Unveiled: Camelot Unchained Newsletter #57 - City State Entertainment View this email in your browser Share Tweet Team Tidings -by Max Porter Hey folks,



Welcome to the end of July and a very hot month here in Fairfax, Va! It was a scorcher! Fortunately, we had a great month of updates and progress on the game, and here’s the monthly newsletter to tell you about it!





But first, some art! Tyler says: An early skill concept artists need to learn is quickly showing various styles or techniques of rendering an asset. In this case, this statue could clearly be created with very different styles, while still being a statue of a Valkyrie. This second image is some color concepting for the Draugr colors, focused on hue and saturation levels. As always you can see lots more art in our weekly news updates HERE. Lots of things to talk about as always this month, with progress on gameplay, server stability, and many important art assets! Check out the State of the Build for a selection of the Top Tenish items from the month. Also, Ben has a Dose of Design article on making changes to the design of games, and Brian has brought back the classic CMsphere article format! Should be a good read!



As every month, we stayed true to our principles of openness, honesty, and being upfront about our progress. We published news posts, ran tests, and continued to put up raw, unedited, and unrehearsed streams! The streams are fun for us, but they are also very important, as we always want to be as informative as possible for our Backers and fans, whom we thank for their support and patience as we move through Beta 1! If you want to catch up on any missed streams, they can always be found on our Twitch and YouTube channels. For a good read of our news, as well as our weekly Top Tenish updates, check out the News section of our website.



Thanks for taking an interest in Camelot Unchained, and for your support as well as your patience! As usual, please bear with my reminder to click the “view this email in your browser” link in the top right to see the whole newsletter. Read on for updates, articles, thoughts, news, and more, and please enjoy this, the fifty-seventh issue of Unveiled. Hot Topics



We're looking for feedback! If you're a Backer, join the discussion on our Forums via our website and chime in.



Hot topics on the forums right now include our latest tests, questions on the latest siege developments, rubble, theories and excitement over the classes as we develop them, and as usual, some of the marvelous constructions that enterprising builders are trying out for Camelot Unchained! Look What You Did -by Brian Ward We received some excellent entries for this month’s Point Capture Fan Fic contest, including some very entertaining co-operative storytelling. Here’s our favorite: An entry from Poxer that paints a picture of Viking duplicity.



In the depths of the mine, as the torches flickered, Grimslag the burley Norsemen chieftain peered ominously down as he purposely queried Grinksol, his Dvergr head engineer. You're certain their Scouts entered here, located then departed with only the high quality samples, and not any of the common loads stacked behind?



Grinklsol, unflinchingly maintained his commanders piercing gaze evenly, smiled and nodded once. As if taking their cue, two shivering shapes emerged from the black back cave cavern shadows. One from either side of the neatly stacked ore, apparently ready for transport.



Grimslag glanced over at them non-pulsed as they walked into the torchlight, for it was he who had chosen these Shadow Walkers, then assigned them here days ago.



One of the Shadow Walkers, a white skulled Úlfhéðnar spoke, his voice sounding like rolling stones. It was as you predicted, enemy Scouts entered here, then hastily chose samples from the top of the closest ore cart to the entrance. He grinned, which without lips was a bit disconcerting then continued, we did send subtle fear to them, just enough to hasten them away, they looked about; no further master.



It was Grimslag's turn to smile. Good, you two surface, advise my commanders to start the planned retreat, they are to get fully clear of this place. Once this is done you two Veil walk to the real mine, make sure you are not followed, and watch over that secret location with your lives. The two Shadow Walkers nodded, then silently headed upward.



Grimm's regarded Grinksol for several seconds then stated in a more respectful tone than used earlier. You will stay, whichever side wins here first' you will bring this section of the cavern down on yourself and them, it is imperative to the plan.



The Dvergar nodded. I will gladly give my life for our realm to gain weeks of mining that miracle ore on the other side of the isle. Let as our enemies fight amongst themselves to mine this worthless node, ha!



Grimslag briefly placed one hand on his friend's shoulder, as he walked towards the surface, he did not look back.



I definitely want to know what happens next with this group! For next month’s contest, tell us a story of how you got your custom-built abilities. Please keep it under 300 words. Dose of Design -by Ben Pielstick Changes Happen

In our last newsletter, I talked a little about how designers often run into difficulties when taking ideas from early documentation to finished features. There is a lot more to talk about on this topic however, especially when it comes to knowing how to triage and prioritize features so that a game turns out the best it can be.



Almost every game has to make cuts and additions while going from what was originally envisioned to what eventually is delivered. As such, one of the most important things developers do is determine what can be left out, and what absolutely has to stay in, so that the game fulfills the goals that were set out for it. This might sound a bit negative, but in fact, a lot of the time removing unnecessary complexity helps to streamline the experience, and actually makes the game better in its final form!



You know how movies always have deleted scenes, but you sometimes get a look at deleted scenes in a special edition? Often, it is easy to tell why a scene didn’t make the final cut. Making cuts in game development can often work out the same way, but only if developers are careful to cut the right things, and replace them when something else is needed.



So how do we determine which things are critical and which should be removed? In terms of gameplay, we always have to focus on the impact on the player experience. There isn’t an exact mathematical formula, but in general, impact can be measured by the amount of exposure of a given feature, and the degree of influence of that feature. ‘Amount of exposure’ in this case means how much of the time or how frequently the player interacts with a feature. A basic item players pick up early and use all the time gets more exposure than an item players have an option to pick up late in the game, and might only come in useful once in a while. ‘Degree of influence’ is how significant the feature is in the course of the game experience. A bombastic NPC character who makes a dramatic entrance as part of the main story and leaves a memorable impression on the player is far more influential than a more generic character who is part of an optional side mission, offering a set of flavor dialog among a set of other similar characters.



Features that have low exposure and a low degree of influence are the first ones to look at when deciding what to cut, so that players get to focus attention on what is most important. Obviously we don’t want to cut anything that has high exposure and a high degree of influence, because these are the keystone features that define the core experience of the game. And so, it’s features somewhere in the middle that are the most difficult to evaluate.



One of the best ways to make an evaluation is to make a priority list. While I mentioned previously that we can’t easily apply math to these calculations, one thing we can do is compare features to each other, and try and get a feeling of which is more important than another based on the above criteria. Sometimes this is apples to apples, like judging which types of items players will get the most use out of or have the most fun with. Other times it’s apples to oranges, where we have to look at adding lots of weapons versus having lots of trees and buildings, because all of these assets take a 3D modeler’s time to make.



Once you have a prioritized list of what the most important features are, you can start assigning more numbers to them, like estimated number of hours to complete, and see where the game could end up if each type of feature was removed or expanded upon. Often, features lower on the priority list actually remain unchanged or get expanded upon over features higher on the list, simply because those higher-priority items have a much higher time requirement to actually get them into the game.



Sometimes when making cuts to features, gaps can be left in the experience that need to be accounted for. To make up for these gaps, whole new features, or expansions to existing features, have to be designed. Depending on the reason for the cuts, these features may have constraints placed on their design, in terms of the time and resources available to get them finished. Or it may simply be that removing some set of features doesn’t really change the experience at all, or improves it if players never notice something missing and get to move on to more fun parts of the game sooner.



Whenever considering adding or removing features, it is important to try and go through the game experience with fresh eyes, imagining what a new player would feel who doesn’t have the background of all the changes that have come and gone over the course of development. This is something external testers and early adopters in of games are very helpful with, which is one reason games across the spectrum, Camelot Unchained included, have moved toward showing works in progress to players early and often, and taking non-developer feedback into consideration. Since we’re still in the early stages of beta, we’ve been doing a whole lot more adding than removing of features, and all of you are helping to point out what works great, and what still needs improvement in order to make the game better. As always, we look forward to showing you the results of future changes, that will lead to new experiences and more interesting gameplay. Developer Quote “...because having fully destructible castles using a building block system with a true physics/stability system (with server-side calculation) plus 1K battles with an ability system where players craft their own abilities from components has never been done before.” -- Mark Jacobs CMsphere -by Brian Ward What’s this, you say? Why, it’s something of a retro throwback! These used to be a common feature of the newsletter, and I thought it would be nice to bring it back.



First on the agenda: It’s been a little on the warm side lately in the Seattle area, although not nearly as much as I hear as it has been for the Fairfax team! Frankly, it’s just about perfect, not to humblebrag (well, maybe just a little). In fact, it’s been the perfect time for us to enjoy some popcorn (maker included!) sent to us by Backer Ludovic. We’ve been getting a LOT of use out of this and so we wanted to offer our sincere thanks from all of us in Seattle! *CHOMP* Playtests: How do they work?



People often ask when playtests are and why they often aren’t announced far in advance. During the week, testing hours can be somewhat unpredictable, although tests tend to happen during our office hours. For instances in which we are sure that we have a known-good, stable build, or when we are specifically trying to get more players in, or even to accommodate folks who cannot join our weekday tests, we’ll do our best plan some tests ahead of time. We do have a playtesting schedule, but it can be tough to predict the future, especially during the week. I thought it would be worthwhile to walk people through the behind-the-scenes process, since I’m pretty close to it. Let’s take a look into what’s going on here!



Typically, the first thing I do on Monday (if we’ve had a weekend Backer test) is to collect the various bug reports Backers have submitted via the Forums, and combine those with any notes we’ve taken based on things we’ve seen in the most recent build. Often, I’ll present those high-level notes to engineers and producers and we will triage. Then we’ll try to confirm reproducibility and veracity of the reports. Sometimes this means we’ll spin up local servers, or we’ll just spin up our cloud-based server instances if needed, and knock through a list of issues to see if they are buggable. If we can reproduce them, or if there’s enough info or severity to warrant an investigation, we’ll bug the issue and put it into our official bug tracking software, called JIRA.



The next thing that is likely to happen is that we’ll move the most recent playtesting build down the “stack” if there’s reason enough to preserve it. This means pushing assets and code from one channel to another downstream one (e.g., going from NuadaPrep to Nuada). We call this a Channel Copy. Sometimes this will involve a Backer test early in the week (or more likely a quick smoke test), where we will check the build, since we are recompiling it from code after the push.



Once we’ve freed NuadaPrep, it’s time to do another push (this time from Hatchery, our main development channel). As part of this process, we’ll vet the state of Hatchery and get any triaged, last-minute fixes in that we need. Once we’re ready, we’ll do the push.



This process of capturing a snapshot of Hatchery and pushing it down the stack can take time. Hatchery is a living, breathing organism: Imagine posing your cat for a carefully planned Instagram photo. You have to be a photographer, going for that elusive decisive moment. New code changes are constantly being made; builds are automatically deployed through continuous integration; and assets are being rebuilt on the build server in real-time as changes get made through the game editor. With so many various moving parts, it can be complicated to take a “clean” snapshot and move it down the stack. We do try to pause this motion long enough to get what we need, but it still can be a challenge. Making an MMO as complex as Camelot Unchained is akin to a big dance production in that it requires a lot of coordination. This is often one of the reasons why it can be difficult for us to know ahead of time if the build we’ve captured is ready to put in front of Backers to test. We definitely don’t like to announce tests before we have a vetted testing build.



We’ll make a decision about which things we want to test based on the commit notes of the changes in the build. This information informs our choices about which zones we’ll run, and which features will be enabled on the server for the test. From that, we’ll then create patch notes and update testing documentation based on our chosen focus of the test, then we’ll smoke test the build.



If all goes well, then it’s time to party! Or at least definitely time to play a little CU with all you fine folks! During the test, I or someone else (like Tim!) will typically monitor both the in-game client experience and the game server console logging, so that any major LiveOps issues can be brought to the attention of the appropriate engineers. We will run testing on this build (and iterations based on it) throughout the course of the week. If we run into no blocking issues and it’s deemed a testing priority, we’re likely to run a weekend playtest. Hooray!



Community Question!



Question from Backer and Translator Extraordinaire known as Apollon:



What tools do you have at your disposal for class balancing and how will you ensure that (adding) new ability components won't throw a wrench into the works every time?



Response from Ben:



What tools do I have for class balancing? At the moment, virtually none. A lot of the ability editing is still happening in C# until we hopefully get a designer facing tool for ability editing built. Adding new components and adding whole new classes will definitely change balance. The way we keep things from being too overpowered or underpowered is just through testing, and I think we're likely to have public tests of big changes before they land on live servers to get some initial player feedback, in case our internal testing missed anything. Overall though, we're not that different from other games, so as new things make their way into the game expect things to get shaken up, and to have to make adjustments based on what's new and different as more components get added over time. State of the Build -by Max Porter Hey folks, in this section I pull some of the highlights from our Top Tenish lists in the past month. The highlights of the highlights, if you will! This should give you a summary of some of the biggest pieces of work that we have focused on in the month of July, and a sense of where we’re at!



Feature Work: (7/12/2019) WIP – Tech – Audio: This week, Spidey started working on the audio of moving siege engines and the required tech to allow interrupted abilities to play unique one-off sounds. dB followed up on this and added ram “ready” and “unready” sounds, and began setting up ram movement SFX ahead of the upcoming tech.

This week, Spidey started working on the audio of moving siege engines and the required tech to allow interrupted abilities to play unique one-off sounds. dB followed up on this and added ram “ready” and “unready” sounds, and began setting up ram movement SFX ahead of the upcoming tech. (7/19/2019) WIP – Tech – Audio: Spidey worked on audio improvement for projectiles. Projectiles now know who their owner is and the type of entity that they hit. This will help us with the audio mixing, so players are not hearing hundreds of projectiles at the same level. Instead, we can adjust the mix to prioritize the ones that are most important, like the arrow coming at you!

Spidey worked on audio improvement for projectiles. Projectiles now know who their owner is and the type of entity that they hit. This will help us with the audio mixing, so players are not hearing hundreds of projectiles at the same level. Instead, we can adjust the mix to prioritize the ones that are most important, like the arrow coming at you! (7/12/2019) WIP – Tech – BPOs (Building Placed Objects): This week and last, Matt landed some infrastructure work on BPOs that will make it easier to support large items (like doors and siege engines) not becoming detached as soon as their primary ‘attachment’ block is removed or destroyed. The actual functionality to do so hasn’t happened yet, however. This work also allowed us to enable Colin’s work on items becoming dynamic and falling when they’re detached from the building but not explicitly removed. In his free time, Matt also helped Tyler and Ben fix a couple of high-priority world editor bugs blocking their work.

This week and last, Matt landed some infrastructure work on BPOs that will make it easier to support large items (like doors and siege engines) not becoming detached as soon as their primary ‘attachment’ block is removed or destroyed. The actual functionality to do so hasn’t happened yet, however. This work also allowed us to enable Colin’s work on items becoming dynamic and falling when they’re detached from the building but not explicitly removed. In his free time, Matt also helped Tyler and Ben fix a couple of high-priority world editor bugs blocking their work. (7/12/2019) WIP – Color Grading Controls: Andrew added a lot of parameters to the editor that will allow artists to change color values in the game. This is very exciting progress for the artists, who want to have more control over the look of the game. Later, we can add functionality to change these parameters based on time of day or location in the game world.

Andrew added a lot of parameters to the editor that will allow artists to change color values in the game. This is very exciting progress for the artists, who want to have more control over the look of the game. Later, we can add functionality to change these parameters based on time of day or location in the game world. (7/12/2019) WIP – Tech – Chat: JB has been overhauling the chat server. The new version will be able to handle permissions for rooms and all the stuff we need for a live game chat like local chat, warband, orders, campaigns, custom rooms all with secure permissions/ownership and moderation. This is currently in review. Gameplay: (7/12/2019) Tech – Gameplay – Exhaustion: Anthony reintegrated Exhaustion back into the game, along with some relevant bug fixes to resource threshold handling that came up as a result of it.

Anthony reintegrated Exhaustion back into the game, along with some relevant bug fixes to resource threshold handling that came up as a result of it. (7/12/2019) Tech – Gameplay – Ability Data: Christina upgraded how ability data is defined to give Ben better (faster) control over the balance of various ability stats, including: cooldown time, stability, and phase times. This gives us more power in choosing the types of calculations we use for these values and makes iteration time while balancing data faster.

Christina upgraded how ability data is defined to give Ben better (faster) control over the balance of various ability stats, including: cooldown time, stability, and phase times. This gives us more power in choosing the types of calculations we use for these values and makes iteration time while balancing data faster. (7/26/2019) WIP – Tech – NPC Behavior: This week, Spidey started working on the messaging framework for NPC behaviors. NPCs will be able to message from the NPC server to the Physics Server and back again, and receive responses to said messaging. This is the root framework required so our NPCs can start reacting to having Line of Sight with their targets, as well as how they will be able to poll the navigation in order to do proper pathfinding.

This week, Spidey started working on the messaging framework for NPC behaviors. NPCs will be able to message from the NPC server to the Physics Server and back again, and receive responses to said messaging. This is the root framework required so our NPCs can start reacting to having Line of Sight with their targets, as well as how they will be able to poll the navigation in order to do proper pathfinding. (7/26/2019) Tech – Abilities: Christina added the ability for scripting to add abilities to a player. The bomb item will be using this feature – when it is picked up it adds a “place bomb” ability on your bar, so players can now hit the hotkey and drop the bomb instead of have to unintuitively drop it by swapping weapons. Server Tech: (7/12/2019) WIP – Tech – Server: Wylie started looking into switching our servers from Windows to Linux. This change will allow us to scale to a higher server count and will help with server costs.

Wylie started looking into switching our servers from Windows to Linux. This change will allow us to scale to a higher server count and will help with server costs. (7/12/2019) WIP – Tech – Server performance: Now that we have done a bunch of testing on worst-case scenarios, Rob is trying to get a more accurate performance profile for the server so we can continue to increase performance while reducing server costs. A win on both sides!

Now that we have done a bunch of testing on worst-case scenarios, Rob is trying to get a more accurate performance profile for the server so we can continue to increase performance while reducing server costs. A win on both sides! (7/19/2019) WIP – Tech – Server: Wylie continued work on converting server code to compile in GNU in addition to the existing MSVC support. In other words: Linuxification of the servers. This will help reduce server use costs.

Wylie continued work on converting server code to compile in GNU in addition to the existing MSVC support. In other words: Linuxification of the servers. This will help reduce server use costs. (7/26/2019) Tech – Performance: Over the last month, we’ve seen a degradation in performance on the Cherry Keep Stress tests. Andrew turned his attention to the problem this week and exorcised (or exercised, it was tired, needed a good workout!) the problematic code. Performance is actually slightly better now than it was back before the degradation

Over the last month, we’ve seen a degradation in performance on the Cherry Keep Stress tests. Andrew turned his attention to the problem this week and exorcised (or exercised, it was tired, needed a good workout!) the problematic code. Performance is actually slightly better now than it was back before the degradation (7/26/2019) WIP – Tech – Proxy optimizations: Rob has decreased the bandwidth used to send player information to the client. This should allow us to send more player information to the client per packet, and update them more frequently, smoothing out the client experience in mid-to-large size battles. Art: (7/12/2019) Tech/Art – VFX: Andrew has been assisting Mike recently to help improve his ability to make VFX that not only have added functionality but also look as expected in the client and editor. Mike spent much of the week problem solving and updating or fixing existing assets to account for these changes.

Andrew has been assisting Mike recently to help improve his ability to make VFX that not only have added functionality but also look as expected in the client and editor. Mike spent much of the week problem solving and updating or fixing existing assets to account for these changes. (7/12/2019) Art - Concept: Lots of environment art concepts were completed this week! They have a look that’s definitely on the fantasy side of things. These ideas will help inform some of the more fantastic biomes in CU.

Lots of environment art concepts were completed this week! They have a look that’s definitely on the fantasy side of things. These ideas will help inform some of the more fantastic biomes in CU. (7/12/2019) Art – Greatsword Animations: Scott finished updating and setting up a shared greatsword animation set. We’ll add these back into the game, so Backers can use the items and Art can test and tweak the animation.

Scott finished updating and setting up a shared greatsword animation set. We’ll add these back into the game, so Backers can use the items and Art can test and tweak the animation. (7/12/2019) WIP - Art - Armor Weighting Polish: Joe made a lot of weighting polish improvements on the male and female human TDD armor. This cleanup is one of the last things needed to finish up the original work on the 2.0 character art refactor.

Joe made a lot of weighting polish improvements on the male and female human TDD armor. This cleanup is one of the last things needed to finish up the original work on the 2.0 character art refactor. (7/19/2019) WIP – VFX – General Cleanup and Improvement: After Andrew made improvements to color accuracy, Mike began updating and improving the existing VFX throughout the game. He’s also updating some assets that had placeholder art. Mike also wrapped his head around the color controls Andrew put in last week and began fiddling with things. Don’t be surprised if you jump in the game and the color values have changed. Also, none of this is set in stone, and it is expected to change.

After Andrew made improvements to color accuracy, Mike began updating and improving the existing VFX throughout the game. He’s also updating some assets that had placeholder art. Mike also wrapped his head around the color controls Andrew put in last week and began fiddling with things. Don’t be surprised if you jump in the game and the color values have changed. Also, none of this is set in stone, and it is expected to change. (7/19/2019) Art - Siege Engine LODs: We finished the LODs for all three battering rams, including the Vikings version. That last one is currently getting set up for animation support. We also added three different base ammos for each trebuchet. We’ll use these later to investigate why ammo doesn’t show up visually during the firing animation of siege engines.

We finished the LODs for all three battering rams, including the Vikings version. That last one is currently getting set up for animation support. We also added three different base ammos for each trebuchet. We’ll use these later to investigate why ammo doesn’t show up visually during the firing animation of siege engines. (7/26/2019) WIP - Art - Material Creation: We’ve begun to improve our ability to create the materials we need for CU by working with Substance Designer, a program that will allow us to more easily make exactly what we need vs. picking from a pre-existing library of materials. This program has quickly become an industry standard for AAA material work. Lots of info about it can be found online. Final Note -by Max Porter Thanks for reading Unveiled number fifty-seven! As always, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter as much as I enjoy putting it together. I’m hoping for a less hot month in August, but we’ll see! Looking forward to more progress, anyhow. Stay cool, and that that’s all for now -- Max out!