u/BanditBloodwynDevs

Daggerfall has always lived in my head rent-free. Not because of its graphics — but because of what it represented: a world so deep and systemic that it felt like it had a life of its own. Hundreds of cities, NPCs with schedules, a economy, factions, climbing rooftops to escape guards. A world that didn't just exist as a backdrop, but as an actual place.

I've been chasing that feeling for years. So I tried Daggerfall Unity, which is a fantastic way to play the old game today. Yet despite the massive technical improvements, it still retains the controls and UI from 1996. And since no one else seems to be building exactly what I want, I decided to build it myself — engine included.

The game is a first-person open-world RPG in the spirit of Daggerfall, but built with modern technology and a contemporary approach to UI and UX. The world is procedurally generated but deterministic — same seed, same world for every player. The goal is to build interlocking systems that create emergent stories on their own. The player decides what kind of life they live in this world. Follow the main storyline. Explore dungeons. Join factions and climb the ranks. Run a trade. Or just settle down in a city and mind your own business. The game doesn't judge.

Right now there are no NPCs, no quests, no combat. Just a procedurally generated open world that I keep finding myself walking around in — which honestly tells me that something is already working.

This is what it looks like today. Still early, but it's starting to feel like a place worth living in.

The terrain generation in my AstralForge engine uses three stacked noise layers

• "Continentalness": shapes the large-scale landmass
• "Peaks & Valleys": adds mountain ridges via ridged fBM
• "Details": local micro-terrain

Each layer has its own shaper that modifies the raw noise output before composition. That's already a lot of knobs. And the world is 500×300 km.

Running the engine to check a parameter change means: compile, load, spawn, fly around. For something that operates at continental scale, that feedback loop is unusable.

So I built a separate WPF tool — WorldDesigner — that runs the exact same noise pipeline but renders a top-down heightmap preview. Sliders for every parameter, real-time color-coded output (ocean, lowland, highland, mountain, snow), and a legend bar showing the actual height range in meters. The whole thing exports to JSON, which the engine picks up via a WorldSettingsLoader at startup. No duplication — both tool and engine share the same noise types.

This turned out to be one of the most important decisions I made for my terrain generation. I tuned parameters I would have never found otherwise — including a subtle interaction between the "Peaks & Valleys" ridged exponent and the continentalness mask thresholds that completely changes where mountains form relative to coastlines.

The second screenshot is what the result looks like in-engine - together with height- and slope- based terrain texturing and GPU-instanced vegetation.

I'm a solo dev with an enterprise C# background, and about a year ago I decided to stop fighting existing engines and build my own instead. The result is AstralForge - a custom engine written in C# (.NET 10) on top of Vulkan via Silk.NET, purpose-built for a Daggerfall-inspired open-world RPG.

What you're seeing in the video is the current state of the open world:

• Fully streaming terrain with chunk-based loading
• Multi-pass Vulkan rendering: Geometry Pass → Composite Pass with exponential-squared depth fog
• Flexible terrain splatting with noise-driven texture transitions (grass, rock, snow)
• ~7km view distance
• GPU-instanced vegetation (trees, bushes)
• Modular ECS architecture with dependency injection throughout

The engine is deliberately focused - no generics, no editor, just what the game actually needs. Every system exists because the game required it, not because a proper engine should have it.

Happy to go deep on any of the rendering or architecture decisions if anyone's curious.