Daggerfall talk:Ingredients

resume

Well I think this is it for now. I provided the statistics and a picture for nearly all of the games ingredients. Except the ones tith a ?, because I've never came across these, but if I find them I will provide the missing informations and a picture too. — Unsigned comment by PLRDLF (talk • contribs) at 01:45 on 14 June 2008

New Images

I'm in the process of taking the icons from TEXTURE.254 and putting them up here, complete with transparency. Unfortunately they're in the original size, and I've done too much at this point to bother to go back and upscale them, at least not presently. What do you guys think - add a "## px" parameter to each image (more time-consuming but ensures original-scale images can still be used) or resize them some other time? StoneFrog 22:54, 31 January 2009 (EST)

To be honest, and not to discourage your or anything, but I'm not sure these are an improvement. Look at DF-Sapphire.png for an example. Your version doesn't look anything like the older one. For one thing, it's red instead of blue. Not having played Daggerfall myself, I don't know what it's supposed to look like, but I'd be very surprised if a sapphire were any color but blue in the game. Many of the others also end up being so small as to be unrecognizeable. Also, as a technical issue, using a "##px" parameter doesn't usually work too well when scaling an image UP. It's good for scaling down, but doesn't look so good in reverse. Also in many browsers, scaling PNG files can screw up the transparency. I think a bit more work on the back end might be needed to get these images up to snuff. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 23:09, 31 January 2009 (EST)

The sapphire is an oversight. Looking through all those nameless sprites sometimes causes me to get them mixed up. The main problem I'd say with the old icons, however, is the inclusion of the inventory background. I mean when all the icons have it, it's nice, almost looks like it's part of the website design, until you realize the UESP skin is not grey in the least. They also, and I am not offending the original uploader in saying this, a tad blurry - that is, blurrier than what I see if I simply upscale the sprites. Some sprites could be upscaled such as the gems, but others may be inconsistent with the table... StoneFrog 23:46, 31 January 2009 (EST)

Update: If I want to keep the new icons in keeping with the old ones' size (INCLUDING the inventory border) I could upscale them as much as 4x. Otherwise 2x will do. I believe the average resolution people have nowadays is 1024x1024, so I'm not entirely sure. The old icons I have left seem more than viewable on 1280x1280. 70.111.46.242 09:43, 1 February 2009 (EST)

Well, even so, many of them to me appear as just featureless dark rectangles. Dragon's scales, Ectoplasm, Fairy dragon's scales, Giant scorpion stinger, Lich dust, Mummy wrappings, Small scorpion stinger, Unicorn horn, and Wraith essence are all completely unidentifiable from the current images. Even blown up you can barely see anything. You might try doing some color-correction in Photoshop or whatever you use to increase the contrast. (Most in-game images in any of the games look too dark when viewed on the site, and need to have their contrast and/or brightness adjusted to look good.) And the scale for these is definitely a problem. Even if 7x9px is actual size in the game, it's just too small to be viewed on a modern resolution monitor. Oblivion ingredient icons are approximately 48x48px. Morrowind's are 32x32px. I'd say Daggerfall's should be at least 16x16px in order to be of much use on the site, preferably larger, like 24x24px. The old images might have been slightly blurry in some cases, but I think that's preferable to blocky and pixelated, as some of the new ones seem to be. Again, I don't know Daggerfall, so I don't know how difficult it is to get better images out of it, but some of these are just so hard to see it's not even worth having them. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:46, 1 February 2009 (EST)

Hrm, I see your point. Of course, the pixellation of the icons becomes much more apparent against a lighter background such as the wiki has, it makes them much more pleasant to look at against Daggerfall's grey inventory background. I could toy around with some brightness and contrast, although I'm not sure how easy it would be to find a good standard as the icons are so different from one another. StoneFrog 11:50, 1 February 2009 (EST)

My opinion

I wanted already to point out something about the new images for some time.

1. The original items in the TEXTURE.254 are way too small to be of any use as they come. Especially the gems have only an original resolution of 9x9. And as everybody can see, that's too small to make them of any practical use. Considering other ingredients and items in the game in general, some have a slightly higher resolution, but even the highest resolution one can find is at the most 25x25. And if you try too resize them to an appropriate dimension, you have nothing but pixels.
   I take screen-shoots for the game using DOSBox which provides a 320x200 PNG-File of the whole screen. The original items from the screen-shoots have a dimension of 75x58, which is rescaled to 150x115 using GIMP's, cubical interpolation.
   Thus resulting in a sufficient large image which has an adequate graphical quality.
2. The image provided by StoneFrog look nice when they are small, but as it was already mentioned by TheRealLurlock, they are too small. Furthermore StoneFrog obviously hasn't considered that many of the ingredients are used as thumbnail pictures in articles. With the small image the text of these pictures becomes illegible.

Result: I propose to restore the original images of the ingredients and use them as long as someone has an idea how the pictures in the TEXTURE.254 file can be manipulated to result in sufficient large images.--PLRDLF 16:13, 13 February 2009 (EST)

Sorry for the wait. Yes, I have to agree. Feel free to revert mine until I can find a suitable solution in Potatochop. StoneFrog 21:50, 26 February 2009 (EST)

EDIT: It may be worth noting that I think the original images were a bit blurry, either due to a filter or scaling the image up in an editor with a certain smooth scaling method. It may be better to get "cleaner" ones of Daggerfall running at Normal2x, no artifacts or scalers or anything like that. Of course, a whole different setup for the images may be devised before that can be done... StoneFrog 21:52, 26 February 2009 (EST)

Will restore the former pictures

Alright, I will restore the former pictures when I've some time and by the way, the scalers in DOSBox are only used when the program runs in fullresolution-mode. To my knowledge they are not used when the program runs in window-mode and the screenshoots are taken from a window-mode. The maximum resolution for a screenshoot of the DOS-prompt is 640x400, but for other applications you can only get screenshoots with a resolution of 320x200, setting the fullresolution parameter has no influence on screenshoots.--PLRDLF 11:42, 28 February 2009 (EST)

Scalers do work in windowed mode, as seen here. Are you referring to something else? You may be thinking of how windowed DOSBox typically runs with a windowresolution=original or at least "normal2x" as a scaler. StoneFrog 17:02, 24 April 2009 (EDT)

UPDATE: Also, this is a screenshot of a Ruby in an inventory slot as taken directly from DOSBox in windowed mode (meaning normal2x is on and the window is at a 640x400 resolution). Compare it to the pre-existing image of a Ruby in use by the Ingredients table. I'm sure you'll see the difference in clarity. StoneFrog 17:05, 24 April 2009 (EDT)

Everyone is welcome to provide screenshots of all ingredients, that look better than the current ones, once again. I did it once and is was a lot of work. Beside I've some serious problems in real life, that will very likely force me to end my contributions to the wiki in the near future, so I've no time to do this once again.--PLRDLF 18:24, 24 April 2009 (EDT)

Broken effects

It seems that 4 items have their effects obviously broken in fall.exe. It would be small tooth, medium tooth, big tooth and snake venom. They have effect byte set to 22, meaning "Spell resistance", but also sub effect set to non-existing subtype 2. According to official guide, those should be "Resist Poisson", which would make sense, especially that subtype 2 is Poisson in effect "Resist". I'd risk the statement, that all 4 has mistakes in type byte (22->8). To correct those, one has to change following bytes from 0x16 (hex for 22) into 0x08:

0x1b7064 - snake venom 0x1b72d4 - big tooth 0x1b7304 - medium tooth 0x1b7334 - small tooth

how do you think, would it affect potion creation? Btw, the diamond and pine branch also have bit 0x16, and according to official guide "they should be resist fire" (8,0) but are "spell resistance" (22,0) - maybe it was bug that they were set to "resist fire", it was found and fixed by changing 0x08 into 0x16, but by mistake developers changed all 0x08 into 0x16 instead of only those two, affecting also "Resist Poisson"??

Btw, if you want to check if I'm correct, check the info I found and filled at Daggerfall:DFRemake/Original_Item_Data - it should give you nice idea how to read 95% of item data from FALL.EXE, including ingredient effects. I'm still struggling with last 2 not-always unknown bytes. What's interesting, there was bug in FALLHACK used by Andyfall, it was assumed there that hitpoints are DWORD while they are WORD only. Editing hitpoints for gems for example could break/change their effects! Good that there are no mods I know about that do this.

I will not make a patch for those, because it would most likely require usage of fallhack or providing some other patching utility. I'm not running Windows but Linux and preparing such executable patch is outside of my skills. I might patch this in Arch Linux Daggerfall package I maintain - https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=50316 - because there I have facilities to do so (command line launcher written in Perl that can enable-disable multiple mods with dependencies checking, and more), but probably not many would benefit from it (only Arch Linux users), so I though that I will share the information here. If anyone have the required skills to create patch for those 4, it would be cool!

For those that are ok with using fallhack, the DHK file would be:

[FALL.EXE] 1798244 1 8 1798868 1 8 1798916 1 8 1798964 1 8 [END] — Unsigned comment by 188.122.8.69 (talk) at 14:21 on 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for contributing to the site, it is appreciated. You should however bring this up on the talk page first, like you did, and leave the article as it is, because this looks a bit... advanced. I have no knowledge of Daggerfall, so I can't help you out there. I'll leave the page as it is now, someone who has knowledge on this will come along. Also, new sections belong at the bottom of the talk page, so I moved it here ~ Dwarfmp 14:36, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Ok, so I moved other topic (about mysterious effects in ingredients, not present in spell maker or any spell) too. Anyway, I don't know when I will have free time to do work on it again, so I though that I will add it straight away when I have some time to spare. — Unsigned comment by 188.122.8.69 (talk) at 15:26 on 17 July 2011

Btw, I posted whole table of items extracted from 2.13 fall.exe on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/Z28M8jUm - it's .csv so you can open it in spreadsheet app to sort/research/tweak, but still it's text file so you can easily process it. This is file I made and used to get all the values. Also here - Daggerfall_talk:DFRemake/Original_Item_Data - I posted idea to what might be stored in ingredients data (could it be duration/chance/magnitude, if the effect is stored there already??) — Unsigned comment by 188.122.8.69 (talk) at 16:05 on 17 July 2011

Mysterious effects

From code, it seems to me that there are effects Resist Magicka (8,4) and Cure Magic (3,3) which do not show in spell creation. But, what's more interesting:

Silver has effect cure magic Werewolf's blood also has effect cure magic

which looks like parts of cures for lycanthropy/vampirism... maybe

Cactus, with also hidden effect Resist Magicka

prevents lycanthropy and vampirism?? Wild guess though. What do you think? :) — Unsigned comment by 188.122.8.69 (talk) at 15:26 on 17 July 2011

Root Bulp?

I don't have the game, so I can't check, but is this the spelling used in the game, or a typo that's been propagated on the site forever? I can't decide if it should be "Root Bulb" or "Root Pulp" - either would make more sense. (The latter is also found in Oblivion, so it's more likely.) Can someone confirm this in the game please? --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 14:02, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Confirmed as "Root Bulb." The image is still misnamed -- can the file name be edited? The only way I know how to fix it is to upload a duplicate image with the correct name. -- DelphiSnake→T+C 15:51, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

gold

andyfalls patch isn't a real/official patch, why is it listed as an alternate form of gold here? — Unsigned comment by 24.38.217.116 (talk) at 18:34 on 12 July 2013

medium tooth

Some time ago I've added medium tooth to the list. It was then removed by PLRDLF (3 years ago, but I found out today). Yet it is present in item data in FALL.EXE of 2.13 (item 58) and it have all data in place. Maybe after fixing effects (see Broken effects above) it would appear? Giniu (talk)

Yes it's present in the FALL.EXE file, but it doesn't appear in the game, just like many other features. I thought it was pointless to put an ingredient, which doesn't exist, on the page. By the way there is not even a picture of it one could add.--PLRDLF (talk) 00:40, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Analysis of TEXTURE.254

As was said previosly on this talk page, ingredient images stored in TEXTURE.254. I have the copy of the game, and I datamined it using Daggerfall Imaging program. (TBH, I haven't play Daggerfall yet. Please, don't beat me for his non-healthy way to find the truth and for all confusion I'm starting right now.)
The file TEXTURE.254 have 72 GIF images. This article claims there is 77 ingredients in Daggerfall. I compared my little gif-s and article and found there are some unused images. And some may have wrong illustration screenshots. Full analysis you can read in my sandbox. (TL;DR: 34-0 and 36-0 could be 'blood' ingredients, which need new images.) I didn't upload actual files because they are very small, and some can end as "unused" or "personal" images. (I confess I uploaded one yesterday: dragon scales — it's not an actual screenshot, but a photomanipulation. I edited iron image for background, upscaled GIF with green scales, and got it. If you don't mind, I can also renew ivory, root tendrils and red flowers images.) So, there is ten unused images (eleven with medium tooth) in .254, and lil' problem with "blood" ingredients: they are not renewed by User:StoneFrog because that files are not in .254. (Same with Pure Water.)
I don't blame anyone — it could happen a lot of human mistakes, and some program mistakes aka 'bugs'. I want to find the truth. So, I call the great and thoughtful community for further analysis and resolutions. We need to be sure every ingredient have right and nice illustration for it.--Hedera helix (talk) 23:39, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

AndyFall gold

In 2011 someone added a note saying that the second gold icon (the cast bar as opposed to the nugget) is only used for the gold ingredient in the AndyFall mod. Assuming that's true I've gone ahead and removed it but it would be best if someone could confirm. I don't remember ever seeing a gold bar item but I'm not certain. The bar icon IS from vanilla DF, it's in TEXTURE.216 which contains the loot pile sprites whereas the nugget is in TEXTURE.254 with the other potion ingredients. Boustrophedon (talk) 00:44, 13 April 2021 (UTC)