The logistics of Daggerfall : The Elder Scrolls Series Discussion

» Fri Jul 30, 2010 8:09 am

Does anyone know how the terrain is handled in Daggerfall? From what I've seen one could estimate the size of the map to be about 500x500km. Assuming terrain is mapped in something like 1 meter segments in an X,Y coord system, wouldn't that result in a number of 500,000^2 = 250 billion values? obviously the game is smaller than that. so what if one wanted to make a game on a similar scale. it seems like to get anything of that size you would need to use smaller pieces that are repeated or else it's just too much. thoughts?

» Fri Jul 30, 2010 7:30 am

Thats right, Daggerfall uses blocks to assemble terrain, towns and also dungeons.

You can browse those building blocks using Interkarma tools at dfworkshop.

http://www.dfworkshop.net/

The site was updated recently with pictures of huge towns which are assembled from town blocks. Each one has something around 4 or 6 medium houses. A huge town like Daggerfall or Sentinel around 8 town blocks of length and fits into one pixel in the 1000x500 pixels world map. From that you can get an idea of how big Daggerfall map is, but this is always a subjective idea.

I don't think that one terrain pixel in the wilderness matches some special terrain block. That would be a model the size of Daggerfall city just for one pixel of the map. Most likely there are terrain tiles the size of a town block that repeat endlessly trying to fill all the empty wilderness space.

Dungeons also use blocks, but are much bigger, the size of Privateers Hold. You can get an idea of how many blocks a dungeon has when you bring the dungeon map and look at the yellow layout on the left. The border yellow squares are only used to close or connect the doors that leave out of each block. A huge dungeon is somewhat the size of 5 Privateers H dungeons.

» Fri Jul 30, 2010 10:37 am

Zingar Baltus did some very good calculations looking at that sort of data. I'll post his findings below, but note that all the image links are outdated:

I made an exploration exercise some months ago that show exactly how big (in landmass) Daggerfall is.

This is a the map of the entire province. If we know how much a pixel is in size we can know how big the landmass is. This map is zoomed so the real size is 1000x500 pixels.

http://institute.no.sapo.pt/gg/DFomega.png

The city of Daggerfall fits entirely inside a pixel from the map above so its big but how big?

http://institute.no.sapo.pt/gg/dfmap.png

Heres another city, called Gothway Gardens, that can be reached by foot (not using fastravel) going south of Privateers Hold.

http://institute.no.sapo.pt/gg/GG.png

You can see that GG is divided in 8x8 city blocks. Cities just like dungeons are randomly assembled from these blocks, except for special cities that are assembled by hand.

Another interesting detail most of these houses are empty. If the player tries to enter or pick a lock to rob an empty house a message appears saying theres nothing of value inside the house.

As most of us know by now theres never a lack of procedural generated quests in Daggerfall. Whenever a new quest is instantiated from a quest template a new NPC or item is allocated and placed in one of these empty houses. There are hundreds of empty houses in a city like Daggerfall, but theres also douzens of taverns, guilds, shops, banks, etc.

If we now how much a city block measures we can guess how big Daggerfall is.

Heres the key for guessing the size of block. The terrain patterns are the key, and also look at the house wall textures.

This is a zoomed city block. It is divided in terrain tiles. A city block is 16x16 terrain textures.

http://institute.no.sapo.pt/gg/city_tile_with_grid.gif

The size of a terrain tile is revealed in this picture.

http://institute.no.sapo.pt/gg/detail.gif

Each terrain tile is 4x4 wall textures. I estimate that each wall texture is 1 meter at the base. and with this we can calculate the size of pixel in meters.

1 map pixel = 1 meter x 4 wall textures x 16 terrain texures x 8 city blocks = 512 meters

The size of the playable area is then

1000 x 512meters = 512km width

500 x 512meters = 256km height

It looks bigger than it realy is. wink.gif But with this size is the game with biggest seamless landmass i know. No other game has come even close.

That comes to about 131,000 km^2

» Fri Jul 30, 2010 2:25 am

yeah i've got daggerfall explorer so i've looked through the models & blocks, but i didn't see any of the wilderness. there is more wilderness than towns and all towns are on flat ground as far as i know. i've done a little research and learned about things like quadtrees

» Fri Jul 30, 2010 9:21 am

That data could also be hardcoded on the executable and not available on the data files. In that case Daggerfall Explorer will not show any wilderness tiles. I'm guessing those tiles must exist somewhere because walking in the wilderness we can see the terrain repeating. I get the impression there's only one tile per region that repeats itself endlessly. It's possible the devs had a more ambitious solution for Daggerfall wilderness but in the end they decided to go with this simple method.

Using tiling blocks works better with cities and dungeons, but it's not adequate for terrain. Sentinel city for example looks pretty awesome in this picture:
http://www.dfworkshop.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/treedev7.jpg

"That comes to about 131,000 km^2"

Not as big as England or Turkey as some have claimed but still an impressive size.