Nice find! Gets me wondering if there are any hidden debug options in this demo. Hallfiry, thanks for the preview! Also is it me or does the game' rendering engine look different to the retail?

I don't know if they changed the engine that late, but I think I've read somewhere that they more or less scrapped it at some point.
Also I forgot to upload a video from one of my old PcGames CDs.
Daggerfall at E3 1996:
http://www2.zippyshare.com/v/94194373/file.html
It's part of a very comprehensive 20 minutes E3 report.

There is a debug variable in Z.CFG, but I have no idea what exactly it does depending on different values (it's set to 0 IIRC). In fact, I've found preciously little info on Z.CFG, mostly pertaining to how to enable cheats and/or magic item repair in the latest version. Earlier versions also have a cheat variable, which is set to different values in different demo versions, but again, I have no idea what the effects are.

As for the engine, I wonder why the early demo works so slow for me, even though the later versions are much more robust on the very same DOSBox configuration...

Also, I've noticed that the later demo versions actually have both "censored" and "uncensored" body sprites for all races and genders, the censored ones having permanent blue underwear like in the early demo. I haven't figured out if the censoring could actually be activated somehow or not. It had also occurred to me that, had the developers wanted to avoid the entire nudity problem without limiting the player's clothing options, they could have allowed the players to switch underwear items (if more than one of each type is available), but not to remove them. The code additions needed for such a limitation couldn't have been that huge I suppose.

They may have taken out the code for debugging thus the variable doesn't work or maybe there are keys used to activate it in-game. To me the engine seems more Arena-like and grainy than the final, maybe it's just the resolution though.

About the clothing, Daggerfall had a lot of features which were cut from the game because there wasn't enough time to implement them, this becomes evident when the finished product was still full of bugs and issues. Interestingly, the E3 footage shows what appears to be a part from the early demo at the end of the video but the E3 version allowed more real exploration outside by the looks of it. Most of the stuff we don't get to see, (cut FMVs, gameplay elements etc) was probably due to all the demo's being set in dungeons.

I'm sorta disappointed that you have the Light spell, but the lamps and torches you can buy in a shop, they simply do nothing...

In fact, the game could have allowed for more interesting stuff without resorting to magic. For example, why not obtain tools to pick locks? (BTW, Amulets & Armor does have such an item, usable by certain character classes)

Another weirdo thing is that not only the game has two visibly different types of sprites, hand-drawn and pre-rendered, but both types also come in a great variety of resolutions. You have the pre-rendered passers-by with their high-res special "talk" frames (larger than the movement animation), and on the opposite side are the hand-drawn merchants, most of whom are about three times smaller in size (I guess those were made the earliest, following yet Arena's standards). Other hand-drawn characters get somewhere in between, and some have actually two sets of frames in different TEXTURE.* files (curiously, those are included in the early demo, but not used AFAIK), one large (and not used I believe), and another scaled down somewhat.

The German Daggerfall preview says:

Interesting! In fact, I guess the inevitable art shift with the mixed hand-drawn and pre-rendered sprites would have worked out okay after all, but the difference in individual sprite sizes is just too noticeable sometimes. Daggerfall is such a game where any lack of detail is detrimental to the atmosphere, especially considering how powerful its engine was for the time. Two sets of nearly identical sprites of different sizes (there are some differences, e.g. the barmaid* in the larger version is not holding the bottle, and there's also a drunkard who's supposed to be sitting by the fireplace with his face away from the player, who has lots of bottles around him in the smaller version, but not in the larger version of the sprite) suggest that perhaps it was planned to use graphics of different quality depending on the user's machine capabilities, thus optimizing performance, but this got scrapped for unknown reasons (time constraints?). It's a shame anyway, since indoor environments never feature large numbers of characters at once, so I guess it wouldn't put too much strain on RAM even if high-res sprites were always on by default. Also, it's not like there was a lack of free space on the game CD as well.

Anyway, it is possible to play around with the high-res sprites that are available by swapping TEXTURE.* files to see if they are usable.

* I've linked to this page simply because it displays the the relevant image; the high-res version there is, of course, not part of the original game.

Hallfiry presents to you...

*drum roll*

Daggerfall at Winter CES 1995 (January 95):



Showing the long lost and sometimes (especially at UESP) mentioned Daggerfall CES Cinematic (which is epic and awesome).

also shown: Terminator: Future Shock (who cares?)

Awesome, Finally it's been found! This is a really early look at Daggerfall when everything still largely resembled Arena. Shame they cut the cinematic, for being an early idea it goes to show how much was put into making the game.

Yeah, this is a pretty cool find ^_^

Boy, have they messed up the graphics in the game! Not only has the human characters' armour got somehow corrupted despite being completely identical to the elf armour sets, but the clothes got their fair share of confusion too. I'm not sure about the latest version of the full game, but all demos do have problems with clothing, especially noticeable with some items like the Khajit suit. Even on the screenie I posted above you can notice that the collar is a bit too high and covers the character's chin. Same stuff, but vice versa, happens both in v1.0.179 and in v1.0.181: for no known reasons female elf characters use a clothing set that fits the Khajit body shape. Once again, this is more or less easily fixable by replacing the elf set (TEXTURE.236) with the human set (TEXTURE.237), as the human and elf body shapes are identical. What is more, the Khajit, Argonian and the "wrong" elf clothes texture files (TEXTURE.235, TEXTURE.238 and TEXTURE.236 respectively) have different sizes despite being generally identical (there are a few minor, in some cases completely undetectable differences in certain frames across the three sets, most of which are related to frames of cloaks and robes with the cape on).

The Argonian male clothes set also seems to have minor issues with the cloaks, which cover parts of the tail in a weird fashion; but here, using the Khajit male set does not seem like a perfect solution, because the body shapes are not completely the same.

I'm guessing that at some point, it was planned to have more lean bodies for the elf characters, but then the devs scrapped that for some reason, and all humans and elves got identical bodies that only differ in skin tone.

It is the Daggerfall Betony demo - what is different in this release is that it is complete, well at least more complete than the other Betonys available online. It unpacks to 150 megs, it contains some number of interesting files. I found it on the cover cd of polish CD-Action magazine (03/97).

Is there any info about how many versions there actually are? And what percent of them are just incomplete copies? The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages claim the version they have is complete (available here), and so is the version from the PC Gamer cover disk which was shared by Litude (see above; the download link must have expired already though).

Here's the complete list of Daggerfall demo builds thus far:

Available Builds:

- Daggerfall Beta Demo 0.1 - Has a pre-generated 16th level male spellsword character. (This is the common 0.1 version which replaced the previous (missing) 0.1 demo)
- Daggerfall Betony Demo 0.79 - Allows the player to explore outside and the city of Betony. (Found on PC Gamer Volume 4 Number 1, January 1997 CD)
- Daggerfall Standard Demo 0.81 - Normal Dungeon Demo. (Found as an Internet Demo and on the CD version of Arena.)

Missing Builds:

- Daggerfall Beta Demo 0.1 - Has a pre-generated 5th level male spellsword character. (Was quickly replaced with the common 0.1 version to change the character level and was available from compuserves GAMBETA forum, Unconfirmed)
- Daggerfall Beta Demo 0.1 - Has a pre-generated 16th level female spellsword character and some other differences. (Released April 1996 on the European version of PC Gamer, It also came with the Collectors Edition of Daggerfall which was available through pre-order)

Actually I meant if there were different versions of the Betony demo specifically, or just some incomplete packages out there.

Just incomplete packages. Some are for example missing the arch3d.bsa as far as I remember.

Also: I found another nice article in one of my old mags:

PowerPlay 07/94:
*link removed* but the entire mag can be found on my website, soon.

Hmm, this scan has a shot of the character screen that shows a level 5 female Breton Spellsword (bottom right), could it have been from that demo?

Possible, Because the early demo builds originated from Compuserves GAMBETA forum for testers etc. So it was one of the earliest (Stable) builds to be sent out to magazines.

I understand that I'm not the only one who has speed issues with the preview in DOSBox. Well, it seems that like Arena, the Daggerfall preview had been tailored to work with SmartDrive, which it tries to initialize at the start of the programme. DOSBox doesn't include or emulate SmartDrive, but if you put SMARTDRV.EXE into either the preview folder or any other directory that is listed in the PATH variable, it'll work, and I think the preview runs smoother that way.

Actually I could never play the 0.1 demo with dosbox. For some reason, it does not bind the mouse and when I click for the first time in the menu (where the cursor doesn't move), it closes.
On my second PC (Win98 SE, Voodoo5 5500,...) the demo works fine, except for the dungeon which has graphics bugs and makes me fall through the floor instantly.

EDIT: Starting the demo from windows 3.11 fixes the cursor! (But again, I fall through the floor...)

I have this effect as well in Taewoong's DOSBox v0.71, but not in the latest official build (v0.74), which seems to work fine.

The workaround to this (if the problem persists) is to disable automatic mouse lock in DOSBox settings:

If you press F1 in the preview, it's supposed to switch the weapon hand. Interestingly enough, it'll give you some kind of a sword even if no weapon is equipped in the left hand or you hold a shield.

Also, the character background text very obviously describes an Archer even though the character is a Spellsword.

As for the DOSBox issues, I was recently notified of a build called DOSBox-X which is a custom version of v0.74 with some fixes and improvements. It seems to run the preview quite fine, and doesn't have the mouse autolock issue.

I've just realized that I didn't update the download link in the first post after the file archive of Demu.org got moved to the Internet Archive, so I fixed that, and also added links to the split six-part version of the demo package that is available from giffer.com.

So the Preview CD and the Collector's Edition thing are not the same? I have double-checked the preview CD version, and it's file-by-file identical to the regular downloadable version.

On another note, I've played a bit with the preview demo (it runs at an acceptable framerate in DOSBox-X). The demo is quite easy actually, if you keep your distance from the monsters and attack them with fireballs or ice bolts. In open areas, spell reflection renders all possible enemy projectiles useless, and in many cases you can cast your offensive spells from behind the corner without even any need for defensive magic.

The game does generate new monsters over time, but does this rather slowly. Sometimes you re-enter a previously explored area and find a monster where there wasn't any.

Once the game generated several Orc Warlords near the starting location. Curiously, both had female armour sets on them:


I tried picking the armour hoping that it'd change into its male version somehow but it didn't. I could put on the female leather cuirass, but chain boots crashed the game.

That said, the male character always gets male armour on the start, and whatever armour pieces or clothes are found on other monsters also seem to be of the male design. Obviously the Orc Warlord has leftovers from the female demo. Or maybe it's just a weird bug.

You can also notice a statue in the inventory on the second screenshot. Sometimes you can also find the "large statue" item which is also black but looks more like a staff than anything. I think neither is used in the full game (the small statue looks different in the final version).

Liquid ingredients are stored in bottles, although you probably know that.


If you drop a bottle on the ground, its contents disappear. You can drop them on the ground from the bottle though, and they'll stay there:


Unlike treasure piles, all dropped items are shown either in their original graphics (like bottles) or using their special "item on floor graphics". Here's a buckler and a dagger, for example:


The problem with this is that if you drop many items in one place, their graphics will overlap one another, and while you move and the item pile is visible, different sprites will flicker one over another, creating a weird effect. Perhaps this has something to do with the screen redrawing routines, but at any rate, this is probably why the idea was dropped in favour of random treasure pile sprites for dropped items.

In the preview demo, you can also get into everyone's favourite location in Daggerfall: the Void!


Got there by levitating through a staircase, but in another place in the dungeon there was a floor that also allowed to levitate through somehow.

One more thing I've noticed, there's a skill called "Disguise" in this version, which apparently was responsible for how well one can impersonate other people or fool guards:


There are also such language skills as Faerie and Elvish which were later scrapped. These are also asked about in the career-defining questions section of character generation procedure.

Also, the Missile skill is apparently what has become archery. Maybe one was supposed to be able to throw other items (like darts or stones) and not just use the bow?


Concerning items, all shield types you may get report a similar +1 to armour rating for some reason. It seems like many things just weren't tweaked at this stage yet. For example, there doesn't seem to be a way to view the exact amount of spell points, except for the meter on the HUD. Clicking on the STR parameter tells your maximum encumbrance but current encumbrance is not displayed and it actually does not affect movement speed or fatigue. On the other hand, if you jump into water sometimes the game will tell you that "you carry too much weight to stay afloat".