u/DFInterkarma

These settings go back to Unity 5 days (DFU started dev around the same time Unity 5 came out). That's where the names of presets come from.

https://docs.unity3d.com/560/Documentation/Manual/class-QualitySettings.html

They control things like shadow distance and quality. DFU ended up putting some of these dials into its own settings, so it's not that relevant anymore. Hopefully it gets a makeover someday.

LOVE the OG. This game shifted the course of my life for decades. :)

Hey there! :) I'm the creator and lead developer of DFU from early tools through to 1.0. The Daggerfall Unity GOG Cut was something GOG did on their own initiative, for their own reasons. It wasn't something I was involved in.

They did kindly offer to place unmodded Daggerfall Unity on their store, but it required me to sign a legally binding digital distribution agreement that provided indemnity for GOG and none for myself. The independent legal advice I received was that because Daggerfall wasn't my IP, this would expose me to more legal risk than I had already accepted building Daggerfall Unity in the first place. So I declined.

This also would have burdened me with maintaining the release long term, which wasn't something I could face at the time. In 2022-23, I was dealing with a parent at end of life, the loss of a beloved pet, and no longer able to work in my small business because it was too physically and emotionally demanding on top of everything else. With DFU coming to a close around the same time, it was like my whole world had ended. I had to pick myself up after 2023 and start again, and I'm very fortunate to be doing well again a few years later.

Upon reflection, I don't believe the GOG Cut was a net positive for DFU. It left a bad first impression for a lot of people. This cut deeply after putting in almost 10 years building it for people's first experience to be a buggy mashup of different mods that didn't look anything like what I had built. It also left me with the tax of supporting everyone coming to me with a stream of problems that had nothing to do with the base game.

Other than convenience (which I totally get), I think the best place for Daggerfall Unity is where it is now. Free and in the hands of the community to do with it as they will, not being controlled by a single creator or company. I look forward to seeing where it goes and what people make in the next 10 years.

DFU was already everything I'd dreamed of years ago, and it somehow keeps on getting better thanks to the modders and community around it.

Woooaaah! This is a dream come true. Incredible work!

Hey there! Thank you for your kind words, you should know how much they lifted me up this morning. Watching people enjoy playing and modding DFU makes all those years of effort worthwhile. :)

Incredible work as always!

Yep, the source is a screenshot I made in 2018 and posted to Twitter when first developing the Smaller Dungeons feature. I wanted to show that I could make dungeons smaller down to 1 interior block or larger up to 64 interior blocks. Here's the tweet.

https://x.com/gav_clayton/status/1021943523199700992

Most Daggerfall dungeons fall somewhere in the range of 1-3 interior blocks. That 64-block "Cthulhu" dungeon was just me having fun while making DFU.

In the years since then, I keep seeing people pass this screenshot around as an example of what Daggerfall dungeons look like, even though it's around 20 times larger than the largest DF dungeons.

Even better, the last time I tried telling someone this dungeon didn't exist outside of my dev environment, they pushed back really hard saying that they've seen dungeon this large in classic. :D

Internally it's because the action record on the flat say "play a sound when clicked" but doesn't define which sound to play. That ghostly moan is like the "oops tell mark now" of sound files.

The letter is fine, it's just the tooltip.

Macros don't expand in tooltips for performance reasons, as certain macros require world data lookups to complete. This can result in momentary stalls mousing around the inventory as world data is parsed. Heavily modded world data can makes it feel like the game is freezing intermittently in inventory when mouse touches these items, which was the more serious problem.

I could have handled this better by only bypassing problem macros in tooltips, but I was becoming very overwhelmed towards the end of beta and made the decision to limit macros in tooltips so I could focus on fixing more serious issues and readying localisation for 1.0.

So more of a limitation than a bug, and hopefully it gets some attention and refinement someday.

Reading the comments here is good for the soul. It makes all the years working on DFU worthwhile knowing that people continue to play and enjoy it.

The one that fills the entire screen is the most technically correct. Use whatever your monitor's best/native resolution is (e.g. 1024x768), then enable retro mode with 4:3.

The vertical stretching is normal. For anyone interested, following is a more detailed explanation why this happens.

In the old days a common video standard for games was Mode13h, which is 320x200 (16:10). But most consumer monitors of the time displayed 4:3 (e.g. 640x480 or 1024x768). This resulted in our video signal being stretched 20% vertically between the game's video buffer and the monitor's output. A lot of games compensated by building art around this. For example, drawing circles a bit fatter so they looked properly circular when stretched vertically by the display signal. Daggerfall's art direction is a bit hit and miss with this, but you'll still notice much of the art (e.g. wandering NPCs) are more proportional with the 20% vertical stretch and too wide at 16:10.

Daggerfall Unity doesn't get this perfectly correct - it is a ground-up recreation in a totally different engine after all. It does its best to support the full range of players from the most retro through to most heavily modded and everything in between. Recreating a game that was intended to run entirely in one resolution and support a wide range of modern hardware and displays was a really challenging thing. I didn't always get it right, but I always did the best I could at the time.

Hey there. :) Daggerfall is natively 16:10 (320x200). The trick is to enable retro mode and 4:3 scaling, and it will stretch that extra 20% vertically to 4:3. Link below has steps.

https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity/wiki/Enabling-Retro-Mode

Haha this looks fun! Awesome idea. :)

Beautiful screens! I'm astounded how far DFU's modding scene has come.

Hey! :) I believe this specific issue was fixed before 1.0, but I can't say for certain. I stepped away from DFU after 1.0 and now it's community-driven. Try asking on Lysandus' Tomb Discord and see if anyone knows for if this is still a known problem.

https://discord.gg/rn95kxPGpg

The only way to fly!

Hello KoW! Thank you for your kind words, always. :) Daggerfall Unity is a very special creation, and I'm proud that it is completely owned by the wider community now. Watching this thing I began take on a life of its own and continue growing almost a year after I took my hands off the wheel is incredibly satisfying.

It will start taking shape next year, but I wouldn't expect release state for at least a couple of years. If you want to follow development, I'm documenting my progress about once per month at https://dev.interkarma.net/

You're welcome. :) Of course, updating engine version on master (if and when Kab decides it's time) will affect every DFU user and mod creator for all platforms, not just Mac. That's why it's such a big decision for people who volunteer their time to the project, as the number of support requests will ramp up whenever engine version is stepped up.

Hey there. :) The shortest path is to fork the project with your changes on git and release builds against your fork. That way anyone who wants it can review code differences and download your builds. You'll be responsible for fielding any bug reports and supporting your build.

If you're looking for something a bit more "official", I'm no longer actively involved in stewardship or support of the project and have handed this over to u/kaboissonneault. You could try reaching out to Kab here or on the Lysandus' Tomb Discord for Daggerfall Unity.

The engine upgrade is largest hurdle, as this will require some mods other than straight asset replacers to be rebuilt against new version. Having done this several times from 2015-2023, this change can take a while to push fully through the community awareness and creates a higher support burden for maintainers for some time. It's up to Kab if and when he even wants to tackle this as part of the master release builds. But once engine is upgraded beyond the 2019 LTS release, then it would make sense to build against Apple Silicon moving forward.

Hey there! :) Someone else has already mentioned I've moved on to creating my own game. I wanted to add that I'm unlikely to attempt another recreation like DFU. It was a once-in-a-lifetime project that consumed about 20 years from the early days of reverse engineering file formats all the way to the finish line. That's an incredible feat for an individual and required some amount of sacrifice from my one mortal life. Daggerfall is the only game I was ready to make that sacrifice for.

But it brings me great joy in my life that so many people have played Daggerfall Unity, and it's incredible people enjoyed it enough to ask me to repeat the process with another game. Thank you for reaching out.

Very well done!

This happens when the "aa" and "Text" folders in StreamingAssets don't match the executable version.

Always extract each version of DFU to a fresh new folder, never on top of old install, and don't copy anything from the old install into the new install. Mismatched files and old mods cause the majority of problems people experience with DFU.

It's best to install updated mods fresh each time rather than copying them over, but if you do copy over StreamingAssets to copy mods, be sure to avoid the "aa" and Text" folders at minimum.

Yeah, just overthinking it. I do that all the time too haha :)