Time, Sky and Interiors

The next thing I implemented was proper time of day support. The city lights turn on and off based on the time and the lighting/fog get much darker at night. This leads to the next visual feature: skies! During the day, Daggerfall uses 2 textures for the sky – an East and West image, which form a sort of cylinder around the player. For a given region there are 32 different sets sky images, ranging from dusk to noon which are then played backwards from noon to evening – but with the east and west textures swapped in order to have the sun travel the whole arc through the sky. As you look up, DaggerXL limits how far up it scrolls the sky so that you can’t see past the top (which wasn’t a problem in Daggerfall since you couldn’t look up as far). No such limits are used when looking down since the bottom color is stretched as far as it needs to be. Night skies are simpler, there is only one texture that is tiled to form the “cylinder.” [Note: it’s not really mapped to a cylinder because that would imply perspective distortion when looking up or down but its an easy way to visualize the effect]. I also, finally, adjust the exterior building textures based on region so all the buildings should now look correct from the outside.

In addition, if a building has an interior you can click on the door and enter. Interiors show up correctly, except for modifying texture indices based on region in some buildings, as do all the decorations and flats. The only things missing are doors (the internal doors that rotate, the doors leading outside are there) and NPCs. Those things are next on my list. Anyway you can also leave and go back outside too, of course. When you go inside, the exterior is turned off and only the proper interior (and it’s flats) is rendered. Conversely the interiors are not rendered when outside.

Sky screenshots at different times of day:

Screenshots of various interiors: