I don't remember Chicken George, but I do remember George IV, and Brute Dragon, the proprietor of http://web.archive.org/web/20010623151541/members.nbci.com/brutedragon/bruteschicken/bruteschicken.html, which unfortunately only now survives in a skeletal, imageless form, somewhere within the confines of the Internet Archive... And Georgina Allen, of course.

The last time I dropped by the newsgroup, it was completely inundated by spam. Needless to say, I didn't stick around.

Things change, of course; that's life. It is refreshing, however, not to have Imperator attacking me for my place of residence or political views, however.

The only thing I remember Imperator for is having an absolutely massive postcount.

Hey Frosty, I can't see your cute Asian face....

Massive post-count, yes, but many of those posts were an entire 1 word long.

Right. As I recall, there was a "hidden" set of forums that were constantly abused by him (as well as other members). I never saw or heard about them until long after they were gone, though.

It is refreshing, however, not to have Imperator attacking me for my place of residence or political views, however.

If I knew where you lived, I'd fill the breech for sure. But I'll try anyway.

The people of [your town] are complete rubes. Why, just over in [nearby rival town] they know how to use a fork! And they wear shoes! Why, if I was from [your town], I'd move far away, but even that would be futile, because people in [faraway large metropolis] could spot someone from [your town] in a heartbeat by your out-of-date haircut and lack of footwear. No, people from [your town] should just stay in [your town]. Don't forget to watch [corny witless sitcom] and [lower-class talkshow sleazefest] and eat lots of [fatty salty snack food product]...not that you would, you [your town] resident you.

Also, you always vote for the wrong candidate.

Did GeorgeIV ever come to these forums? I remember him from alt.games.daggerfall (weren't you there too Mr Wildspell?).

CC

IIRC he popped up a handful of times a very long time ago. But that might be a false memory.

No, it's 'cos I live in Vermont, and he hated our Civil Unions law, Howard Dean, and former Senator James Jeffords leaving the Republican party.

I have never been a newsgroup person. I always disliked outlook and it's kin, which kept me away. But I do seem to remember George IV here.

Oblivion was, for the most part, fixed by a few certain mods. The game became far more enjoyable after I installed Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. Their bugs are still absolutely horrible, though. I don't play the game anymore simply because my computer freezes every time I exit the game.

I vaguely remember a GeorgeIV being here, but I doubt he posted much.

Hey guys. I drop by every now and then to see what's up, but I don't have much to contribute in the way of news or information anymore. It's great to see so many people from the Workshop still paddling around.

I've been keeping myself busy with work, both the IT support side of things and lately developing a VB.NET front-end to a FoxPro accounting database for a client. That's about seven thousand times more boring than it actually sounds, but it pays the bills nicely.

Speaking of Fallout 3, I can't bear to follow its progress anymore. What I'm seeing is highly removed from the core Fallout experience, and not coalescing into "my kind of game" by a long shot.

All the best to everyone, hope you've been keeping well.

Jor, I think you're a little confused here. The only remake I was ever involved with was my own (The Daggerfall Project), and the only place I ever posted updates was on my forum and weblog. I'm not even sure who "they" are, since I always worked alone.

There were a lot of other projects on the Workshop, mainly because it became a natural hub for Daggerfall fans with a development bent. These were all managed by different people however, and they deserve to be recognised for their individual goals and achievements.

In hindsight, I met a lot of my personal goals with the Daggerfall Project, even if I didn't find the time to keep moving forwards. If you're going to remember me for anything, please let it be the tools I released and helping to advance knowledge of the file formats. Holding me accountable for running out of time to maintain my hobby after putting so much into the community is really quite unfair.

BTW, if anyone is looking for my old tools they can be found on http://www.svatopluk.com/daggerfall/download/interkarma.stm, along with source code where available.

HOLY CARP, AN INTERKARMA!

*Shrug*

I filled up my mod directory with tons of mods and all the official stuff, but the problem is deeper than that, I think. You can fix ( most of ) the gameplay problems and such with mods, but it's too big a task to completely change the game. You'll always be stuck with the laughable dialogue system, the extremely shallow dialogue, the incredibly poor voice acting, the very predictable quests, the ridiculous mini-games, the poor design which cuts cities off from the rest of the world( using the 'Open City' mod basically prevents using other mods that alters stuff in cities ), the 'I'm playing a console game' feeling( because of the poor UI which mods can't change too much ), the way the game forces you to use the magical compass since the dialogues doesn't bother giving much of directions, the poor and boring replacement for the Dwemers( the Ayleid Ruins ), the uninteresting gameworld in general, the extremely disappointing 'revolutionary Raident AI', etc., etc.

I don't know. I was rather disappointed with Morrowind when it came, but with all the mods and expansions that game is actually a classic. Oblivion, while possessing a fair bit of improvements with the game engine and some mechanics, doesn't get anywhere near its predecessor, even with all the mods you can throw at it.

That's how I see it, anyway. They made too many wrong design choices.

Oy, sorry bud. I did have you confused with someone else, then. But now I can't figure out who I'm really thinking of... Ah well. My bad.


I don't remember being that disappointed with Morrowind when it came out. Yea, the birthsigns are stupid in comparison to the advantages/disadvantages system, and the combat svcked, but overall I've thought it was a wonderful part of the series.

As for OB. I can look at it and see that it is a good game, but it's a terrible, terrible Elder Scrolls game. Had they just marketed it under a different name (Action-Fantasy Setting, Chapter DXI: Crapolaville), I probably wouldn't hate it nearly as much as I do, simply because I wouldn't have the expectations that come with the series. But since they had the gal to call it a TES game, well that's just a tad infuriating and rather insulting.

No probs mate. For the record, I wrote Daggerfall Explorer, Jukebox, Imaging, etc. I put together the decompression code Dave Humphrey used in http://www.uesp.net/file.shtml?dagger/files/dfinstall.zip (check Dave's readme for credits). As far as I know, I'm the only person to write real-time viewers for Daggerfall's 3D objects and cities (Daggerfall Explorer and Cartographer).

Long story short, this hobby slowly fell apart for me after I got into a serious relationship and started a small business. I'd still be working on the Daggerfall stuff if I could.

Sorry to hear that. Always thought your project seemed the one most likely to be completed, as you appeared to take a more professional approach than the other teams.



I don't know. Too many highly subjective 'improvements', I guess. It was not a direct improvement over Daggerfall( like Daggerfall was to Arena ), but instead a very different game. Good in its own right, great with the expansions and mods( wouldn't have given the game half the time I did if it hadn't been for the mods, though ), but it dropped out so many of the great ideas and features that Daggerfall had.

I liked Oblivion a lot more than Morrowind. It felt far too "alien," which is what a lot of people like about the game. Raapys brought up some good points about Oblivion's faults, though - the dialogue is horrible, and I really wish they would've worked on it vs. the voice acting (which I think usually detracts from games, rather than adding to the experience). I guess I'm just one of the weird ones...

Interkarma - what's going to happen with the Daggerfall Project? I was pretty excited when you announced it and actually had hope it would be completed. I would probably still be playing Daggerfall if it wouldn't have aged so horribly in the graphics department. Any chance you could at least let the source go in the hopes someone else would pick it up?

No you're not weird but i feel you are missing the spirit of the Elderscrolls. I don't trade the spirit of these series from anything else no matter how good it is. Would it be any different if Oblivion had a great story and great dialogs and reactions? No. Because an older Elderscrolls player expects the freedom of roleplaying that is unique to Arena and Daggerfall. This is not the same as being just a sandbox. I didn't felt so much betrayed with Morrowind because they kept this freedom with the huge amount of guilds they put there. On the other side they cut on the essentials like the land scale and the procedural elements which are important for the feeling of a huge and live world. Except for the wilderness improvements, the bockyness of Morrowind wasn't much better than in Daggerfall and they did everything by hand.

They wanted to make everything look unique by brute force and that showed a lot of inexperience and naiveness. It's not the quantity that makes things unique it's how it is presented to the player. What they should have done was to place special hand-made places like treasures to be found by the player among the generic procedurally generated content. Mysterious things that carry a lore background and can be found like the Lysandus tomb or the Direnni Tower from clues and quests or that pop up inside a dungeon completely unexpected. Something like Diablo did with their procedurally generated dungeons.

The guys who made the first two games were gameplay masters and i feel we will never see an Elderscrolls game again. It's sad, like watching a rare species going into extinction.

Well of course the older games are better . I'd much rather have a randomly generated world than what we were given; think about what they could have done with today's technology. I've become bored with games in general simply because, frankly, most of them svck nowadays. Morrowind and Oblivion had their faults, but they are "good" games. They are certainly not the greatness that preceded them.

It's funny - I very rarely hear anyone who plays Frontier piss and moan about the game's random nature, and it's exponentially larger than Daggerfall. I know it's not quite the same time of game, but the point is the same.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: I'd rather have someone throw a huge gameworld at me and let me fill in the blanks, rather than try and hold my hand through a more linear experience that involves somewhat forced story-telling.

From an objective point of view, I released an early prototype of the Daggerfall Project back in 2003 with Daggerfall Cartographer. That program could extract and render any above-ground location in the game. Full source code was included with the download, but in the last 4 years nobody has come along and done anything with that. I can't help but feel if someone had the right blend of fanaticism and programming experience to pick up where I left off, they would have shown their hand by now. I agree things would be easier with what I have today, but the fundamentals have been there since 2003.

I always said I did it all for my own enjoyment first, which is part of the reason I stuck it out so long. I also imagine it's the reason why helpful community regulars like Jormungandr associate me to the "hopeless remake" image, despite everything I've actually achieved. Nothing against Jor, I see him helping a lot of people around here and he's obviously a great guy.

There's a holistic awareness of the possibility of a fully realised Daggerfall remake, but the first mistake people make is thinking it will be no more difficult than the various Doom and Quake redux projects out there. There's a whole world of difference between the two, and the fact Id Software release source code to their old games is just the start.

So for now, I'm going to hold onto the Daggerfall Project for the same reasons I got started. For my own enjoyment. If I see a team get together with the same goals as myself (total emulation of all content in Direct3D, original game CD required), and they can progress beyond the stage of Daggerfall Cartographer to show something promising, then I will absolutely provide all the help I can.

Oh, I know well those tools, they've been a great help. Especially the DFImaging and Explorer :goodjob:

As for the remakes... I'm normally a pretty optimistic guy, but none of these remake projects ever seem to go anywhere. I see them start up and they're all gung-ho and showing off their progress, and I get a bit excited about them... and then they disappear, and nothing ever comes of them. So I hope you don't take my negativity personally, it's just based on statistics

Thing is, though, even if a remake project comes to fruition... it won't be Daggerfall. It won't have the feel, especially if the graphics are updated--as many remakes seem to be doing. Because, for me, the grittiness is one of the things that sets the mood and feel of the game. It may be that the music could be redone (same composition but with better technology) to better effect, but I just don't know about the graphics.

It's very unlikely someone will be able to work with your code base. You have been studying the binary formats and working on those tools for years. I don't think anyone else (except for a few other old guys who made other Df tools and have a Df x-ray picture in their minds) would be able to do Daggerfall engine replacement.

Maybe you could keep working on it like 2-4 ours a week. The impression i get is that you are a bit unmotivated. I like the idea of a Daggerfall engine replacement we could mod, but this is a very difficult task.

I'm working on Dragonfell engine with the same motivation of doing it for fun. I'm not trying to finish anything anymore. I just do a bit every week and try to keep it fun. It doesn't bother me in anything if i ever finish it or not, but i always do a bit more every week with the little free time i have now.

I agree 100% with you Jor. That's why I advocated the "emulate" strategy over "rebuild". Not only would it give people a core Daggerfall experience using the exact same content (albeit smoothly rendered), but it would help sidestep most of the legal issues as nobody is distributing copyrighted content, just a new executable to drop in your installation.

The whole process is a nightmare however. Once you get past the first stumbling block of understanding the basic file formats, you start to run into all kinds of problems. For example, the 3D assets are all constructed from n-sided polygons - not triangles as is the current norm. Getting all of this converted in real-time to a format a modern graphics card can understand is one hell of a challenge. And that's just the easy stuff.

I think most people would prefer the emulate route for the same reasons you stated. The game has a special charm that would be utterly lost by the process of rebuilding.

Oh, and no offense taken. I know just how big a job this is, probably better than anyone. It's ultimately why I put my family and career first. That decision was a slam dunk.