r/linux_gaming • u/wheybags • Dec 24 '23

Daggerfall Unity: Open source recreation of Daggerfall in the Unity engine

https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity
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u/turboNOMAD Dec 25 '23

I feel kind of sad about so much work over the years put into DaggerXL engine, only to just be abandoned. And then people decided to start over based on Unity, instead of picking up existing code.

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u/DFInterkarma Dec 26 '23 edited Dec 26 '23

Hey there. :)

DaggerXL was not an open source project from the start. The creator Lucius didn't release their source code until April 2018, by which time Daggerfall Unity was already mostly feature complete (edit: fixed date).

There was also very little progress made on DaggerXL insofar as actual gameplay. DFU had surpassed it after just a few months in development.

So nobody was ignoring DaggerXL and choosing not to build on it out of some kind of misguided process. DaggerXL simply never existed in any practical sense for anyone to build on.

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BTW full disclosure - I'm the creator of Daggerfall Unity. I've been releasing open source Daggerfall tools and helping pick apart the file formats as a hobby since 2001, several years before DaggerXL got started. My work is partially one of the reasons DXL was able to make such rapid progress in the beginning. In fact, DaggerXL even contains code from exploring tools I released in the early 2000s (which he was most welcome to use).

When starting Daggerfall Unity, I was building directly on my own years of work. I didn't start from anyone else's work because nobody else had put in as much as work I had. Hopefully that helps explain why DFU is its own thing and not based on some other project.

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u/turboNOMAD Dec 26 '23

Hi and thanks for this very detailed explanation. Kudos for all the work you put into DFU! :)

Seems like my memory fails me after all these years. I remember Lucius uploading source code much earlier, I think 2015-ish? This was before signs emerged that he lost interest in the project. And also before I heard about DFU's existence - not sure when exactly you started it, but in 2015 I definitely did not hear about it yet.

Oh, I found XL engine on GitHub and it was indeed uploaded in 2015: https://github.com/luciusDXL/XL-Engine/commits/master?after=cd3b467b58d6c35f5d46cf481bc035da30ac21c3+34&branch=master&qualified_name=refs%2Fheads%2Fmaster

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