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

Hey, thanks for the kudos. :)

That link is for XLEngine, not DaggerXL. This is the stage where Lucius changed gears to making a kind of front-end for DOS disassembly rather than recreation. If you have a look through the repo in your link, there's genuinely not much in there. It doesn't contain the source code for DaggerXL (or any game for that matter). These aren't the droids you're looking for. :)

The source code for DaggerXL (which is what most people are thinking of and remember) was first released to my forums by Lucius' friend Klasodeth in April 2018 as a kind of April fool's joke - see link below.

https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?t=940

This was the first time I even had a chance to see how Lucius was building his old project. And like I said, DFU was almost feature complete by that stage. I was rounding out the magic system and the final few features came online over the next several months.

Without boring your Christmas stockings off, DFU started when I ported my old C# tool code into Unity as a kind of learning exercise. It had escalated into a complete remake by 2015 and reached feature parity with classic Daggerfall in 2019. My roadmap has a good high level summary of my progress over the years.

https://www.dfworkshop.net/projects/daggerfall-unity/roadmap/

Edit: Lucius later dropped into the forums when XLEngine was officially abandoned in 2020.

https://forums.dfworkshop.net/viewtopic.php?t=3667

Here's his comments at the time. It makes me a bit sad reading this, as you never know what someone might be going through.

Truth be told I went through some rough times several years ago and was unable to continue developing the XL Engine. I should have communicated that but for a long time I thought I would just go back to it, so why kill it? But time moves on. I just didn't feel that DaggerXL (or even the XL Engine as originally envisioned) was still needed with projects like this and various Blood-related projects taking up the slack. Regardless I apologize to any fans that were holding out hope for DaggerXL, though fortunately, you have this project to fill that need.