I recently demonstrated spell missiles and discussed the back-end framework driving magical effects in Daggerfall Unity. I’m happy to report that it’s now possible to create custom spells and hurl sparkling death at your foes! As my last article was a bit dry and technical, I’ll start this one off with a short video of spells in action.

New Builds

You’ll find all new test builds on the Live Builds page as usual. Here are the key features of this release.

Create custom spells in the Spellmaker UI (invoke using “showspellmaker” from console).

Spellbook UI where custom spells are saved with your character.

3x magic effects are currently available for testing:

Continuous Damage Health (a damage over time effect).

Damage Health (a direct damage effect).

Heal Health (heal yourself and other entities).

All elements and target types are available (as appropriate for effect) when creating spells.

Smooth crouching, head bobbing, and head rocking when damaged (Meteoric Dragon).

Sound and music volume sliders (in progress). Some effects not wired up to volume slider yet (Meteoric Dragon).

City Guards and crime tracking, starting work on Crime & Punishment (Allofich).

More mod support in the back-end (TheLacus).

Various small bug fixes and improvements.

While only 3x effects are available at this time, this doesn’t nearly do justice to the progress that has been made. Spell effects are actually very small scripts – usually no more than a few lines of code and some properties. What really matters is the framework driving magic in Daggerfall Unity has finally progressed to this point. The previous article has more on this if you’re interested.

Testing

The purpose of these builds is to test the magic & effects framework is well-behaved and usable in its current state. What I’m looking for are crashes and other unexpected behaviour in the framework. Once this is working well, I will continue to roll out more effects in future builds. To keep testing as focused as possible, here’s a summary of what you can expect from this release.

Create and cast spells using the starting 3x test effects above.

There is no spell absorption, reflection, or elemental resistance at this time.

You can select elements to change appearance of spell and missile, but all elements are equal in terms of damage.

All target types (caster, touch, target at range, etc.) should be working.

Spells do not yet increase related magic skills of character.

Spells are all currently free to buy and to cast – so make them as weak or powerful as you like.

All of these free spells will be expired at some point closer to 0.5 stable.

Magic items are not implemented yet, this will come much later in 0.5 cycle.

Note: Due to changes in the modding system older mods may not work in this version. Please revert to build #105 for any broken mods until creators update for current version.

Feedback

For discussion on these builds, please head over to the forums. If you want to report a bug, post this to the Bug Reports forums. If you’re not sure if something is a bug or just not implemented, don’t hesitate to ask in Help & Support.

I hope you enjoy this early preview of spells in Daggerfall Unity. Have fun!

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