After having haunting memory of an ancient RL called “Thief” or whatnot, where 3D letters hunted you around but unable to find it either on disk or the ‘net, this may be the next best thing to it. :=)

The Daedalus engine can indeed use external files for textures. An example screenshot with texture mapped surfaces can be seen at http://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/daedalus/inside1a.jpg

Note the “point” of the first person view in Dragonslayer is not meant to be “look at me, aren’t these cool graphics”, but rather it’s “a first person view is interesting gameplay”. It’s much easier to get lost, ambushed by monsters, and so on when playing in first person, where it’s a nice change compared to the top down view of other Roguelikes. Fancy graphics aren’t as necessary here, just as most prefer ASCII to tiles when playing a standard top down view Roguelike.

From a message they sent me, the whole Daedalus Script is 37K in size, including the bitmaps or code to generate the textures, so may be if they used external files that would help a lot (but I dont know if daedalus can handle this)