New builds are now available on the Live Builds page, bringing us up to build #81 across all platforms. A lot has happened over the last month, with steady contributions from long-time Daggerfall Unity developers Lypyl, Allofich, TheLacus, and Nystul. I would also like everyone to welcome on board new developer Hazelnut, who has built many valuable updates over the last month.

I’ll post a more complete list of updates towards the end of this post, but want to start with the big visual stuff that’s changed since last update.

Main Quest

The complete main story quest is now offered when starting a new level 1 character. Please keep in mind this is still under construction, so you are likely to reach a point where you cannot continue and may need to start fresh later (or use a console cheat). It could be another few months before all main quests are in a passing state, but I felt it was important to start offering to new players.

Main Quest Testing – Stage 3

I’ve pulled the wraps off stage 3 of main quest for testers. This includes a quest from Prince Helseth to blackmail Lord Castellian (S0000002) which follows onto recovering an unauthorised biography for Queen Barenziah (S0000011). This tome can be stolen by the necromancers if you don’t recover from Orsinium in time, leading to player needing to strike a deal with Gortwog for recovery. Will the player return the book to Barenziah as planned, or betray her and deliver the book to Gortwog instead?

Transport Menu

Hazelnut has implemented the transport menu for player to switch between Foot, Horse, Cart, and Ship. Until full shops are implemented, all level 1 characters will begin with a free horse, cart, and ship to play with. It’s a great feeling to tear around towns and the wilderness on a horse at long last. But as player housing is not yet implemented, you cannot store loot on your ship. Please keep this mind or anything you drop to the ship will be lost when you leave!

Item Info & Player Status Popups

Another Hazelnut update. He has implemented inventory info popups and world status popups. What you can’t see easily is this required a fairly large back-end system to expand context macros correctly across various systems. This work is also being used in several other places now.

Banking

The third big update from Hazelnut builds on earlier groundwork by Lypyl. Banks are now mostly operational. You can deposit and withdraw gold, convert gold to letters of credit, and even take out loans!

Selling & Repairing

If you’ve played one of the earlier interim builds, you might have noticed player encumbrance and weapon condition has been implemented. To complement this, Hazelnut has added selling and repairing items at stores. The selling and repairing gold values match classic very closely thanks to additional work by Allofich. Now you can finally tip out that wagon and profit from all your dungeon crawling.

Real-time Info Panel & Enhanced Item Lists

The final big-ticket item from Hazelnut is a real-time info panel for items which displays details as player moves mouse over an item. This is optional, but currently enabled by default for testing. A second option, which must be enabled in settings.ini (EnableEnhancedItemLists=True) will show an item grid of 16x tiles instead of the default 4x. This is excellent work that brings the UI forwards while maintaining classic style.

Enhanced Mod Support & Post-Processing

TheLacus has built out texture injection to support wilderness flat replacements, and added post-processing support for effects like SSAO, bloom, vignette, anti-aliasing, and more! Post-processing is currently available in mod form. Check out this thread on the forums for more information.

Talk Window & Discovery

Last but certainly not least is the NPC talk interface by Nystul. You can now bother town NPCs to ask for directions to local shops, with more features on the way. A huge thanks goes to Nystul for all of his amazing work on this system.

The talk window also complements my location and building discovery, as NPCs can direct you to nearby businesses if they like you enough (and know the place). Please keep in mind this system is still under development and NPCs cannot yet offer all the topics available in classic at this time.

More Gameplay

One of the most under-represented contributors by screenshot is Allofich. He contributes a great deal to the back-end formulas, reverse engineering, and general flow of game systems. These are all very hard to show in screenshot form, so make sure you have a skim through the patch notes to find more of his work. Some of the features he’s added recently include fixes to activation, residence greetings, and shop opening hours.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt that Daggerfall Unity is barrelling forwards. Thanks to contributors, new systems are starting to be built ahead of my original schedule. If this trend continues, some of the later gameplay elements are likely to be ready concurrently with upcoming work on spell system. Bundle this with all of the amazing mod work being done over in the Community Workshop forums. It’s just not possible to highlight everyone here, so please take the time to read through mod creator’s threads and give them feedback on their work.

Detailed patch notes follow for build #81. If you want more frequent micro-updates, please follow @gav_clayton on Twitter. Thank you for reading!