New Builds For August 2018

New builds are now available on the Live Builds page.

What’s New

Implemented custom class creator UI (Numidium) – Note: most advantages/disadvantages still pending implementation as part of effect system rollout

Implemented outdoor swimming (MeteoricDragon)

Implemented item power information on “Info” messagebox popup (Allofich)

Magic items and their powers are now generated in random loot and in merchant shelves (Allofich) – Note: magic item powers are not functional in game yet

Bug Fixes & Improvements

Improvements to smooth height changes (MeteoricDragon)

Easier to mute sound or music volume (MeteoricDragon)

Fixes to crush detection to prevent accidental deaths (MeteoricDragon)

Smooth status change feedback added to health, fatigue, spell points bars (MeteoricDragon)

Bug fixes to arrow weight handling (Hazelnut)

Fix exterior music playing in dungeons and other interiors (Allofich)

Fix for music volume incorrectly influencing UI windows (Allofich)

Fix for doors rotating incorrectly on load (Allofich)

Fix for opening books imported from classic saves (Allofich)

Restored several variant changes in item templates overwritten by a previous change

Fix for quest parser not detecting end of final message block if empty line not present

Clothes in stores now have a random variant assigned

Fix for mouse not being captured after alt+tab – clicking in game window should recapture mouse

Fixes to “add armor” and “add cloth” console command to correctly use player gender and race

In Progress

Implement Illusion effect back-end behaviour – still needs to be wired to front-end effect (Allofich)

Certain time-limited items such as summoned items now supported in back-end (Allofich)

Started work on potion back-end for recipe handling

Looking to the near future, my personal workload has started to shrink again and I will continue work on rolling out spell effects soon. I somewhat prematurely celebrated my larger July projects wrapping up, only to have some of the smaller projects drag on much longer than expected. We should see a return to more regular incremental updates to magic & effects very soon.

On the plus side, the other developers have continued to work on systems and fix bugs. I’m particularly excited to see the custom class creator and outdoor swimming in this round of builds, as well as magic item drops for loot and stores.

Something that’s hard to describe in point form is all the incremental changes forming the rungs of a ladder towards a fully functional magic system. All of these seemingly minor back-end changes such as potion recipe handling and magic item drops, and magic crafting stations, are all important building blocks towards our goal.

I received a little bit of disappointed feedback when potion and magic item crafting stations came online before potions and magic items were ready to go. And I imagine the feedback will be similar now that magic items are dropping but not yet fully functional. The thing to keep in mind is that once all of these threads come together, the final stages of fully opening up spells, magic item, potions, advantages/disadvantages, diseases, etc. will coalesce very quickly.

I’ve linked the Black Triangles story before, and it’s well worth a read if you haven’t already. It perfectly describes all the work that goes into making the back-end of a game functional while not much interesting is happening on the surface. The same is true of Daggerfall Unity as the various moving parts begin to mesh.

For more frequent updates on Daggerfall Unity, follow me on Twitter @gav_clayton.