eye.
Some programs default the FoV to 35 degrees, imitating a common camera lens.
Occasionally, depending on the 3d i was working on, we'd go as much as 70+, but that was for really wide open spaces where we had to fit in loads of stuff on the periphery.

The FOV I'm using was tweaked to match Daggerfall. It may not be perfect, since I eyeballed it, but as you can see from Sur_Warlock's comparison its pretty close. It could possibly be tweaked further though, its not hard to change.

It was always traditionally 90 in most 3D games. In more recent times things like the Source engine have been defaulting to 75, although I always preferred 90 even if it was slightly less accurate.

I would think in a dark corridor, on a screen, things would look too near at 50 (especially when textures are low-quality), and would probably take too much movement of the mouse to turn around. Although I understand why 50 is used in visualisations, I'm not sure how well a screen can mimic the complexities of sight :hubbahubba: ... or something.

Certainly for many games, 75 is normal as far as I'm aware. Makes it easier to twitch-move and keep track of where you are I imagine (and even easier at 90, though things can start to look distorted). Also in most games this is really simple to change, so shouldn't be a huge issue.

I really like what you're doing. I don't mean to be critical. Just pointing something out that caught my eye.

All I can say is WOW! I enjoy Morrowind and Oblivion, but neither has ever caught my attention as much as Daggerfall. I am going to be watching this thread with eager anticipation.


Keep up the fantastic (and unbelievably fast!!) work!
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Your newest blog entry looks fantastic, can?t wait for the demo release! :thumbsup:

Thank you everyone. I can't wait until I can release the demo as well, its always exciting getting a project like this going. Some people will have issues of course, but its exciting nonetheless.

This looks like it's coming right along, good work

This project - is a dream!!! But I have a question. Is it possible to rework the models and replace them with a bit richer in polygons, smoother and detailed? If yes, it would be amazing! And it would be honor for me to work on models for Daggerfall.

Regardless of the weird resolution of the blog images, something is a bit different with the HUD scaling for sure. Maybe it's just because you have the game at a 4:3 aspect compared with the 8:5 of the original, but the HUD looks compressed horizontally in your screens (slightly) compared with the game in DOSbox.

How do you know how the enemies should move? Or are they stupid enough to make it easy to observe? They do seem pretty stupid, even compared with other games the same age.

Daggerfall enemies seem to simply move forward towards the player, no matter what it takes (notice how easily they get stuck in doorways if they aren't within a 22.5 degree margin of the opening). One thing I find interesting is how the enemies have sideways-facing, back-facing, and back diagonal-facing frames even though you rarely see them. They don't have to really turn. They just swivel around and maintain their front-facing frame.

Frankly when it comes down to movement, even DOOM's enemies were smarter. Well, or at least more fun to fight.


I remarked on that in an earlier post. The ones in the article are squished a bit to fit right with the blog's formatting. You're right though, even the "screenshots" page has them at a 4:3 aspect ratio which doesn't work right.

You ought to pursue some of the http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Aspect_ratio that most DOOM source ports do in order to keep a proper aspect ratio, even when running at more modern resolutions.

This is amazing, and I'm very excited about it. I hope you finish it soon; I just downloaded Daggerfall, and I'd rather play it with your engine, instead of using DOSBox.

By the way, will you include cheats? :hehe: When it comes to old, super-hard games with a lot of fights, I tend to use cheats because I'm really not a fighter in games

Oh, and it would be really, really great if texture replacers were possible for this engine... but I guess it's not that easy, since the files are still the same old ones, and nobody has ever made any replacers for those

You can actually replace all the graphical assets of the original Daggerfall, but it's an arduous task since there's only one real program that allows you to do so - http://www.svatopluk.com/daggerfall/download/andypic.stm. Oh, the best part? It's a command line program. So unless someone actually is compelled enough to write the world's largest batch file, nobody would bother to install larger-scale replacers.

DaggerXL will hopefully allow us to replace textures Half-Life style, by simply adding custom files with the same name as the originals in a folder that overrides defaults wherever replacers exist.

Speaking of replacing Daggerfall assets, I recently found http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Labyrinth/2200/clothes.htm old site with a bunch of clothing replacers for the ladies. I may have to tinker around in AndyPic and try some of these... :hehe:

The HUD may be slightly compressed, the 3D scene uses a proper aspect ratio but I'm not yet correcting the 2D elements (UI). I will get this in before the demo.

As for textures, yes it will be easy to replace the textures. It will use the original texture to determine the uv coordinates (which were in subtexel resolution, i.e. texture resolution must be taken into account) so that higher resolution textures can be used.

For that Geocities site StoneFrog, you'll want to grab 'em quick, GeoCities is going down permenently in the next couple months.

So, it would be wonderful to have a possibility to replace the textures, but what about the models? Is it possible to replace them with more detailed version? And is it possible to use normal mapping?

Yes it will be possible to replace existing models and add new models. Additionally you'll be able to make your own dungeon, interior or exterior blocks as well. As for normal mapping, that could be supported in the future as well, since DaggerXL uses per-pixel lighting (funny how far ahead Bethesda was in the lighting department back then). However these features are for the longer term, the immediate future of the project is to get the core Daggerfall features implemented.

So, I would be glad to work on the models for the game! So, what instruments I need to get the original models. And then, how I could test the new ones in-game?

Pre-Demo looks promising The whole project is promising! Can't wait to see how it'll run.
Besides all the inevitable modding improvements, hopefully this will be (an albeit long-winded) solution to my infernal ImDisk problem on my umpc..

Demo can't be more than a few days away, right? :dance:

That's correct.

In Arena, the puddles that form on the ground after a rain fall (something we ought to return) are fully reflective and allow you to see buildings and villagers. :ahhh:

Is it wrong that with the video I actually hear the music and sounds of daggerfall in my head?

Awesome sauce.

Privateer's Hold took quite some time, will the rest of daggerfall be automatically 'updated' or will you have to handcraft most other places yourself too?

As I understand it, he hasn't hand crafted anything, but created an engine that understands Daggerfalls' data. So by definition if Privateers hold works, many other things will start to fall into place.
But I know nothing about how its actually done :blink: