Phew! Terrain is one of those rabbit-holes that keep on getting deeper the more work I put into it. Add an editor into the mix and there’s always just “one more thing” that needs to be done. Thankfully, I’m getting really close to a good baseline with the whole terrain system.

What I have so far is the shell of an editor with unlimited undo/redo, scene & properties view, and drop-down toolboxes that provide extra functionality based on the scene object you have selected.

I’ve put most of the work so far into the terrain toolbox. The screenshot below shows the toolbox in action with a terrain that has been manually deformed and arbitrarily painted using several blend textures. It’s great being able to just point and smoothly deform a terrain in real-time, then air-brush textures over the top.

I still have a ways to go before I’m using this tool to build actual game-space, but it’s getting close enough for me to build Playground2. In a few more weeks, I’ll upload a video of the editor in action while constructing the next playground build.

I’ve decided Playground2 is to be set outdoors with a few points of interest to explore. This adds some work as the editor I need for more complex environments is very much early in development. Still, I’m pushing through and here is a screenshot of my editor in its current state with a terrain loaded. Right now it’s just building random terrain, but it will be possible to manually raise/lower/smooth and paint the terrain. The sky dome and clouds are just placeholders until I create something better.

Starting with Playground2 the playground scene files and editor will be bundled and you can play with the same back-end I’m using. This might be useful for anyone interested in helping me build maps later on.

I will talk about Playground2 more in a few weeks when the editor is further along.

The following video shows a completed Ruins of Hill Deep Playground1, or “Chucking Anvils Down Stairs” build.

The purpose of this first playground is to test systems that lay the foundations of the entire mod. These are things like dynamic content conversion from Daggerfall, rendering, lighting, physics, player controller, user interface, etc.

To make the playground a little more interesting, I’ve added several physics objects with different properties for you to shoot/drop into the world.The highly vertical dungeon room (from Direnni Tower), provides a great environment to jump around and drop things from great heights.

I’m currently ahead of schedule on Playground1 and it will be ready for download in the next few days.

I’ve uploaded a video of the Playground1 Title Screen. This is the animated display you will see under the main menu.

All visual content is loaded at runtime from Daggerfall’s files into my new engine. Several effects are layered here, such as a generated starfield, animated clouds, glowing fireflies, and fullscreen bloom. Fireflies carry a point light source that illuminates anything in their immediate vicinity, including billboard sprites.

The music is remixed by Dan Goodale. I have received permission to use his excellent Daggerfall remixes in Ruins of Hill Deep. Dan’s work strikes the perfect balance of familiar-but-fresh this mod is aiming for. It’s an honour to use such incredible music in my project.