I was grinding in the wilderness a few minutes ago, transferred to my ship to drop some stuff off, and transferred back to the wilderness. What happened is unlike anything I've seen in my 10+ years of playing this game.

Sorry for the bad screenshots, but this is all you get for right now:
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l280/Fabulous_E/Screenshot2009-09-07at84716PM.png
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l280/Fabulous_E/Screenshot2009-09-07at84712PM.png
http://i98.photobucket.com/albums/l280/Fabulous_E/Screenshot2009-09-07at84705PM.png

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2z1LNIpQfk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v00tF0OOqXo

I'm certain it's a glitch, but I didn't know the game was capable of producing wilderness like this. I haven't really explored yet; just kind of freaked out and took pictures. Has this happened to anyone else?

Edit: Well, it didn't carry over to the saved game. I could walk across the lake, and as soon as I went up the cliff the wilderness reset itself to what it normally is (bland). I'm going to see if I can reproduce this, but it's pretty unlikely.

Edit 2: Actually, it happened again. The mountain gets pretty tall, and I walked right off the edge and died (a level 19 character with high agility...). If anyone else can reproduce this I'd be interested in seeing what your results are.

Wow.
I thought it was just flat.

Very interesting. My theory is that you got teleported accidentally to the edge of the world. I will look at it tomorrow to see if i can find the same thing.

There is a terrain anomaly where you leave a cell (easy way to do this is to head south of Daggerfall or another city that takes up an entire map pixel), then turning around, returning to that cell, and exiting on the opposite side. It forms a trench between the cells, and all the wilderness sprites spawn in there. There's a thread lying around somewhere.

Your case is very strange. I like it.

I checked my map, and I was in the same place as before. The water is also treated as land in that I can walk across it as opposed to swimming. I had similar thoughts upon first seeing it, though.




Hmm, I don't think I've seen this one. I'll have to try it sometime.

I should also mention that the instant I go above the cliff (no climbing required, by the way, I can simply walk up) or fall off the mountain, the terrain resets itself to normal. Maybe this is a glitch that simply exercises the random terrain generators elevation limits? If that's the case, I wonder why they didn't make better use of it. The mountain that was generated in my case is far more realistic than what is generated in the Dragontail Mountains.

If anyone else has a ship, see if you can repeat this bug. Every time I try it I get the same general area. I'm wondering if there's more variety in this wilderness glitch.

I've experimented a little more. When I tried exiting a town and repeating the glitch, the game froze.

I also tried it on my Acer Aspire One, and it crashes as well. DOSBox is giving me "illegal read" error messages. What's weird is that these saved games are very similar to what's on my Macbook (which is what I was using earlier). The saved games on my Acer are slightly earlier, but I don't think it should make that much difference. It might have something to do with the way the OS handles DOSBox (Windows 7 on the Acer vs. OSX 10.6 on the Macbook), but I doubt this.

Either way it's an interesting anomaly. Again, if anyone wants to experiment with the glitch I'm interested in seeing other results.

Whoa! Great find! I've not seen anything like that before either.

Do you have any idea what could've happened, Interkarma? I don't know the technical details behind the game files, but I'm wondering if this bug is showing off the elevation limits for the wilderness (or engine, for that matter).

I know those screenshots svcked, so I took a video (first DOSBox video hooray!). I just watched it on Youtube, so I'm hoping it's viewable to others by now. If not, give it a few hours.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2z1LNIpQfk

I really have no idea. I've seen the "trench" a few times, but this one is totally new on me. It's a safe bet the random landscape generation has bugged out spectacularly, but I don't know enough about Daggerfall's terrain generator to take a guess at how exactly it happened. It would be cool if we knew how to reproduce this (like the trench anomaly). It might give us some hints into how Daggerfall uses the elevation noise in WOODS.WLD to build random terrain.

As for the trench, if you expand out the 5x5 elevation noise data (see http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:WOODS.WLD_format#Pixel_Data), there is a strange grid-like pattern over it. I believe the "trench" is caused by Daggerfall miscalculating an index into the noise data and picking up on the straight lines of the grid.

What you've discovered here is far more fascinating, and less easy to explain. Perhaps memory corruption when paging in terrain data?

Well, I loaded up the game again and explored a bit more, and it only seems to get better. I didn't pay very close attention to where I was going, other than following the "cliff" around the edge of the map. There is more than one mountain (at least 2-3), and there seemed to be a huge one somewhere near the center.

I'm guessing the game fixes itself once I move outside of the effected pixel (world map wise), because going above the elevation of the cliffs doesn't reset anything as long as I stay in the effected area (eg. going up the mountain).

If anyone is interested I'll make another video or pass out the saved game (if you really want it). I feel a little silly getting this worked up over a glitch, but it just goes to show you that this game still has some surprises left in it.

I'm going to look into what I did to produce this in the first place, Interkarma. If I move outside of that one area of the map it just crashes as I try to leave my ship. Once I get some more time on my hands (and it's not 2AM on a school night..) I'm going to experiment a little more.

Edit: It probably bears mentioning that I'm using a saved game with a hacked view distance (doubt this has anything to do with it) and I'm using DOS32A as an extender (much more likely, IMO).

Cheers Taemos. Don't spend too much time trying to reproduce this, it's probably a totally random happening that might be nigh impossible make happen at will.

This has inspired me to play with the elevation noise data in WOODS.WLD and see what happens in the game. I'll share the results when I get around to this.

Would be interesting to see if it happens without dos32a in there. I've never seen anything like this either, but I haven't played for very long.

The only interesting thing I saw with terrain is it seems to pick which regional textures to use for the whole area being rendered based on where you're standing. It causes fun stuff like if you walk over a desert/grassland border the textures behind you will change as well. I wonder if that would also cause buildings along the border to change textures.

This bug reminds me of the one where towns sometimes end up with bumpy terrain and buildings that don't fit.

When I run it without DOS32A, it crashes with error 2 as soon as I try to leave my ship. Mystery somewhat solved...

Terrain glitches are both possible and reproducible, assuming you know what you did to cause them. The thread StoneFrog was referring to was mine, http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=758600&hl=. But I must admit your find is much more interesting!

Am I right in seeing that when you returned from your ship there was water where there was previously dry land?

Well, they were water tiles, but they were counted as dry land. I had a water-walking spell active, but I waited it out and they were still solid.

I'm not going to bother trying to reproduce this (well, no more than I already have). Something about DOS32A allows this bug to go through where it would otherwise crash the game. I'm going to make another video, though. I'll post it here when it's done.

Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v00tF0OOqXo


Please do. I'm very interested in seeing what you might find.

The uncorrected aspect ratio made me want to cry.

Man, that terrain is awesome. The game totally needed some of that goodness.

Yeah, thank Youtube for that.

Agreed. What I don't understand is how this bugged scenario made such perfect cliffs and mountains, yet the game uses nothing like it. There were landscape features like this in earlier screenshots, but obviously they didn't make it to the game. I'm wondering if they were removed due to memory allocation issues. This is just speculation judging from the fact that I can't reproduce this without DOS32A, but I think it's a fair one considering the average amount of RAM at the time.

Funny how it works with DOS32A and not with the RAM just cranked up in DOSbox if that's the case.

It would be positively awesome if there's some nice terrain data that can be decoded for use by something like DaggerXL (not that I doubt Lucius' ability to create something awesome).

Daggerfall terrain also uses patches of geometry like dungeons and towns. The problem is that there is only a few patches for each region, mountain, temperate, tropical,desert, swamp and ocean. A quick solution would be to combine the terrain heightmap that can be extracted from Daggerfall files with terrain patches to morph them in a way similar to what we see in this video.

http://www.imperial-library.info/maps/WLDIliac.png

Terrain is something that Oblivion has improved by a lot over Daggerfall but unfortunately the sense of proper land and structure scale in non-existent. Just like we see the Imperial city tower while aproaching in the distance, it would be awesome to be walking on Wayrest wilderness then look west and see the top of the Ilessan hills with 3D mountains (particle effects) above it's top, or look south and see the cliffs of Dragontail mountains at night mixing with a starred sky. It's little details like this that make a rpg game feel magic.

You misconstrued what I said. I never implied that more RAM would allow the glitch to happen again, only that a lack of it might have hindered terrain features like this during development forcing the developers to remove them from the game (although I think it has more to do with them rushing the game out than nixing it due to memory issues). DOS32A probably allowed something like this to occur because it's obviously a more stable extender than whatever they used in the Daggerfall executable. It was pure speculation on my part.

Anyway, I'm just going to archive this saved game and continue with my character. If anyone wants another video, let me know, but I've explored it about as much as I can without delving into the WOODS.WLD file (which Interkarma is already planning on doing and something I'm severely underqualified for).

Yeah, I thought it was an effect of having a huge amount of available memory leading to stability rather than just the state of the memory extender.

I think I'll try running with DOS32A and see if any of the crashes (about one a week) turn into weird glitches instead. It seems the chances are about zero, but it could be fun!

Thankfully, this may ultimately become reality courtesy of DaggerXL.

Definitely. This just seems like a neat preview of things to come.

Edit: I was playing around with the glitch and found a small crater in the middle of four of the mountains (they're bigger than hills, at least :P). There was a small pond inside of it. I really want to know what this engine was capable of, because to me it's too coincidental that the glitch just happens to occur. The mountain seemed pretty realistic in terms of size and shape (and I would know, I live in the mountains), considering the technology of the time. It's also interesting to me how the mountains had a rocky texture, but once the elevation was lowest it changed to the water sprite. They probably could've fixed a texture gap (rocks -> water) given time.

I also measured how far across the effected land was, and it 1 pixel like I figured it would be. You don't really get a good scale for them in the game though... it feels like a huge amount of land in here.

Considering how height-based terrain works, there's no reason why Daggerfall couldn't have supported hills, mountains, valleys, and other varied terrain. I suspect the problem was that pre-computing such elaborate terrain was beyond the means of Bethesda for one reason or another. Storing elaborate terrain would not have required much (if any) additional storage space. But calculating plausible terrain for a country-sized landmass might have been too much for them. Simply applying varying levels of jitter depending on the terrain type would have been a lot easier to process and test than trying to pull off varied terrain types that all need to level out properly to accommodate the flat city tiles. I bet with an improved tool to generate the terrain in the first place, the engine used for Daggerfall could have rendered complex terrain with no changes to the engine. Future Shock and Skynet are evidence of that. They used the same engine, and terrain in both of those games was a lot more varied than that of Daggerfall.

This combined with the draw distance we've seen from the video for Demo #2, one can only imagine how many weeks would be spent exploring mountain ranges and scouting out unique places from sight alone.