Daggerfall

Just a few days ago I’ve stumbled upon new attempt at bringing Daggerfall back to life. Ruins of Hill Deep is a total conversion mod (like quite a few for Morrowind and Oblivion). Author of the RoHD is Interkarma, well known person in Daggerfall fan community. He wrote quite a few tools for Daggerfall over the years and the new 3D engine is based on their code base. Well, good luck with the project and hopefully we’ll finally see some Daggerfall action again soon.

Another remake currently in works is DaggerXL (mentioned in Daggerfall for Free!). Unfortunately, after a really promising start its development slowed down so let’s hope it will pick up the pace again (the author is currently merging several of his engines for remakes, like Dark Forces and Blood, into one shared engine).

Last but not least, Daggerfall turned 15 this August. So let’s watch this official trailer:

Or a guy with shotgun wreaking havoc among Daggerfall’s popular town guards:

Arena

I tried running TES: Arena on Android phone recently. There’s a free DOSBox port for Android called aDOSBox. On my Nexus S (1Ghz ARM CPU) aDOSBox runs Arena at about 1 FPS. So it is far from playable speed but new phones could get usable frame rates maybe in a year or two (on Galaxy S II it’s already noticeably faster). Main problem is controlling the game since there are nearly no usable buttons/keys on the phone. Also Arena is quite “mouse heavy” as you need to move the mouse holding the right button to swing your weapon.

Apart from free a DOSBox, there is also paid AnDOSBox that is supposed to be faster. See this youtube video of Daggerfall running on HTC Desire (1GHz CPU as well) which seems to be faster than Arena in aDOSBox (confused by the similar name? They also have nearly identical icon!).  Do you know any other alternative for running Arena on smart phones?

Some city in Tamriel

Arena character overview

Game Resources

New tool for extracting and converting Arena files appeared on UESP site last year. It’s command line utility based on WinArena (mentioned in post HoMaM 2 and Arena remakes). You can get the source code in C at UESP Arena-Files.

I’ve been thinking about creating some GUI for Arena files browsing and extraction. Daggerfall has great tools created by community for fiddling with its assets but Arena not so much. File format decoding would have to be based on WinArena too, as it’s the known only tool (and stuff based on it) that can read more than just some textures or extract file archives. No file format documentation can be found on the net either (though there’s lot of info for Daggerfall formats). So WinArena’s code is basically the only documentation/reference available.

And finally, the official Arena trailer:

Today you can play original DOS version of  HoMaM 2 in DosBox. It wasn’t the case few years ago when DosBox wasn’t able to run SVGA games. There’s also Windows version of HoMaM 2 executables in Heroes Of Might And Magic 2 Gold (expansion disk included). However, neither of these two options take advantage of today’s high resolution monitors. Map view will always be stretched from it’s original 640×480 resolution.

Several years ago, I stumbled upon Free Heroes II project. It’s a GPL cross-platform (SDL based) implementation of Heroes of the Might and Magic II engine. It’s been steadily progressing over the years and fortunately hasn’t died like many other remakes of older games. Today, “standard game” mode is playable as well as hot seat multiplayer. Very nice feature of Free Heroes II is that map view is not stretched to higher resolutions. Instead, you can see larger portion of a map without the need for a lot of scrolling around. Let’s hope we’ll see version 1.0 in near future.

Another game I’d like to see remade is the first The Elder Scrolls game Arena. There hasn’t been any known attempt at remake Arena – unlike its sequel Daggerfall (though all past remakes failed the latest one, DaggerXL, remains very promising). No description of Arena file formats is available on the Internet either (with few exceptions of raw images or formats shared by more Bethesda games) – again unlike Daggerfall where almost everything is described in detail.

I was pleasantly surprised few months ago when I found out about WinArena. It was originally Arena resource extractor and converter (textures, maps, sounds, sprites, …) with 3D engine capable of  displaying Arena maps added later. Unfortunately there are only two versions you can find on the net and the latest is dated December 2005 – so it’s long since dead.

3D engine uses software rendering in 256 color mode like original Arena (it supports higher resolutions though). According to the author, many of the effects in the game are based on palette manipulation tricks so it wouldn’t be possible to get the exact Arena look using standard hardware accelerated 3D API like Direct3D or OpenGL.

What’s best on WinArena is that full source code is provided. And since it handles most if not all Arena file formats, getting their description is just a matter of going through the code. I’d also love the possibility to revisit all the main maps in the game so maybe I’ll modify it a little bit (WinArena currently starts at the beginning of actual Arena gameplay – in the prison like most TES games do).

You can get latest version of WinArena at TESNexus.

Just before publishing this post I also found Python port of Elder Scrolls: Arena which also seems inactive at the moment (there’s some resource extraction Python code in the project’s repository).

There were a lot of attempts at remakes of Daggerfall but all failed so far. However, a new promising one appeared recently and it’s progressing at warp speed since then (one month from wrongly textured entrance of Privateer’s Hold dungeon to rendering city blocks). Check out development blog and downloads at the homepage of DaggerXL. You need original Daggerfall data files to run the demo – no problem now when you can get it free.

Daggerfall Workshop was recently reopened as well. It’s a home of tools that let you explore Daggerfall’s game assets (textures, models, maps, music, etc.). There’s also a new exploring tool in development that looks really good, with very interesting blog posts about various Dagger’s file formats, rendering techniques, and so on.

I did my small share of dabbling in Daggerfall’s file formats too. Image and texture loaders in Object Pascal are part of ElderImagery extension of Imaging library and I’ve got BSA archive handler somewhere too. I’m now thinking of adding SKY format (backdrop images used in game for skies and far away mountains) loader, just for fun I guess.

When writing about Daggerfall, one cannot forget mentioning its music which was really excellent. Much more atmospheric and fitting than the music in recent Elder Scrolls games (there was also a lot more tracks). Check out Robert Hood’s arrangements of Eric Heberling’s original music tracks.

UFO: Extraterrestrials homepage:
http://www.ufo-extraterrestrials.com.
UFO at Gamers Gate (digital download for EU and rest of the globe except North America): Gamers Gate UFO page.
UFO at Matrix Games (digital download for North America): Matrix Games UFO page.

Boxed version will be available in few weeks.
Now working on first patch…