A while ago I asked in one of the threads about why sometimes crypt entrances have a door stuck in them and why there are monsters behind the walls. I figured there was more dungeon but couldn't find any secrets other than the known ones in some of the crypt layouts. Today I answered my question. It seems the crypts have extra dungeon pieces floating nearby in the void.

I tried exploring some by levitating through the void. In every case so far I've found a room just behind the entrance. Sometimes it has a monster that opens the door. I haven't found any truly huge rooms like this yet, but I found two instances of the vaulted room with beams so far. Mostly I found corridors and staircases with one or two attached rooms/closets. There are a few small free-floating rooms too. Most of the rooms are empty but some have monsters.

This is my all-time favourite Daggerfall weirdness so far. It also explains why some of the segments in the large dungeons always seem to have monsters behind the walls that I can never find. I'm a little surprised I've never heard of this on the web yet. Maybe I look in the wrong places. Flying to all the disconnected sections is kind of fun and has the bonus of training thaumaturgy.

Congratulations, you are now officially a Void Ranger, wear your badge with honor... :goodjob:


Edit: Ha, one letter's difference completely changed the meaning, sorry. :brokencomputer:

Hehe, whatever the typo was I missed it.

well, that would explain the noises i hear, even after clearing a crypt. i just thought it to be buggy sound

I thought about that originally. Then I realized I couldn't rest near the noises. If you have a magic-using character it's really easy to get into the void and have a look.

Things like this make me think it would be very interesting to see the code for the tools Bethesda used to make the dungeons.

This is an interesting side-effect of how dungeon blocks have been designed. You know already that Daggerfall's dungeons are lego-like (i.e. blocks snapped together to make the final product), well some blocks have been designed to be used in different ways. For example, at 0 degrees rotation the block can be used as a single-room end piece, but rotate it around 180 degrees and it can be used as a ramp to join two floor elevations together.

Next time you are looking at a disconnected dungeon piece, try to imagine the whole block (this will include the parts that are connected and the parts that aren't) rotated to a different orientation and snapped together with appropriate joining blocks. You'll be able to visualise different uses for the same block when building different dungeons.

It's a cunning space-saving tactic on Bethesda's part. Of course, it becomes frustrating when a monster spawn point is inside an unreachable part of a block preventing you from resting (or getting a serious case of the creeping willies from something you can hear but not see).

Edit: As an example, look to the upper-right portion of http://www.dfworkshop.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/the-ashcroft-graveyard-dungeon.jpg from Daggerfall Scout. You can see a few floating dungeon bits hanging out by themselves. This particular dungeon is only 2x2 blocks wide. As you can imagine, those blocks can be re-used in a wide variety of other dungeons depending on how they are rotated and snapped together.

Interesting, I didn't know dungeon blocks assumed different placement parameters and shapes whern rotated!


That used to drive me mad. Crypts are so small but I would keep hearing noises and start frantically looking for secret doors...

Aye. Consider a block of land with a house facing the road and an old-fashioned outhouse in the back yard. If you somehow picked up that block of land and rotated it around 180 degrees, the house and outhouse exchange positions: the house is now facing away from the road.

Dungeon blocks in Daggerfall just work like that. A single block may have a staircase on one side and a room on the other. The rotation of the block will define which components "face" the player. The unused geometry just hangs unseen in world space (until a void ranger stumbles across it).

That's cool. It would have taken me a month of flying around to come to that conclusion. I thought they just had a really quirky dungeon generator back in the day.

My next question should be, what's with there always beinga room connected to the entrance doorway? I've seen those without exception so far. I even found one that was a hallway with two rooms connected there. In every case I've seen that section has had its only entrance stuck to the entrance door. There's one in your screenshot too.

I don't know if the engine will rotate those blocks (i call them external blocks) but they must be like that because the engine uses them to close the sides of a dungeon. Sometimes one external block will close the sides of two or even three internal blocks at the same time. One example will clear this up. I use small caps b's to describe external blocks and big caps B's to describe internal blocks.

__b__bBbbBBb_bb_

The bulk of the dungeon is the internal blocks (the big B's). The external blocks (small b's) are only used to close the sides of internal blocks that don't have another internal block to it's side. Notice that the external block in the corner of the three B's needs to have corridors on it's right and bottom side to snap with the nearby B's. This is why you have those weird external blocks.

bBBB

I'd say you're spot-on. The blocks with extra geometry are used to close off the outsides of the dungeon. By stacking extra geometry into the same external block, it can be re-used to close off other blocks.

By the way, I've probably made things confusing talking about rotating dungeon blocks, as they don't actually get rotated. Rather, dungeon blocks are snapped into a 2d grid. For example, the massive dungeon below Castle Daggerfall is 3x4 blocks in size. Which geometry "faces" the player depends where that block is snapped into the grid. I was trying to convey the sense of front and back components without getting into how the whole dungeon itself was stored. I really do svck at explaining things.

I'm coding block and map support into DFConnect now, so it should be fairly easy to pop up a small dungeon viewer before too long.

Yes, assembling a full dungeon should be very easy with the way blocks are made. Each block (both internal and external) will snap perfectly side by side because the doors leading outside (from the block) are always in the same place. It shouldn't mater what external block is used to close a side and if it's used to snap to the left, right, north or south since they always have four corridors for each face. These corridors are not connected to each other and always lead back to the same block, otherwise the player would reach a door open to the void.