r/Daggerfall

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https://youtu.be/US50QmZaeyE?si=h2aATJZ9bQA9H6M5

You know that Daggerfall mod that adds ambient text descriptions to the world? The one that tells you the stone wall is cold and damp, or that the air near the blacksmith smells of coal and hot iron?

That mod always stuck with me. Not because it added mechanics — but because it added presence. It made the world feel like it existed before you arrived.

I'm building a Daggerfall-inspired RPG from scratch (custom engine, C#/Vulkan, solo dev), and I knew early on I wanted something like this. So I built it — but took it one step further.

Every object in the world carries property tags: material, condition, sensory details. When you interact with something, the system reads those tags and generates a short ambient text from a pool of templates. Rough wood feels different from smooth wood. Mossy stone reads differently than dry, cracked stone. The same tree can give you a slightly different line each time.

The templates live in a JSON file — so it's fully moddable. Anyone can extend or rewrite them. And because of the way the system works, adding just one additional template or property tag multiplies the variety of the ambient texts the player can see. Since templates also support tag concatenation, the variety grows even more.
Right now, the game knows only 7 templates and 18 tags. Without tag concatenation, this results in 174 variations. With it, there could be more than 200. So you can imagine what adding just a few more templates can do.

Small feature. Big difference in how the world feels.

P.S.: This will not be the primary interaction, just like picking up items or open doors. The interaction prompt and the trigger key to activate these ambient texts will change.

For more updates, you can join my Discord: https://discord.gg/ejY3HW9qB

I been playing for a bit, reached level 7, got a few decent Magic Items, and while doing my normal routine of clearing dungeons selling off the loot and identifying items I found this.

If I understand this right this dagger has a 10% chance off-base to instantly kill whatever I stab with it, and an additional 2% for every player level, so currently it's chance is 24%, is this as absurd as I think this is?

I feel like I have been handed a budget Merunez Razor.

The idea of this build is a guy with a hammer or mace that moves really fast, ducking and weaving between enemies while dealing damage. This is sort of a follow-up to yesterday’s post.

I’d love to hear your feedback and ways in which I could improve the custom class.

I am playing Daggerfall Unity.

In case anyone’s curious, the class is named after the Valorant pro-player [NS] Dambi.

My eyes and brain are burning because of this screen but i'm still really happy to play it properly

I'm a solo dev with an enterprise C# background, and about a year ago I decided to stop fighting existing engines and build my own instead. The result is AstralForge - a custom engine written in C# (.NET 10) on top of Vulkan via Silk.NET, purpose-built for a Daggerfall-inspired open-world RPG.

What you're seeing in the video is the current state of the open world:

• Fully streaming terrain with chunk-based loading
• Multi-pass Vulkan rendering: Geometry Pass → Composite Pass with exponential-squared depth fog
• Flexible terrain splatting with noise-driven texture transitions (grass, rock, snow)
• ~7km view distance
• GPU-instanced vegetation (trees, bushes)
• Modular ECS architecture with dependency injection throughout

The engine is deliberately focused - no generics, no editor, just what the game actually needs. Every system exists because the game required it, not because a proper engine should have it.

Happy to go deep on any of the rendering or architecture decisions if anyone's curious.

Daggerfall has always lived in my head rent-free. Not because of its graphics — but because of what it represented: a world so deep and systemic that it felt like it had a life of its own. Hundreds of cities, NPCs with schedules, a economy, factions, climbing rooftops to escape guards. A world that didn't just exist as a backdrop, but as an actual place.

I've been chasing that feeling for years. So I tried Daggerfall Unity, which is a fantastic way to play the old game today. Yet despite the massive technical improvements, it still retains the controls and UI from 1996. And since no one else seems to be building exactly what I want, I decided to build it myself — engine included.

The game is a first-person open-world RPG in the spirit of Daggerfall, but built with modern technology and a contemporary approach to UI and UX. The world is procedurally generated but deterministic — same seed, same world for every player. The goal is to build interlocking systems that create emergent stories on their own. The player decides what kind of life they live in this world. Follow the main storyline. Explore dungeons. Join factions and climb the ranks. Run a trade. Or just settle down in a city and mind your own business. The game doesn't judge.

Right now there are no NPCs, no quests, no combat. Just a procedurally generated open world that I keep finding myself walking around in — which honestly tells me that something is already working.

This is what it looks like today. Still early, but it's starting to feel like a place worth living in.