I've been looking around UESP and Svatopluk's site and have looked at a few nifty things players can do by using a hexadecimal editor to modify FALL.exe. Things such as increasing render distance and lifting level/skill caps.

Does anybody know of any interesting engine-based hacks that can be done? One thing I've noticed is that the sprites for the game are much higher resolution than they can be viewed in the game's cramped 320x200 resolution. It'd be an ambitious undertaking, but I was wondering if enough of the engine's parameters exist in FALL.exe or any other data files that could allow this to be done. It'd probably require a lot of work, such as changing HUD offsets among other things. Has anybody attempted such an endeavor?

As I understand, the sprites are so large because that way they don't get all blocky when you get up close.

Back when the Workshop was on m0use.net, one guy found an incomplete VESA 2.0 mode built into Daggerfall's executable (I'm pretty sure it was Craig Peterson, but the emails on that server are long gone so I can't check). With a bit of clever hex editing, he was able to force Daggerfall into 640x400 mode. Primary problems were the game still rendered to a 320x200 square in the top left corner of the screen, and the GUI is hard-scaled for 320x200 as well. After several experiments trying to work through the problems, it just became too epic a task using a hex editor. Too many aspects of Daggerfall are hard-coded into the EXE and not content-driven.

What a shame the source code to Daggerfall isn't out there somewhere, or the game wasn't more mod-friendly. Bethesda have released incredible modding tools with Morrowind onwards, they definitely support their mod community. It's just a shame Daggerfall didn't get a little more future-proofing by way of design. It would be great to see what this community could do with Daggerfall if provided with better resources.

Just think, perhaps in some other alternate reality we have flying cars AND a 21st century compatible Daggerfall. Yeah!

And for probably giant rampaging scones too.

This piqued my interest after reading about Bethesda's game Terminator: SkyNET which allowed you to play the game's predecessor Terminator: Future Shock at a higher resolution of 640x480 as opposed to the game's original 320x200 resolution. Bethesda should've really done something like that for Daggerfall!

It DOES?!?!?? D@mn! I guess I need SkyNet, then, as I would like to check out T:FS at a higher res... Even if only a bit.

Many aspects not related to the 3D engine of the Daggerfall executable can be hacked. For example, ages ago when I was lost in Daggerfall hacking, I discovered how to increase the 'loiter a while' limit from 3 hours to what you want. I remember I did that after reading someone who wrote on the ES forums that this was impossible to do. The challenge motivated me, and as I was fond of reverse engineering at that time (yes that's possible to have a hobby like that...), I managed to do it. I was also able to increase the 'rest for a while' 99 hours limit, though this is not very useful. One other thing I hacked was the 50% training skil limit, however this one can be considered balance breaking. I think I could tweak many other small things like that, if someone has an idea, feel fee to post it. I ask that because I'm considering making a small Daggerfall tweaking utility, somewhat like the Morrowind Code Patch, but mine would not correct bugs unfortunately...

Also, most Daggerfall fans here are aware of Dave Humphrey's DFSkills, which let your character attributes increase up to 200, and his skills up to 128. I made a very long time ago a similar utility which let your character skills progress beyond 128, up to 200. You can still find it on my old friend's Aggelon's website, http://aggelon.free.fr/download/dagskills.zip.

What I'd love to see is someone figure out how the map files work.

Hi Tarvok. Are you talking about the maps in Terminator mate, or in Daggerfall?