With items and loot more or less finished, it’s time to place my sights on the next big feature group. I had originally planned to work on spells and effects in the 0.4 cycle, but also had quests in mind as an equally important feature. So back in July, I used a Twitter poll to sample what the community wanted priority on. The answer came firmly in preference for quests over spells.

I need a break from items. If you could vote somehow, which major feature-set would you prefer me to start on next? — Gavin Clayton (@gav_clayton) July 10, 2016

Fast forward a couple months: 0.3 stable is now tagged on Live Builds page and I’ve started work on the quest system in earnest. This post is the first in a series documenting the journey from raw bytes to a working feature.

When adding a big new feature, there’s always a technical planning stage before commencement. I need to understand which of Daggerfall’s binary files are involved in the feature, learn how much is already known about those files (sometimes a lot, sometimes almost nothing), map out the additional details I need to know before I can re-implement that feature, and finally start cutting some code.

Sometimes it takes a few iterations, as writing code to pull apart the binaries is itself a journey where new information is learned. I don’t know what I don’t know, and often that new information results in a new iteration with better understanding. There’s basically a research-implement-compare loop going at all times throughout development of Daggerfall Unity. It can be a bit draining.

Items for example needed considerable research to bridge the gap between “enough knowledge to make an item editor” and “enough knowledge to fully implement items in a new engine”. Believe me, there’s a huge amount of work needed between having a file spec with lots of unknowns and building a completely functional equivalent. Most of my time is spent somewhere in that gap.

So when starting quests, I set out to learn everything I could about the binary formats and the work others had done before me. I was pleasantly surprised to learn:

Quests are among the most well-understood formats, thanks to the work of several early Daggerfall hackers (notably Donald Tipton and Dave Humphrey).

Tools exist to edit live quests, but more importantly decompile the QRC and QBN files to a human-readable source file (thanks to Template v1.11 by Tipton).

Early Daggerfall modders already had a good understanding of creating quests for Daggerfall – there’s an established process.

Quest files are one of the few cleanly decoupled things in Daggerfall. Unlike items which have template data hard-coded in the executable, quests are nicely self-contained.

With the above in mind, it was no longer necessary for me write a quest decompiler from scratch, design a new file format, decouple quest data, or chase half a dozen other time sinks. I can almost go directly to implementation. Almost. But first I need quest data in a usable form.

For the first step, I’m using Template v1.11, which you can find on UESP. This tool can decompile all the QRC (quest text) and QBN (quest programming) files to a single easy-to-read text file. So the information goes from raw binary data to the following (snippet from starting quest _BRISIEN).

QBN: Item _letter1_ letter used 1020 Item _letter2_ letter used 1021 Item stopMainQuest letter used 1022 Person ladyBrisienna face 1 named Lady_Brisienna anyInfo 1012 rumors 1013 Place PiratesHold permanent PirateerHold1 Place _dirtypit_ remote tavern Clock _invitepc_ 7.00:00 14.00:00 Clock _remindpc_ 30.00:00 0 flag 1 range 0 1 Clock _pcfailed_ 14.00:00 0 flag 1 range 0 1 Clock _oneday_ 1.00:00 0 flag 1 range 0 1 Clock _nowwhat_ 29.09:00 0 flag 1 range 0 1 -- Quest start-up: log 1010 step 0 pc at PiratesHold set _exitstarter_ say 1025

That can still look a bit daunting if you’re not comfortable with programming concepts, but the source format generated by Template v1.11 is generally very easy to read and understand – more like a complex INI file than a real programming language. It’s so good that I’ve decided to adopt Template’s output as the source data for quests in Daggerfall Unity. You won’t need to recompile quest source back to QBN/QRC, rather you will use the source directly in Daggerfall Unity where it will be compiled at runtime by the quest system.

This means the de facto standard for creating Daggerfall quests will remain essentially the same in Daggerfall Unity (with some minor differences I’ll discuss later). If you’ve ever created a quest for Daggerfall, or even seriously looked into it, then you already have the skills to create quests in Daggerfall Unity. If you’re new to Daggerfall quests then you can learn from existing quests and read Template’s excellent documentation. Just as I don’t need to start from scratch, neither do you.

I will need to change the format slightly for unique needs on my side, but I aim to keep my input format as close as possible to Template’s output format. There’s also the need to emulate support for every single condition and action in Daggerfall Unity to behave similarly to Daggerfall given the same quest source. That will probably be an ongoing process all the way through to 1.0. But we need to start somewhere, and this is a great starting point.

The next article in series will look at parsing quest source files and how quests will be executed inside Daggerfall Unity.

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