News Archives

2004-02-26: I've been looking into the HAZE.### and SHADE.### files. So far, I've determined the following:

HAZE.001 is definitely used for fog-related fading effects, but the background color of fog is apparently hard-coded.
Rain with mist never appears when you want to use it for testing. :)

2004-02-24: Added more of Donald Tipton's old stuff. Renamed the specifications category to Documents.

2004-02-23: Added my SKY##.DAT format guide. Put a new specifications category on the navbar. Made adjustments to this site so that it can be mirrored or relocated more easily.

2004-02-20: Added my new SKY##.DAT to BMP converter.

2004-02-14: The VID format spec has been mirrored on Interkarma's forums so it's still available when my site is offline. Addendum: Created an archives page for all the old news.

2004-02-09: Early this morning, I used my town editor to add an extra row of buildings in Gothway Garden, Daggerfall. Daggerfall Cartographer displayed the extra blocks as expected, but when I went there in the game to see if everything was working correctly, the extra buildings were nowhere to be seen. Later, I tried changing a section of wall in Wayrest. When I travelled there to look, the game promptly crashed to the desktop. I have a general idea of what's wrong, but in order to fix it, I will need to develop BSA editing capability and probably implement a parser for FACTION.TXT. Looks like I'm becoming a Chinese jet pilot sooner than I thought. Update: If anyone has the source for the most recent (~~late 2002~~ Edit: August 8, 2003) version of Donald Tipton's ATLAS tool, it would speed development immensely.

2004-02-05: Added a short listing of my current projects (with status info) for those who feel like keeping track of how much work I'm not doing.

2004-02-04: Updated the VID format spec (text-only version here). Made some formatting changes here.

2004-01-17: I haven't done much development lately, as I've spent the last couple weeks shopping for parts for a new computer. All the hardware is either here or in transit, but I don't have enough money to buy the operating system. As a result, I have decided to start requesting donations in the software section.

2004-01-02: Finished (I hope) work on the frame compression routines. Today's test video is pretty much the same as the last one, only smaller.

2003-12-23: I have been experimenting with VID frame compression. There are still a few bugs to be worked out, but my compression utilities work well enough that I was able to put together this short test video. Just rename it to ANIM0001.VID (after backing up the original, of course) and Daggerfall will play it on startup.

2003-12-21: Big update to the VID format spec based on info from Corroded Coder and a few experiments of my own. The HTML version has been updated to match.

2003-12-19: Updated my VID audio dumper to v1.13. It took a few hours to get it working correctly, but with the new data buffering routines, it goes through the file so fast you can't even read the output.

2003-12-18: Released my VID audio dumper. The previously-mentioned issue with WAV files has been fixed. Fixed the same problem in the (still very much beta) VID everything-dumper I've been hiding in the VID spec. Use them wisely, soldier!

2003-12-17: Added my plaintext copy of the VID spec. This includes most of the same notes, etc. as the HTML one, but is smaller.

2003-12-14: Put up my (X)HTMLized version of the VID file format specification. Needs a bit of polishing still, but it should be useful.

2003-12-09: Put up (a brightened version of) the Daggerfall title art Donald Tipton used to have on his site (which seems to have disappeared).

2003-12-07: Look, shiny things:

2003-12-06: Currently working on a utility to extract audio and still frames from VID files. I should have something vaguely usable ready next week, assuming my head doesn't explode in the interim. Update: It's working, but WiMP doesn't like my WAVs. I'll see what I can do.

2003-11-30: Screwed with the layout a bit to match the other site.

2002-01-29: Wrote a quick-and-dirty utility for creating BSAs from scratch. Currently, it's unfeasable for anything but very small jobs. Hopefully, I can improve it later.