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A tedious travel mod for daggerfall unity

TheNewBob/TediousTravel

Folders and files, repository files navigation, tedious travel.

A travel mod for daggerfall unity to make traveling more tedious. Because there's weirdoes like me who find that strangely immersive.

In explicit, the classic daggerfall "click-and-be-there" style of fast travel is removed from the game. Instead, you'll actually be traversing daggerfall, with a convienient "autopilot" and adjustable time compression.

A low-level character will require about 4 minutes real time for a good days travel. I made it from Gothway Garden to Daggerfall in about half an hour real time on horseback, though at least half of that time was spent chatting people up at ins, which are now suddenly very, very useful landmarks.

How to build

Check out the daggerfall unity source code, then check out this repository into the Assets/Game/Mods folder. The structure is now fully compliant with virtual mods, so all you have to do to run it within Unity is click play and activate the mod in the DFU mods screen. To build, open the mod tools, load in Assets/Game/Mods/TediousTravel/tedioustravel-dfmod.json, and click build.

How to play

You can open the travel map normally and click on a destination you want to travel to. Instead of ye olde travel options, you'll see an estimated travel time and a prompt whether to start travelling or not. If you answer yes, you'll be taken back to the game, where your character starts heading in the right direction.

In the top you'll see a menu where you can adjust your time compression, interrupt your travel (stop, but do not clear the selected destination), cancel (stop and clear the destination) or take you back to the map to see where you are. Pressing esc will do the same as the interrupt button. You can at any time select a new destination in the map. If you exit the map without setting a new destination, any old destination you might have set will be preserved.

If you interrupted your travels, or got interrupted by enemies, and press the button for your travel map, you will first be asked if you want to resume travel to your current destination. If you answer no, you will be taken to the map as usual, if you answer yes, you will immediately resume travel without going to the map first.

About travel duration

First off, the estimated travel duration will depend on your base speed when you open the map. If you sit on a horse, the duration will be a lot less (usually about half) of what it would be if you opened the map on your feet. If you are currently on performance enhancing drugs (aka potions) that will wear of in a few minutes, the estimated time will be highly misleading. Self-overestimation is a common sideeffect of drug use, after all... ;)

The travel time for the first 24 hours will be shown as hours of pure travel time (no rest). Times above 24 hours will be shown in days, but assuming 8 hours of actual travel per day. This is because...

Endurance matters!

Daggerfall has an endurance cost for just walking, and it also applies while riding. You don't really notice this during the game, but this mod brings it up rather painfully. A low-level character with an endurance of 50 will in fact be able to walk just shy above 8 (in-game) hours straight before kissing the ground. Plan your trip according to your abilities, and use ins and towns to rest. Or just travel as the crow flies and rest in the open, where you'll more likely than not get chewed on by a grue.

Horses matter, too!

No, seriously. If you're starting a new character and plan on using this mod, a Horse should be at the absolute top of your list of things to buy before going anywhere much.

Fast Travel by ship

As of 0.2.0, Tedious Travel has a limited form of fast-travel. Fast-Travel by ship is now offered between port towns.

In case you didn't know, Daggerfall, while not having any visual representation for ports, does actually know which ports have a port. I'm not sure what exactly that is used for other than letting you buy ships only in port towns. A bt counterintuitively, there are actually many port towns inland. I'll just assume that those are mostly located at navigable rivers, since Daggerfall has absolutely no representation or awareness of those. Also, there's not only towns having that feature. Some farmsteads and homes, even some dungeons, appear to have a port, though the DFUnity sourcecode tells me that this flag is also used for some as of yet unknown purpose. So it's possible I'm counting some locations as having a port that were not intended to, but it's fine, since that allowed me to put a little bit more complexity in (see Travel times and accessability).

Finding and traveling between port towns

There is a new filter button labeled "ports" on the world map. It will vanish as soon as you zoom into a location, because it takes up the space some locations need for the navigation buttons. So if you want to see port towns, press that button in the world map, then zoom in to a desired location. The other filter buttons will vanish, as this is a global override. You will see all ports on the map, regardless of their type, and no locations without a port, also regardless of their type. Those types still have some significant influence though, see "Travel times and accessability".

In any case, when you click on a port town when the port filter is active, and when you are currently in a location with a port yourself, you will get a popup with a travel time and a fare. If you click yes, and have the money, you will travel to the targeted port instantly (in-game time will still pass, of course). If you are not in a location with a port, you will get the normal travel popup and continue your journey over land. If you are in a port town, and your destination is a port town, but the ports filter is not active, tedious travel will assume that you want to travel there the standard, tedious way.

Travel times and accessability

Travel times depend on how "accessible" both your start and destination port are. Which right now is just estimated by their type and size. This is to emulate the fact that from a small village, there might not be many ships available sailing to or from it. You might have to wait a while, or lay over and jump ship along the way. So your journey will take longer, and be more expensive. Both start and destination modify the time. So your voyage will take longest when traveling from a hamlet to a hamlet, and fastest when traveling from city to city.

But not all types of ports even have regular traffic. Homes (except wealthy) and dungeons are not visited by merchant ships regularly, so you won't find any ships sailing for these ports or leaving them. For all intents and purposes, they are useless to you. That is, unless you have your own ship, with which you can sail wherever the winds can take you. Time penalties for inaccessible locations as well as fares also don't apply in this case. I thought this was a nice opportunity to give ship owners a bit more advantages for their considerable investment.

Port accessibility is as follows (obviously, this only applies to locations of this type that have a port):

• Cities: Highly accessible, no time penalties.
• Inns: Quite accessible, only slight time penalties.
• Villages and temples: Reasonably accessible, medium time penalties.
• Hamlets and wealthy homes: Only sporadic traffic, high time penalties.
• Other homes, dungeons, cults: No regular shipping, only accessible with own ship.

Travel times are otherwise still calculated by the default travel time calculator. I'm not yet sure how smart this is, but it does lead to travel to and from locations far inland taking longer than between locations at the coast, or at least appears to be, which seems reasonable. If you've ever navigated rivers, you know why (Yes, I have a few times, even with a sailing boat).

Blackhead on the Isle of Balfiera

For some weird reason, the main island in the Isle of Balfiera region doesn't have a single port town, while all other (smaller) islands in the game have several. I had to promote one, or the island would be inaccessible when using tedious travel. So I promoted Blackhead. I'm mentioning this because Blackhead is a port town only in the context of Tedious Travel. Daggerfall doesn't know anything about the promotion, so you won't be able to buy a ship there, for example.

Known issues

• The framerate at higher time compression is atrocious. Not much I can do about that, but your mileage may vary based on how powerful your PC is.
• Setting time compression too high will eventually make you outrun the loading of the map around you, and you'll fall of the edge of the world. I have not currently set a hard max, because I want people with various systems to try out and see how far they can take it before deciding on a maximum setting. I have a lower mid-range laptop, and my journey into the void starts somewhere at 25x on horseback.
• If your travel path takes you straight through another town, it can happen that you get stuck on an L-shaped building. Just interrupt your travel, dislocate yourself from the wall (which by now you'll be attempting to climb), walk out of the town and resume your travel.
• The mod is not water-aware. If you run into a lake, you'll just keep going.
• Your vitals on the hud will only update when travel is interrupted, so be careful when sick, and don't get too cocky about your travel distances.

Releases 10

Contributors 4.

Letters from a middle-aged man (etc)

Daggerfall: Tedious travel mod

Roads would have helped, but who’s supposed to pay for them? I’ve been in Daggerfall for years and never paid a dime in taxes.

In classic Daggerfall, there are two ways to travel between locations on the province map: Fast travel, or traveling on your own.

You can literally walk or ride from one town or dungeon (or village or graveyard or farmstead) to another, simply look at the map to find the direction and use your compass to go in that direction. Eventually you will arrive, or else miss it and walk right past, since Daggerfall (unlike the other Elder Scrolls games) does not have roads outside of the habitation. (This is probably not realistic to make with a mod, given that Tamriel is the size of Great Britain or above, but that would have been ideal.)

Fast travel on the other hand is virtually instant for the player, but not for the character: You click on the destination and get an estimate of how long it will take given a couple different options. Then you confirm, and the new location loads. Time and date will have updated accordingly, but you the player don’t  feel  like it has taken time. The time is only relevant if you are on a deadline. Most quests have very generous deadlines, but if you take on several at the same time you may need to factor in the time.

What if you could experience distance in the game without having to hold down the forward button the whole time? There is a mod for that.

“Tedious Travel” 

Thanks to a mod developer known as jedidia , you can replace the fast travel option with what he (?) calls ‘a convenient “autopilot” and adjustable time compression.’ The autopilot is extremely simple, it just points the nose against the target and off you go. If you start it in towns, you may get stuck in buildings; but overland it is quite effective. Unlike fast travel, but like traveling on your own, you may run into hostile encounters, but the mod thoughtfully pauses the game when this happens so you can take control of the situation: Kill or be killed, or try to run away, or – if you are a linguist – convince the rampaging orcs that you are on their side and they are obliged to guard you against wild animals while you take a nap.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, why would one want to do tedious things in a game? Well, not all have a super vivid imagination. When you are used to just clicking on a map, it can be hard to get a feel for how an actual character in a medium-tech, medium-magic world would feel about distance. For instance, I’ve found myself not bothering to look for bargain shops in an unfamiliar town, instead fast traveling to a town where I know I can get good prices for my loot. That would be a lot less likely to happen if I actually had to ride for several days to get there!

Luckily you don’t have to spend several days in the wilderness even with Tedious Travel. This is where the “adjustable time compression” comes in handy. By default you move 10 times faster than normal walking / riding speed (your choice of transportation matters for travel time, obviously). You see the terrain fly by like on a train. You can slow this down if you want to enjoy the scenery, or speed it up. I got to 45 before I gave up. At some point I guess it won’t be tedious anymore, although I assume the risk of wilderness encounters remains even at high speed. (Time compression is turned off for the duration of the encounters, so don’t worry about that. Also as mentioned, the game stops and wait for you to take the reins.)

Even if you go for higher speeds like 40x or even 50x, you should still get a good idea of the difference between local and regional travel. Visiting the next village over may be a short trip, but traveling from the west coast to the north-eastern mountains or the south-eastern jungle will still be an adventure. There are two reasons for this. The first is the random encounters, as mentioned – on a long journey there will be lots of them. Related to this, there is the matter of stamina.

Stamina is not a problem during the original fast travel. In fact, if you choose cautious travel, you will arrive at daytime with full health and stamina, no matter your starting condition. But with Tedious Travel, as with manual travel, you will eventually get tired. Traveling by cart or horse is less tiring than walking, but after a day in the saddle you will no longer be able to go on. Letting your stamina get too low is also a problem if you run into bandits or monsters: Fighting them takes stamina, and if you run out of energy during the fight, they are not going to show you any mercy. Also, the chance of unfriendly visits increase if you camp out at night rather than the day.

Luckily, rural Daggerfall has a decent number of hostel villages, typically named after a long gone tavern but now occupied by one to three inns and a few other buildings (presumably where the staff lives). They always have plenty of room these days, although if you explore them you will occasionally find NPCs in various states of undress in some rooms. If you’re not looking for more combat experience, for instance because you are a linguist traveling on some scholarly quest, you may prefer to set your course for the nearest such village in the general direction you are going, and get a good night’s sleep there before moving on. They are generally very affordable. Once you start approaching travel in Daggerfall more realistically, it becomes obvious why there are so many of them – in fact, the question is why there aren’t more.

Yes, I am easily amused, I guess. In the highly unlikely case you want to try out this or any of the innumerable recent mods for Daggerfall Unity, you should go to the Daggerfall Workshop Forums – Released Mods .

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Tedious Travel 0.4.2 (2019-10-16)

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Post by jedidia » Thu Sep 27, 2018 7:22 pm

Re: Tedious Travel

Post by Interkarma » Thu Sep 27, 2018 8:05 pm

Post by Jay_H » Thu Sep 27, 2018 8:11 pm

Post by King of Worms » Thu Sep 27, 2018 8:47 pm

Post by jedidia » Thu Sep 27, 2018 8:51 pm

1. Start traveling towards anywhere. 2. Click the Map button during travel. 3. Exit out of the map. The travel menu is still on top, but I'm not moving and my horse isn't visible. 4. Click Cancel. I'm back in ordinary gameplay. 5. Attempt to travel again, and the mod has ceased working. I now use Daggerfall fast travel, not Tedious Travel.

Fatigue appears not to display in real time. I had to interrupt travel to see it change.

Well done getting your mod concept working a game never built for such a travel design, I know how challenging that must have been.

Post by Hazelnut » Thu Sep 27, 2018 9:12 pm

Post by pango » Thu Sep 27, 2018 9:17 pm

Post by jedidia » Thu Sep 27, 2018 9:26 pm

something fishy is happening with map search, sometimes I had to zoom the map region to get it working (otherwise the cursor would stay on my current location). I'm not exactly sure what's going on.

And of course it would be perfect if search could trigger your new traveling mode, but I assume you ran in some current limitation that prevented that.

When traveling, on my computer at least, the view tends to go down, at a speed that varies from travel to travel.

And water is not handled specifically at all, but that's another can of worms I guess.

Post by Midknightprince » Fri Sep 28, 2018 5:16 am

Post by jedidia » Fri Sep 28, 2018 6:45 am

I took it up to 55

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