Thanks.

I want your babies now.

This is looking great! I'm keeping a close eye on this!

Thanks!

You make me want to track down a copy of Daggerfall.

I wish you good luck with your continued work. This is... awesome.

Exciting and important work :celebration:
Will follow this closely :thumbsup:

Nice, looking forward to it if only for Windows support. I'm getting tired of running Daggerfall in DOS Box.

Quite an ambitious endeavor. Seeing how Interkarma is the only one who ever manages to finish Daggerfall-based programs, I wish you the best of luck on this. It's the community's first step towards breathing some new life into an old game.

One thing I hope you'll consider is an option to alternate between a more legacy rendering of the textures (pixellated) as opposed to that crude OpenGL blurring effect that I hate so much.

Someone already asked this question on the first page - I guess I should just get a FAQ up. Anyway there will be a texture filtering slider which ranges from no filtering (point sampling) to high quality anisotropic filtering. So you'll be able to get the pixelated look on the textures if you want, however the screenshots/movies will continue to use the current filtering.

I guess I don't play enough Daggerfall to notice how this looks better :shrug:

Best of luck nonetheless! :thumbsup:

For starters, the screenshots were much higher in resolution, meaning that objects can be seen at much longer distances before losing details. This will be particularly nice in outdoor environments, especially if the view distance is increased dramatically over the DOS version of Daggerfall. Second of all, it's running as a native windows application, meaning not only will it run on modern systems without requiring emulators, it also means that many of the nasty bugs that plagued Daggerfall can finally be squashed once and for all.

This project isn't about merely making Daggerfall look prettier than it did during the days of DOS. This is about making Daggerfall playable on modern systems while making the engine run better and bug-free. Considering the project was announced only days ago and luciusDXL already has a working engine that can read the game data and has some basic collision, I think what he's shown so far is very promising. If his ongoing DarkXL project is any indication, the best is yet to come. I think there's only so much we can expect visually from an engine that's in the earliest stages of development.

How much reverse-engineering of the file formats and game mechanics do you have go through, Lucius, or has most of that already been taken care of? I'm interested in how you plan on implementing the skill system, weapons, actor spawn frequency (perhaps handled by the particular city/dungeon block), and things of that nature.

Many of the file formats are fairly well understood thanks to people who have contributed to the information on uesp.net. Things that are less understood, unfortunately, tend to be more gameplay related. However I think all the formats are well understood enough that figuring out the rest won't be any harder then similar things I've done. Certain members of this community (and other Daggerfall enthusiasts) have worked very hard over the years figuring out a lot of file format data (and various game statistics such as guild advancement) - I think its finally time to put this stuff to use in a Daggerfall recreation.

Things like enemy placement and fixed NPC placement I already understand. The specific monster data is not documentation (its one of the "unknown" values) but knowing which monster is where and then looking at the data - its not too hard to figure out. I haven't really looked at how random encounters (when sleeping or traveling outside) or random NPC spawning works, but I'll get to that later. As for other plans, I'll discuss them more in depth as I approach those challenges.

Out of curiosity, what "higher resolution" are you aiming for? I think 640x480 (or x400 to maintain aspect ratio) would be a good enough start. I say this constantly but looking through Daggerfall's image files reveals the textures and sprites to be much higher resolution than they appear in game, due to the low 320x200 resolution. At point-blank they have the quality of their original source, but it'd still be amazing to see the denizens of Daggerfall in their full glory.

"Higher resolution" is whatever your video card can support. If you want 640x480, that will work. The screenshots were taken in 1024x768 (windowed) but there aren't any hard limits with resolution.

Many new changes have been made since the last post:

To learn more about DaggerXL, see http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=1008178

Animated texture support, emissive flats, better flat scaling and rendering, dynamic light sources attached to light flats, proper texture set switching based on region (yes this is required for dungeons too), greatly improved collision detection, working doors and first pass implementation of proper enemy and treasure placement. All the enemies show up as rats right now, including one giant rat but will be the proper enemies next time. The random treasure works correctly.

The lighting has been tweaked from the player, now there is an upclose light as well as a longer distance fog-like attenuation. Unlike Daggerfall, however, the lighting doesn't fade completely to black in the distance and light sources still light up the environment no matter how far away they are. All the dynamic lights still need to be tweaked but pulse/flicker like in Daggerfall. They are not quite standard point lights, there is the standard (N.L) contribution, but even surfaces facing away from the light receive a little lighting if they are close enough. All lighting is done per-pixel similar to the original game.

The proper texture swapping has done wonders for making the dungeon look like Privateer's Hold, it really helps a lot as you can see from the screenshots. The flats are also about the correct size and positioned almost correctly, some more tweaking is still required as you can see with some of the lights.

Next up will be properly displaying all the enemies, supporting switches and elevators (like the throne, which rises when you pull the switch in the main room), supporting quest items (these are just invisible right now) and UI. Beyond that I'll start implementing combat, enemy AI, skills, and so on needed for the demo. Also sound and midi music will be in before the demo as well.

On my blog there is a movie showing the many changes, see here:
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/dynamic-lights-doors-collision-and-more/

And here's several screenshots:
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/dxl_lighting1.jpg
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/dxl_lighting2.jpg
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/dxl_lighting3.jpg
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/dxl_lighting4.jpg
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/dxl_lighting5.jpg
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/dxl_lighting6.jpg
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/dxl_lighting7.jpg
http://daggerxl.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/dxl_lighting8.jpg

Let me know what you think.

Very nice, I'm looking forward to this demo

Very nice work, I'm impressed! The dungeon is still inverted, but the atmosphere of Privateer's Hold is really here!

You're fast, this is the most excited I've been about Daggerfall in years! Once this is over it'll just need to be ported to a PocketPC and then I can die in peace ;p

Really, its quite impressive the speed in which you've went at this. I hope you don't burn yourself out, because right now its looking like you have the skill/knowledge/momentum to actually recreate Daggerfall.

:drool:

Bookmarking this thread. I wish I had the know-how to help out, but alas, my talents lie elsewhere. Best of luck, I really look forward to this. :tops:

Wow - great progress :intergalactic:

Would you prefer it if we left comments on the blog rather than on this thread? It looks a bit lonely

Thanks. As for comments, leaving them here is fine. People are more likely to notice an active thread here and then bookmark the blog, right now you probably won't find my DaggerXL blog by accident.

or you could simply say" screw them, im doing my own race for the public" and then proceed.

A more constructive approach toward Bethesda could raise support from this project. I don't think the 7-year hostility of Daggerfall fans towards Bethesda has helped this cause, do you?

constructive support? they dont care, appearently, as long as you dont try to get cash for it.