Unveiled: Camelot Unchained Newsletter #51 - City State Entertainment View this email in your browser Share Tweet Team Tidings -by Max Porter Hey folks,



It’s a new year, and we’re off to an awesome start on progress for Camelot Unchained®. Perhaps you heard about the two thousand eight hundred and nine ~~~~BREAKING NEWS - over 3,000 ARCs (Autonomous Remote Clients) and live players we had all in the same battle at once in a recent test? We actually peaked at over 3,500 before the poor ARCs called it a day! If you haven’t seen it, read more about that (formerly) impressive 2,809 here!



In the East Coast office of City State Entertainment®, we’re enjoying some views of the slush and snow outside - we are currently getting just the edge of the deadly polar vortex gripping the midwest - and pressing onward with great alacrity. As usual, this newsletter contains articles on our progress or explaining an aspect of the game, including a Dose of Design from Ben on the improved and improving Ability Builder, a piece from Tyler on improving things from an art perspective, and a piece from Brian explaining BPOs!



As always, we consider it our responsibility to continue to be open and honest with our Backers. Therefore, we continue to put up raw, unedited, and unrehearsed streams, showing you everything from impressive creative work by our artists and programmers to our latest updates and news. 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, especially as Beta ramps up! 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 following along with us, or if you’re new, thanks for checking out our project! Don’t forget to click on the “view this email in your browser” link on the top right to see the whole newsletter, and read on for updates, articles, discussions, art, and all the goodness, and please enjoy this, the fifty-first 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 discussion on our latest tests, ability builder, and the classes of Camelot Unchained! Dose of Design -by Ben Pielstick Building the Ability Builder

One of the main features of Camelot Unchained is our Ability Builder. This is a very uncommon feature in the world of MMOs; it’s designed to add a lot of potential customization for players who want to try and create unique and powerful character builds to suit the goals they have in mind.



The basic concept of the Ability Builder is that rather than simply giving players a set of unchangeable abilities baked into their class, players in CU will have a starting set of abilities built from a set of components. These abilities can then be disassembled, and their components can be recombined in a number of ways to create lots of different abilities. As players play the game and gain experience with their starting ability components, they will start to unlock additional components. This will greatly increase the number of possible abilities a character could create over time, giving players exponentially more ability options for each new component they unlock.



This system offers unique challenges to fully design and implement, even in its most primitive form. For example, building abilities from components means we need a reliable solution to select the right visual effects for whatever combination of ability components a player might decide to put together. The visual effects can’t be wholly defined by any one component, because each different combination has a different visual effects requirement, meaning we have to define visual effects for combinations rather than for each component.



The way we’ve solved this particular problem is by using tags. When a player makes a “Fire Ball” ability, one tag comes from the “Fire” component while another comes from the “Ball” component, leading the ability system to search for a visual effect record with the combined tags of “Fire” plus “Ball”.



Another part of the system that needs special consideration is the user interface for players to build their abilities. For now, we’ve built out a temporary user interface that allows the full functionality of the ability builder. However, we haven’t yet put in all the special styling and added features that will make the experience more engaging and display more information to help players evaluate the consequences of their decisions when building abilities.



The main feature of the ability building system currently under development is the implementation of ability components themselves. While we’ve shown off a few premade abilities in recent tests, the composition of components into custom abilities takes a lot more useful pieces being written and tested, so that there are an adequate number of possibilities to test the system fully.



Once we have a sufficient number of newly created ability components ready and working, we will be testing the full functionality of the ability building system. This will mean allowing players to start with a few premade abilities specific to each class, along with a set of components for players to build custom abilities out of.



Among the ability components we are currently creating are the new components for our Mage classes, including the Arthurian Flame Warden, the Tuatha Dé Danann Druid, and the Viking Moisturemancer Wave Weaver. Once the ability components for these classes have made their way into early testing, we look forward to showing you more.



For those of you active in testing our current beta phase, it will be great to get your feedback when this early version of our ability building system makes its way into the build. Until then, keep an eye on our updates for previews of a lot of new features that are coming soon! Developer Quote “As you folks know, I can’t say the words “Build the foundation first” enough times to both my team and our Backers. That’s what these tests are showing, that the aspects of the foundation are in really good shape or else these kinds of tests would not be possible.” -- Mark Jacobs Art It Up -by Tyler Rockwell Imagine, if you will, a big bucket of multi-colored Legos. Now take one set of those Legos, one brick of each color, and tie them together with a piece of string, starting with the first brick, tied to the next two, those two each tied to three more, and so on, until you’ve amassed a pyramid of string and bricks. Now, interconnect a few of these bricks with string, haphazardly, signifying relationships between those now interconnected bricks. Now grab four of your friends, have them recreate what you just did, and connect their pyramid to yours. My friends, in a nutshell, this metaphor represents the pieces of different systems that go together to make a character. When something isn’t working, it’s up to you and your friends to work together to debug this snarl of string and colored bricks!



If something within that system isn’t set up correctly, you might get something like this: That’s a male Luchorpán in Tuatha armor. C’mon, you couldn’t tell? ;) Or better yet, here’s a Tuatha Human wearing his new undergarment shirt: Fantastic, right?! When things like this happen, it’s up to us to determine which pyramid of bricks to look at first, then which bricks specifically are at fault, and make sure everything is set up correctly. Because we’re updating all the art, all the animations, the skeletons, and the code, there are a lot of points of failure that need to be checked and re-checked.



As we continue to find and fix bugs, we can slowly see patterns of what didn’t get checked off, or where we may have forgotten to update textures, etc. Luckily, this is all relatively easy to fix on the art side--it’s just sheer volume we’re up against! As things begin to take form, we start getting results such as this fantastic specimen: As the character 2.0 work is coming together, it becomes an increasingly difficult challenge to track down some issues. In this case, those giant bat wings are actually the character’s gloves, which have a transform on them, meaning info on the geometry saying they should be in a different position than the animation is telling them to be in. So you get these things that look like they belong in a John Carpenter movie! This particular issue took a few minutes to track down, as there’s more than one reason that could have happened.



While I say “minutes,” it might sound simple -- remember, we’re updating over two thousand assets! To put this exercise into perspective, let’s look at one nude character mesh. This is made up of many parts, illustrated partly in the image below: Each one of those parts needs a unique named material applied to them, which gets assigned to a piece of “equipment” such as “Heavy Plate Breastplate.” Each piece then becomes an “equipment part” with a uniquely assigned UV slot on the textures sheet, a gender, a race, and a layer. That last item supports our layering system, allowing our characters to have a nude, undergarment, and armor layer. It’s what allows you to see a shirt you’ve equipped underneath your armor. When something doesn’t show up as expected, it’s usually because one of these items was incorrectly entered--but times three, because there are three assembled layers represented in the final part.



Knowing how all this works is obviously key to putting these characters together. In a previous article I wrote in another newsletter, I stressed how this exercise would increase our productivity moving forward. That goal has been achieved with more people on the art and engineering team understanding how the characters are assembled, and how the different disciplines overlap. Additionally, from a production standpoint, I can see where we need to improve things. Rebuilding multiple characters all at once has successfully stressed the weak points in the pipeline, giving me a clear picture of solutions we need to put in place when we begin on new work, such as new armor or races!



This entire process is a very collaborative effort, and honestly, is the best part of making games, in my opinion. It’s just like those reality TV shows where they put together a custom car or motorcycle. One guy is really good at the metal work, another the paint job, etc. But here it’s animation, modeling, materials, rendering, networking, pipeline, and so on. We have an ongoing chat channel called “Characters 2.0 dev” that is equally filled with table flip emotes when we get stuck on something and rejoicing as we knock out another bug.



We now have almost all the art assets finished and imported (not quite viewable by Backers yet), and are currently doing a final audit to make sure we’re only seeing small bugs that won’t impact playing the game, that can be fixed later. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be doing polish and cleanup on the work while also adding in the artist-made character LODs, which should improve performance as well as visual fidelity. (Also discussed in the previous article.) In the end, we’ll have better proportioned characters that are easier to animate, deform better when animated, and have higher fidelity textures with improved rendering performance! Progress Spotlight -by Brian Ward Beep Beep! What are BPOs?





Over the last few days, the first phase of a system that we have been talking about for months, called Building Placed Objects (BPOs), was merged into the master codebase of Camelot Unchained. While this system is still a Work-in-Progress (meaning that aspects of the design and implementation are subject to change), we thought it would be a good idea to cover some of the basics about what this system is, and what it will mean for building in general.



Up until this point, if you wanted to put a table into your building, you would have to build it out of blocks, and those blocks would behave just as any other part of the structure. Which, if we’re being honest, when you get into smaller objects that really require more up-close detail than a large building (like decorative chairs and such) it starts to look too blocky. While we’ve seen some shockingly impressive efforts by Backers on the Builder Islands and Contested Island to get around this, it’s clear we need to be able to add actual items into the mix if we want to make Camelot Unchained feel more immersive.



Now, of course you could drop or deploy a crafted object near your plot, but it would be ephemeral, in that it would not actually be part of the plot or even be related in any particular way to the build, so it might behave in unexpected ways, like clipping through the building, etc.



And there was absolutely no way to back up this entire state of things with your building and the objects you’ve dropped near it. Once it’s destroyed, it’s gone for good!



Enter BPOs — which we lovingly refer to internally as Beep Oh’s — objects that are affixed to a building plot, just as blocks are. They are saved with your building’s blueprints, and in Offline Building Mode they allow a building designer to essentially play interior decorator ahead of time, without worrying about the actual gathering of resources (yet).



Developer Matt Meehan, who has been the principal implementation engineer for this system, explains: “The majority of work so far has been on making it possible to put BPOs into blueprints and general offline building designs. The next phase will focus on making them more ‘real’ in Camelot Unchained itself. First, we won’t just create the items from scratch. The game rules for turning raw materials into blocks will also play into creating the items that need to go in the building. The specific details are still being worked out.”



The system will allow for all kinds of potential items to be added to building blueprints, for such categories of things as (and this is by no means an exhaustive list): Interior lighting — Chandeliers, braziers, torches, etc. This is a big deal, as we use a physically-based lighting system, and you may have noticed it’s usually pretty dark inside buildings regardless of the time of day outside. Let there be light!



Decor — Carpets, tables, and other tidbits. The general thinking here is that you’ll be able to stub out spots for starting items that would go inside your build, and later on as you craft upgrades or get more resources, these would be added to your building.



Armaments — Does your keep have an array of forward-mounted trebuchets for defense? The big benefit here is that as your build is repaired, and assuming you have the resources for these items, or perhaps if there’s a trebuchet in your inventory, it could be automatically added back to your build without you needing to go back and manually replacing it.

BPOs will have some rules for making more realistic buildings. For instance, items like chandeliers will need to be affixed to a “ceiling” block in your building. While not yet in the implementation, these items will also be affected by building destruction in that they will either revert to their “dropped item” state or they will be damaged in some way.



This system is going to have a major impact on gameplay (just being able to go inside buildings and see what you’re doing will be HUGE!), immersion, and will enable some truly wonderful designs to be executed, and we can’t wait to see what you’ll create with it. Final Note -by Max Porter Thanks for reading this issue of Unveiled! It was my pleasure to put this together for you all, and I’m pleased to have such a nice set of updates to kick off the year! That’s all for this month, so until next time -- Max out!