Hello,
As we know, a few days ago Daggerfall has been released as freeware. I've got an idea of creating a daggerfall installer.
Basicly it would download the game and dosbox to the user computer and install it. As result user would be able to run daggerfall directly by clicking on the icon on the desktop or in the menu start, so he wouldn't even notice that it runs in the emulator(using dosbox autexec feature), and uninstall entire content using standard windows procedure.
I think it won't violate any licenses as if it will require to accept daggerfall license before download.
What do you guys think about this idea?

Cheers

If you can do that, then I will definitely take advantage of you and your wizard like computer skills.

I fought with DBGL for about an hour yesterday trying to get an easy way to open the game. I got it to the point where it would start, but you tried to load saves and when you tried to pick a province at the beginning the game would crash.

Even though im getting pretty dos savvy,I'd gladly install that.
Like your avatar by the way!
Wonder who they had do them?
Or is it just realistic looking pixels?

I'm not sure if i understand you correctly but my avatar is an animation ripped from the daggerfall game

I think he meant that the animation looks quite realistic, even for such an old game.

Daggerfall's art seems to contain a lot of digitized photos of things. I get a kick out of how that animation never matches what my character is wearing.

As for an installer, it will probably be welcomed by all the guys who only have DOSbox because of Daggerfall. Those of us with a pile of DOS games probably won't have a use for it.

Ugh. I need to fire up AndyPic and modify all the dagger animation frames so the wielder isn't sporting those hideous blue sleeves...

Will you share the results with us when you are done?

Wait, I wonder if DaggerXL will have the ability to have equipped armor appear on the character so that you can see the armor on the arms in 1st person view... someone should ask that...

I don't think it will, but it will allow the possibility to add such a thing (new assets need to be added for everything from scratch), if I read his blog posts correctly.

my post is recycled from other posts

Sure! Now that Daggerfall's had a substantial increase in player base, I may be able to get some basic replacer mods out there for you guys. Any preference on the sleeve color? Gray? White?

EDIT: AndyPic seems incapable of fully reading CIF files (format used to store weapon animations). Unless another modding veteran can point me in the direction of another program, I think we'll just have to wait until DaggerXL.

Hi Pastgamer. That would be a useful tool for many people. Just as a note, in order to copy ARCH3D.BSA and DAGGER.SND to your install point, you will need to extract them from PACKED.DAT (unless you distribute these two files with your installer - I don't know if that will be OK with Bethesda or not).

If you decide to go the pure route and extract, I created some code capable of extracting the proprietary compression in PACKED.DAT a few years ago. If you download the source to http://www.dfworkshop.net/?page_id=61 from my site, you will find the source code to extract PACKED.DAT in there.

Dave Humphrey used this code in his excellent http://www.uesp.net/file.shtml?dagger/files/dfinstall.zip (which is basically what you proposed but for Windows installations).

Good luck!

As far as I know, http://www.dfworkshop.net/?page_id=78 is the only tool capable of completely exporting all Daggerfall's bitmap formats, including CIF files. It's a shame DF Imaging only exports content, and doesn't put it back into Daggerfall's files. That would have made it a lot more useful!

Now that I'm thinking about it, couldn't someone write up a DOS batch file? You can just execute one of those and htey'll punch in all of the commands you've programmed them to, right? That'd solve the easy game start problem. The installation would still have to be done manually.

Or you can use a freeware program such as DGBL. Or you can edit the dosbox config file if Daggerfall is the only DOS Game you play.

As I said up there, I couldn't get DGBL to work right for me. Is the anyway to specifically tell it what commands to do?

One thing I would definitely do also, is pre-edit the z.cfg file to use the control set 'viewplyr.dat' making the game a WASD/mouse look game, which is what modern gamers are used to. Also to pre switch on Full Screen so you get a Morrowind/Oblivion type GUI. Then a readme pointing out these things and maybe listing the 'new' control keys.

Certainly, if Bethesda had pre edited the z.cfg file, we would have many fewer gamers saying they got killed by rats because they 'couldn't look down', probably expecting to be able to do it with the mouse, which they couldn't, but could have if the viewplyr.dat file was used! In fact, there will be many downloaders of Daggerfall that have already given up on it, never having found out about the view mode. It's now going to take a lot of talking about this in the forums around the web to rectify Bethesda's mistake. Quite simply, if Daggerfall had been available for download with the edited z.cfg to use the view mode included, I think we would have 1,000's of gamers saying what a great game it is, getting 1,000's more to download it. As it stands, who knows how many downloaders, couldn't get on with the controls and just deleted the game, moving on...! Such a shame!!!! (Why can I think of these things, and yet multi million dollar corporations cannot?!)

I thought they were gray.

Not on my installation.

Hey, thanks for that information! To be honest, I was going to ask you abut that source code(i was able to figure that out and find some information in google, not the code though), but you were kind enough to answer my question before i even asked . I think extraction is the only option.


Well i think thats a good idea, could be probably some installation option .

Do you have the JRE. Or Vista. I don't think DGBL works on Vista, as I tried for a while and it kept giving me JRE errors, and now my Java installation won't unistall. But if you have it working fine, you just add Daggerfall to your list of games and go to the config file. There you just add the commands that you would on DosBox, and then everytime you run Daggerfall it will automatically put in the commands without any typing. But I think it should be possible to create a bat file that could run it.