The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall DaggerXL Project

Over the weekend we’ve been introduced to the DaggerXL engine – an ambitious one-man project that seeks to “fully emulate” The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall and “optionally enhance” it by adding higher resolution textures and gameplay elements that never made it into the original release of the game. The engine is still in a pre-alpha state, but quite a bit of progress has been made with the project’s most recent v0.15 and v0.16 releases:

I’ve released version 0.16 with some of the UI is implemented. After the title screen you see the Load/New/Exit screen Load will (for now) load your quick save game (same as F2 once you’re in-game), Start will begin in Privateer’s Hold (the previous default) and Exit will immediately exit the program. Hitting the highlight keys will have the same effect (L, S and E).

Previously if you hit the Escape button while in-game, the game would immediately exit. Now it brings up the Options dialog like Daggerfall. You can also click on the (Options) button in the on-screen UI. So far you can save (equivalent to the quick save for this build F1), Load (same as quick load F2), Exit (the only way to exit the game now, except for closing the window of course) and Continue.

While rest isn’t implemented yet, I now have it skip ahead a few hours whenever you click on the control. This will allow you to change the time of day quickly without having to reload the program.

…

The fast travel UI is slightly better, you’ll no longer (randomly) teleport to a location when clicking on a region this was caused by holding down the mouse button while the mouse happened to be over a location. You now start at the edge of a location, looking in, rather than at a seemingly random location (which could be inside a building). If you travel between regions, models will always have their textures swapped to the correct region corrected textures, even if it was loaded previously. Some missing textures will be displayed now, which caused some really weird results in some locations. Some block record errors have been fixed, so the missing tiles (such as Wayrest) will now show up, in addition there would be some incorrect tiles on occasion which are also fixed.

There are still some other issues that need to be fixed, mainly collision issues and short pauses at tile boundaries but I’ve decided to plunge into the gameplay and roll the previously mentioned fixes into a build without delaying a build due to those issues. Hopefully I can get gameplay builds coming out pretty quickly with larger systems being worked on in the background across multiple builds (in other words keep the existing systems working so that I can keep builds coming out regularly even if something like collision issues are taking a while). My explanation is probably confusing so I’ll say it simply I want to get to the point where builds are released regularly that focus mostly on getting the core gameplay complete. The game should starting becoming truly (playable) very soon.

The project also brings a new start menu, animated logo, and cinematic introduction to the game, which you can see in the YouTube videos below:

Thanks, RPGWatch.