Exploring Daggerfall
With Ruins of Hill Deep “Playground1″ coming up in the next few weeks, I decided it was time to reopen the Daggerfall Workshop Forums. This is the obvious place to discuss my projects and ask for help if you have any troubles downloading, installing, or running my work.
You will find the forums at http://forums.dfworkshop.net. I hope to see you there soon.
I’m in the process of bringing everything together for Beta 2 now. This is the largest update yet and will be the final test version before 1.0. Following is a roadmap of Beta 2 with a few details on each item. Some of this is a recap of previous posts.
XNA 4.0
Daggerfall Modelling is now a Visual Studio 2010/.NET4/XNA4 project targeting the “HiDef” profile and Shader Model 3.0. I realise this will exclude some users with very old or integrated GPUs, however most cards from 2008 onwards should support this without any problems. This has been done in line with the new engine which is using some SM3.0 features like MRT and VTF.
Deep Engine
This is the game engine I’m developing for Ruins of Hill Deep. The reason this is part of the Daggerfall Modelling roadmap is that I will be using the same engine for both projects. Deep Engine is replacing ”XNA Library” as the renderer for Daggerfall Modelling. The main benefit for me is that any work on this engine progresses both projects. This engine is designed around a world/entity/component pattern, deferred shading, primitive rendering, and has a fully integrated physics engine. There are many more features to come as development continues.
Player Physics
You will be capable of exploring maps on foot with full player physics. This is delivered using the physics middleware in Deep Engine, not the simplistic camera physics I previewed earlier.
Full Day/Night Support
Change the time of day along with the direction and brightness of sunlight. Night-time cities and dungeons are now lit by atmospheric flickering lights.
Enter Buildings
You will finally be able to enter buildings in exterior locations and export their models.
Thumbnails View
The thumbnails view is getting a nice update. Identical models are collapsed by default into a “folder” thumbnail. This will help reduce clutter when browsing thumbnails and better display model “families”. The thumbnail view is also getting a scrollbar for faster navigation.
Model View
You will be able to cycle through models similar to Daggerfall Explorer, using increments to either model index or model id. It will also be possible to use the free camera to explore models.
Location View
The top-down camera will be more useful, with cutaway when zooming and improved camera sensitivity.
Exporting
You will finally be able to export a full city/dungeon/block/interior to a single Collada file.
Improved Dungeons
Dungeons will display the correct textures based on region. You can optionally render monsters and treasure piles in place of the default “editor flats”.
Animated Sprites
Flat NPCs/animals/lights/etc/ with idle animations will now play, bringing a little life to the scenes.
Bug Fixes
Contains several bug fixes, including a fix to the nasty texture alignment bug that crept into Beta 1.
Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I have resumed work on Daggerfall Modelling Beta 2 and will have more information on this release in the next few weeks.
Since early 2011, I have been hard at work designing a new project. This isn’t a new tool, but a story-driven conversion mod for Daggerfall. Experience a new main quest and discover the expansive location of Hill Deep, set high in the Wrothgarian Mountains.
Production of this mod has begun as of October 2011, and I expect to have a playable alpha ready by the end of 2012.
For all news and information about this mod, please visit www.ruinsofhilldeep.com.
I’ve restored billboards (trees, rocks, etc.) to scenes and they generally light up correctly from surrounding point lights and the player’s personal light source. There is a simple light animation playing that changes the scale of the light volume +/- a small amount. Light attenuation means this effect is more obvious at the edge of the light radius than near the source.
The lighting system still needs a tidy-up, and a few bugs remain (such as the emissive wood textures you see in a few spots). I will continue to polish this leading up to Beta 2 release. Still, I’m happy overall with how the lighting is shaping up and posted a video preview.
I’ve added an emissive property to textures. This allows certain textures, such as the windows of buildings, to appear lit from within. Below are a couple of screenshots of this in action. This will eventually look even better with a bloom post-process.
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After moving everything to XNA 4.0, I decided to build a lighting system into Daggerfall Modelling Beta 2. I’ve always wanted to play with deferred rendering and it seemed like a good fit for Daggerfall’s many point lights.
If you’re unfamiliar with this technique, the gist is that different information about the scene is rendered into different buffers (collectively called a GBuffer) and combined together to make the final image. You can see three of these buffers in the debug screenshots below. From top to bottom are the color, normal, and light buffers. These get combined with a depth buffer to create our fully lit scene. The results are very fast, even on a mid-range GPU. The heaviest scene below is “Daggerfall from Above”, with almost every building and light visible. Total render time is about 12ms, and most of that is spent rendering the geometry. The lighting itself takes almost no time at all.
This is only the first of several visual enhancements intended for Daggerfall Modelling Beta 2. Don’t worry if you have an older computer and just want to export the models. You will be able to turn off or scale back these rendering features using options.
 Daggerfall Castle |
 Privateer’s Hold Throne Room |
 Daggerfall from Above |
 Scourg Barrow Entrance |
The SVN repository has been updated to VS2010/XNA4.0 solution & code. If you are building DaggerfallModelling from source please ensure you have the latest version of the .NET Framework 4.0 and XNA Game Studio 4.0. You will also need to be using Visual Studio 2010 (or Express 2010) to load the new project.
A few bugs remain after porting to XNA 4.0. These will be ironed out over the next few weeks.
I’ve received a few emails from programmers trying to build Daggerfall Modelling from source and experiencing problems. The reason for their frustrations is that Daggerfall Modelling is built as a VS2008/XNA3.1 project. This means it will only build with Visual Studio (Express) 2008 with XNA Game Studio 3.1 installed. Attempting to build with VS2010/XNA4.0 will fail due to breaking changes in the latest version of XNA.
I also get the occasional email from Windows XP users with an older version of the .NET Framework 2.0 (pre-SP2) that experience a crash when opening a dungeon. This problem is caused by a bug in the .NET Framework 2.0 that was resolved in Service Pack 2, and can be fixed by upgrading/patching .NET.
The reason I stuck to older versions was to ensure my tools remained accessible to more people. On the flip side, not everyone wants to install an older version of Visual Studio and XNA just to compile my code. I’m also running the risk that Windows XP users will come across that crash without having read my getting started page for Daggerfall Modelling.
After serious thought, I have decided to make some changes to my source code:
The DaggerfallConnect class library and Daggerfall Imaging 2 will remain based on .NET 2.0 for now, but I might bring these forward at a later date.
The SVN will be updated in the next few days with these changes. The next release of Daggerfall Modelling (Beta 2) will require the latest versions of .NET and XNA Frameworks to run.
I’ve completed the first pass at collision and gravity systems in Daggerfall Modelling. This still needs a few passes to fix some bugs, but is largely completed.
I’m not implementing a full physics simulation, just camera-scene collision and simple velocity for gravity. This is a looong way from a real game system, but it’s more than acceptable for a fancy model viewer. If you’d like to see an early preview of this feature check out the YouTube video below. This was recorded while using an XBOX360 controller, which is why you see a crosshair in the middle of the screen.
The first beta release of Daggerfall Modelling is now up for download. I have decided not to enable gravity and collision in this release because I am not happy with the state they are in. They will be enabled in the next release. Following are the final release notes for this version.
If you are installing Daggerfall Modelling for the first time, make sure you read this first!
The controls have changed in some places. Any view rotations on the left mouse button have been moved to the right mouse button. This has been done to free up the left-mouse button for new features down the road. For updated information on controls in the views, check the appropriate page in the Daggerfall Modelling Wiki.
I hope you enjoy this release of Daggerfall Modelling.
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Updates