Another classic game is getting closer to being fully playable natively on Linux. The project to recreate The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall in the Unity engine has hit an important milestone and now the the main quest is completely playable.
Daggerfall is the second entry in Bethesda’s long-running Elder Scrolls series of role-playing games and was originally released way back in 1996. It was an ambitious game, with thousands upon thousands of locations to explore in an virtual game area the size of a small real-world nation. It’s a game that I personally lost a lot of time to way back in the day and I’m happy to see that a project that allows me to play it natively on Linux is coming along swimmingly.
Daggerfall Unity hit the important milestone of having the main quest line be playable from beginning to end. In the post announcing this milestone, the main developer behind the project details how it’s taken nearly a year of development time to reach this point and it was probably the biggest hurdle to clear in the project. There’s still a lot left on the project roadmap including the magic system, important bits of the UI and things like vampirism that have yet to be implemented. Hopefully won’t be too long before everything else falls into place.
Currently the quest system is only available in the unstable builds, with further testing needed before a stable build is put out. Bethesda made Daggerfall free a few years ago to celebrate 15 years of the Elder Scrolls series, so you can download a copy directly from them.
You can try out Daggerfall Unity by grabbing a build here. There are also links there to acquire the game and see the code repository for the project.
Thanks for the tip Sasa.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by Shmerl on 18 October 2017 at 5:08 am UTC
Quoting: ShmerlYou can argue that project that depends on closed middleware while being open itself is open, but I don't agree with it. The claim that "anyone can write an engine" is just a mind excercise. In practice there is no such engine (so far). So you can't just go ahead and do what FOSS is intended to enable, i.e. build, run, modify, re-distribute as you wish. If anyone would make such engine and attach it to this project - then I can agree.By that logic, almost no project is open source if it has dependencies.
Sure, if a project that is, for example, a game engine depends on Ogre for rendering, then you could completely replace the code in question to use your own renderer. Or you could replace parts of Ogre to work differently.
None of that will ever happen, though, because it is beyond "not feasible". Nobody sane would ever do that.
As such, it is just a mind excercise as well.
What happens is that you will download Ogre and build the project.
Just as you would download Unity and build the project.
The only difference is that you could never build the Unity project and sell it without paying something to Unity and that you cannot build Unity yourself for free.
While it depends on the specific license for the game engine project using Ogre if you can sell it (Ogre is MIT, so it doesn't care) and you can build Ogre yourself.
You can disagree all you want, but you cannot change some facts:
A project that has open sources is, by definition, open. What middleware it uses is irrelevant, as dependencies are not part of the project's sources - they are dependencies. It might not be FOSS (not sure), but it sure is open source - look at the words. The project's sources are open.
If it were any different, a project depending on any dependency would be unable to have any different license. And projects depending on closed source libraries would be unable to make their own sources open.
Oh, and yes, you can replace Unity in such a Unity project. By keeping all the logic intact, just changing the engine-specific code pieces to use whatever C# stuff instead of Unity. And converting the assets.
So, yeah you can "build, run, modify, re-distribute as you wish". It's just very unlikely that anyone would do it as it is too much work.
Quoting: TheSHEEEPBy that logic, almost no project is open source if it has dependencies.
It's not open as a complete result, yes. It's open as a part only. In this case, do you care about the part, or about usable result? If about the later, then it's not open for you. Or go ahead, and replace Unity, then you can call it open. As you said, it's not feasible for most, so claiming that you could hypothetically is pointless.
Last edited by Shmerl on 18 October 2017 at 6:08 am UTC
lucifertdark Oct 18, 2017
lucifertdark Oct 18, 2017
Quoting: fractalDoes it carry over the gamebreaking bugs? It's not a true Daggerfall experience if you're able to play it.I arrived relatively late to the Elder Scrolls Universe, the first one I played was Oblivion, then Morrowind & finally Skyrim, I've never tried Daggerfall or the first one.
burningserenity Oct 18, 2017
Quoting: MayeulCI am just curious to know the answer: why didn't they use OpenMW's engine? Is this game really that different?
Is it a total recreation of the game (assets and everything), or just the game engine?
Yes, Daggerfall is very different from Morrowind. Daggerfall is a massive, procedurally generated open world, Morrowind is 100% handcrafted. Theoretically it might be possible, but the procedural generation tools don't exist for Morrowind right now, OpenMW or otherwise.
Quoting: HoriQuoting: ShmerlSince it's using Unity, I won't call it open source really. Their own part is open, but the engine is not. In contrast, OpenMW is actually using a FOSS engine - Open Scene Graph.The *game* part of it is open-source, and that is all that matters.
All that matters for what? You still need Unity to have a playable result. If you don't care about playing it, then sure, it all that matters just code wise.
Last edited by Shmerl on 18 October 2017 at 4:17 pm UTC
ZeroPointEnergy Oct 18, 2017
Quoting: fractalDoes it carry over the gamebreaking bugs? It's not a true Daggerfall experience if you're able to play it.Yeah, that game was pretty horrible when it came to bugs :D . But still a lot of fun. "Hold!! Hold!! Hold!!"
Quoting: ShmerlCode doesn't have to work (at all or only by itself) to be open source.Quoting: HoriQuoting: ShmerlSince it's using Unity, I won't call it open source really. Their own part is open, but the engine is not. In contrast, OpenMW is actually using a FOSS engine - Open Scene Graph.The *game* part of it is open-source, and that is all that matters.
All that matters for what? You still need Unity to have a playable result. If you don't care about playing it, then sure, it all that matters just code wise.
Sure, you need non-open source software in this case to get a playable result, but that doesn't change the fact that the project itself is open source.
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