Unveiled: Camelot Unchained Newsletter #62 - City State Entertainment View this email in your browser Share Tweet Team Tidings -by Max Porter Happy New Year! And happy end of December, happy holidays, and happy start of the December newsletter! :) It’s been a solid year for the studio, full of ups and downs and many adventures, and we look forward to the new year with great excitement! Many good things on the horizon, and lots of exciting development that we’re currently in the middle of pushing through! We’ve got a monthly update going out today as well, where you can read in detail about all of the things that got done over this last month of the year and what’s currently in progress.



Here are some words and images from Michelle, showing a few of the art pieces that got made! Check out the update for even more! Michelle:



It’s been a fun year for the art team, and we are even more excited as we move into 2020 to bring you more developments from the world of art.



In this issue, we have something for the Viking lovers, as we are working on expanding the library of patterns for items such as shields. Not only original designs, but also ones inspired by symbols found in Nordic culture. New siege weapons are coming down the line to rain pain on your enemies! We’ve been expanding on new designs with a range of defense and fire power. The Art team is working to have a vast range of sizes, that scale from single player operation to multiplayer co-operation, for these war machines. In this lineup, you can see great variety with add-ons to a single catapult. How defensive would you like your majestic catapult? The newest fashionable helm for TDD has been created. With materials, it can have a variety of looks depending on how it is crafted. We like to think that no player likes running into another with the exact same look, and crafting is a great way for us to provide variety. The world continues to develop and grow, and the art team has been inspired by the winter season here at the studio, as seen here in the work on the winter forest Biome. To bring some color and some fantasy to this biome, we’ve been working on concepts for subzones, each with their own unique elements. Such as this golden concept here: pinecone-like features that glow and bring pops of color into the world. Tina, the mistress of beasts, has been concepting fauna that lives in this cold temperature area. Everything from non-aggressive and--dare I say cute--creatures, such as the moth seen below, to those who roam the forest with tooth and claw. As we develop creature and plant life design, we are keeping in mind interesting materials they could provide for the crafting system. Thank you so much, Michelle!





As we finish up the holiday season here, we’re thankful for a relatively comfortable winter here in beautiful downtown Fairfax, Va. No snow as of yet! I certainly hope you got everything you wanted over the holidays, be it gifts or just time spent with friends and family. The end of the year is a great time to take stock of the things that really matter, relax a bit, and maybe play a few games!



We’re especially thankful, as always, for your patience, support, and understanding. We are looking to reward that patience with some cool things happening in the new year, and we’re pretty sure you’re going to be pleased! Thanks to all of you!



This issue of Unveiled has the classic pieces you’ve come to love and expect, including an article from Ben on NPCs in PvP, a CMsphere from Brian, and a few choice updates (thanks producers)! As part of our updates, I have continued to stream Morning with Max this month every Monday and Friday morning, and we have just streamed a live update in our new monthly format! Have yourself a holiday snack and check out all those streams, chock-full of great information!



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 updates and newsletters, check out the News section of our website.



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 thing. Read on for updates, articles, thoughts, news, and more, and please enjoy this, the sixty-second 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 special projects and progress in the upcoming year, our new update format, plans for the future, NPCs, release dates, and of course, all the things people are finding in testing! Come join the discussion and participate in our thriving Community! Dose of Design -by Ben Pielstick NPCs for PvP

At first glance, it might seem strange that we here at CSE have been spending so much time and effort laying the foundations for a fairly advanced NPC system. After all, Camelot Unchained is all about PvP, so surely we don’t need nearly as many NPCs as a PvE-focused game. While it is true that a lot of sandbox PvP games have few if any NPCs, or at least keep their functionality very basic, part of the distinction we draw for Camelot Unchained is between PvP and RvR, which needs a lot more going on than a simple, mostly-empty sandbox.



The big difference between RvR and PvP is that with RvR, it isn’t just you as an individual player looking out for oneself. You have an entire Realm standing behind you to help support you. Each Realm is made up of other players, but also out of NPCs. These NPCs aren’t just AI monsters, standing around waiting for players to come by and kill them. They have to be fairly intelligent to protect your castles while you’re offline, escort your caravan as it travels through dangerous territory, and help buy and sell items for you while you’re busy with other important tasks, such as fighting or crafting.



In addition, we do also need NPCs for more typical reasons. We have upcoming classes that will require NPC functionality for their spirit pets. There will be mines, caves, and dungeons in addition to The Depths, which will feature hostile NPCs to make gathering crafting materials a bit more hazardous. Also, to some extent there will be NPCs that generally populate the overall game world, maintaining a feeling of a world that is alive as you explore the wilderness, and also providing some special surprises now and then.



Camelot Unchained of course still has no PvE leveling, but since NPCs feature so heavily into the flow of RvR, it does make sense for us to ensure we build a good set of features to support them. The first major hurdle when it comes to NPCs is the behaviors for the NPCs themselves. These relate to things like navigation, targeting, ability usage, and so on. The kinds of things that let an NPC decide what to do at any given moment. While this represents a significant amount of work, even once you have some good behaviors ready to use, you still need a way to get NPCs into the world. Spawning rules for NPCs are incredibly important, but I think a lot less well understood. Even though we have some special AI solutions for our game, the general kinds of problems that need to be solved for AI in video games are fairly well documented and easily understood. The methods for spawning on the other hand are a bit more obscure, and there are vast differences in the way different games handle spawning, depending on their needs.



In our case, spawning is handled by a very powerful set of scripts we’ve been calling “The Overmind”. This lets us take into account all sorts of factors which apply conditions to what can spawn, when, where, and how often, allowing us to manage the population of NPCs throughout a MMO-sized world. This means a lot more than simply respawning camps of enemies a few minutes after they are killed, as in a lot of games. We can keep track of where the player population is, how many of a certain NPC type are alive in the world, how long those NPCs have been alive, and implement some very advanced logic that will create dynamic and interesting encounters throughout the game world.



As with many features for Camelot Unchained, the first place we’ll be putting NPCs to work is in scenarios. These limited test cases let us stress test our systems, but also provide a way for Backers to see what we are doing, and provide early feedback to help us improve in any areas that gameplay isn’t working out the way it should--under more real-world conditions than we can easily test internally. Look for more new types of NPCs, and situations in which they can be found, coming up in future scenarios. There are a lot of exciting features that will now be possible to implement using our new NPC system, and we look forward to sharing them with you all as we turn the page into a new year, and start to show a lot more of what Camelot Unchained will have to offer. Developer Quote “What I can tell you is that we are working our tails off to give our Backers something really fun to play as quickly as possible.” -- Mark Jacobs CMsphere -by Brian Ward As I sip my Hot Apple Cider and ponder this year, I think about all the great fun we’ve had and the progress that we’ve made. We started off getting record numbers of Autonomous Remote Clients (ARCs) connected into a single instance of the game. Starting in January, we were able to comfortably get 3k ARCs in, peaking at 3.5k. By March, we’d topped that number to over 5k. And since then, we’ve managed to push that number even higher--as high as 14k. This speaks volumes about the types of deeply immersive and expansive experiences that you will be able to enjoy in Camelot Unchained.



And we proved it by taking the next step in creating The Siege of Cherry Keep, an ambitious scenario of vast scale in the vein of Helm’s Deep, featuring over a thousand NPCs, hundreds of player-controllable Trebuchet siege weapons, and a 9+ million block fully-destructible castle (with networked rubble physics to boot!), built entirely by a Backer using the C.U.B.E. toolset. It’s a ridiculously cool accomplishment, and many of you have had the chance to experience it firsthand.

Playtesting



Backer testing was revived this month with a look at the long-awaited Skald, which joins the Dark Fool and the Minstrel to complete our set of WIP support classes now in the game. We also saw AOIT land in the game client, resolving various highly visible rendering artifacts, particularly those relating to alpha textures on particles.



And Now for Something Completely Different



We switched from weekly to monthly dev updates at the end of October. This was a joyous occasion for all! Many of you have expressed that you would rather not hear the drier details about some of the longer multi-week WIP tech updates on a weekly basis. For us, this change meant a relief on production, as it takes time to write up everything and put together a presentation on camera every week — not that we don’t love doing it, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day!



This has been a positive switch. And in that vein, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce my own Top Tenish, at least for this month! ;-)



Top Tenish Holiday Albums from an Unscientific In-Office Poll (Unordered)

Christmas with the King's Singers, The King’s Singers (via Brys)

A Charlie Brown Christmas, Vince Guaraldi Trio (via Brian)

Viking Christmas, Amon Amarth (via Lee)

Welcome to the Christmas Parade, Mariah Carey vs. My Chemical Romance (via Cheyne)

A Heavy Metal Christmas, Christopher Lee (via Christina)

Diablo Soundtrack, Matt Uelman (via Wylie)

The Lost Christmas Eve, Trans-Siberian Orchestra (via Anthony)

Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer, Elmo & Patsy (via Cheyne)

A Maccabeats Hanukkah, The Maccabeats (via Max)

Soundtrack from Die Hard, Michael Kamen (via Mark)

Happy New Year!



That’s it for this edition of CMsphere. Wishing you the very best! State of the Build -by Max Porter Welcome to a summary of the highlights (of the highlights) from the month’s progress! If you want the biggest, juiciest slices of the monthly update pie, well here you go, with a scoop of ice cream on top.



These items are only a small selection of what got done, and we shared the big list with you in the monthly livestream. Check it out there, or in the monthly update email going out!



Gameplay: WIP- Gameplay - Skald: The Skald is the last of the Support trio classes to be implemented, and is now ready for Backer testing. Skalds use shouts and songs, along with ferocious melee attacks to devastate the enemy. The Skald is more of a frontline fighter than their counterparts in the other Realms. These mead-swilling storytellers don’t use their big axes for chopping wood. Their starting ability set is in, but there may be some missing animations, VFXs, and SFXs for built abilities. We invite you to create a Skald during the next play test, make a slew of abilities, and let us know what you think. Tech Improvements: WIP - Tech - Linuxification: It’s been a long time coming, but we've got all the code ported, and internally, Linux servers are up and in testing. Work is continuing on fully-automated builds and the cloud deployment process. We now have some engineers working out of this branch, and expect to roll it out to all of them as soon as the last of the issues are addressed.

It’s been a long time coming, but we've got all the code ported, and internally, Linux servers are up and in testing. Work is continuing on fully-automated builds and the cloud deployment process. We now have some engineers working out of this branch, and expect to roll it out to all of them as soon as the last of the issues are addressed. WIP - Tech - Knockback: Improvements to our new knockback system have been ongoing steadily as we integrate and test knockback with other features, particularly ragdoll and entity death. We are working to incorporate knockback into a variety of abilities, with particular focus on adding data-driven mechanisms for specifying the strength and directionality of knockback forces for each ability that uses it. The final result of this effort will be a balanced, exciting dynamic that players will enjoy both during combat and as a visceral reward upon defeating enemies.

Improvements to our new knockback system have been ongoing steadily as we integrate and test knockback with other features, particularly ragdoll and entity death. We are working to incorporate knockback into a variety of abilities, with particular focus on adding data-driven mechanisms for specifying the strength and directionality of knockback forces for each ability that uses it. The final result of this effort will be a balanced, exciting dynamic that players will enjoy both during combat and as a visceral reward upon defeating enemies. WIP - Tech - Navmesh - Our custom Navmesh and Pathfinding system has achieved a major milestone. With the 2D (terrain) feature set now working, we are finishing the 3D capabilities that round out the full system. Lee has been working very hard on this, and is now joined by MikeD to help drive things home. The focus has turned to performance optimization and bug fixing. Once finished, we will have full support for NPC navigation in our complex, real-time and destruction-rich environments, from tight corridors and stairways in multi-level structures, to dense forests and rough terrain. We are very proud of this system, and look forward to bringing it to our players very soon.

Our custom Navmesh and Pathfinding system has achieved a major milestone. With the 2D (terrain) feature set now working, we are finishing the 3D capabilities that round out the full system. Lee has been working very hard on this, and is now joined by MikeD to help drive things home. The focus has turned to performance optimization and bug fixing. Once finished, we will have full support for NPC navigation in our complex, real-time and destruction-rich environments, from tight corridors and stairways in multi-level structures, to dense forests and rough terrain. We are very proud of this system, and look forward to bringing it to our players very soon. Transparency Improvements (AOIT) - Last month, we implemented a new system for blending transparent objects in our game. This system has been merged back into the master branch, along with some improvements to shaders, and can be seen now on hatchery.



This system eliminates the artifacts you could see where our large draw distances and high dynamic range would cause bright particles and other partially transparent objects to discolor the background behind them. This is also an order-independent system, which keeps most of the advantages of the old system, allowing us to draw our scenes quickly in single large chunks and being free of sorting order artifacts. This is still a WIP, with some work remaining to optimize it and provide better support for rendering certain scenes and on older video cards.



This fixes a couple transparency bugs: White outlines on various assets. Particles changing color over other particles or discoloring the trees or ocean in the background. Particles and transparent effects cutting/hiding some things behind them.

Last month, we implemented a new system for blending transparent objects in our game. This system has been merged back into the master branch, along with some improvements to shaders, and can be seen now on hatchery. This system eliminates the artifacts you could see where our large draw distances and high dynamic range would cause bright particles and other partially transparent objects to discolor the background behind them. This is also an order-independent system, which keeps most of the advantages of the old system, allowing us to draw our scenes quickly in single large chunks and being free of sorting order artifacts. This is still a WIP, with some work remaining to optimize it and provide better support for rendering certain scenes and on older video cards. This fixes a couple transparency bugs: WIP - Tech - Navmesh - Development on our 3D pathfinding system continues to progress quickly, as Lee and MikeD work on fixing bugs in the system and making navmesh generation increasingly robust. In service of that, MikeD and Ben are building a series of obstacle course maps that are designed to isolate all the unique geometric cases that the navmesh generator has to handle.



Each map contains numerous distinct "stations" that highlight a particular use case for pathfinding. These allow us to test our algorithms against different structures of increasing complexity. In the map shown below, for example, we can test navigation mesh generation against simple ramp and staircase structures combined with raised platforms, then further test those structures by including the considerably more complex cases of multi-level indoor spaces of different sizes.



Other test maps we are building add organic terrain elements intersecting these and other more complicated structures, yielding a full suite of test cases that cover the spectrum of what players can build in Camelot Unchained. Ultimately, our system is approaching the point where it will be able to handle every situation we throw at it. We look forward to bringing it to our players soon.

All About Art: Tech/Art - Material Rendering - PBR Roughness/Specular fixes - Part 1 - We’ve known for a while now that something wasn't quite right with how some of our materials were rendering. Thanks to Joseph's technical art skills and George's coding skills, we've found a path to some improvements! Our materials are made up of several different textures, which all relate to one another to provide the final in-game render. We fixed a bug where the metallic map (determines if something is rendered as metal or not) was being ignored and objects were projecting material colors into the scene based solely on material roughness (determines how light bounces off a rough or smooth surface). Basically, if something is metal, it intensifies the color cast from it. So in the game you might see really bright color, say from blue ice, onto white snow, way too intensely! Part 2 - The second fix was where the specular map (how intense the specular highlights are) were not being multiplied correctly when in shadows. This basically amounted to a "sheen" on objects in shadows, which had our artists here scratching their heads. You would have seen this on your character's skin or the bark of trees, as obvious examples. And that's not all! We actually have another fix we're working on, not yet in game, that's blowing out the normal maps (small surface details) on characters. Big thanks to Joseph in helping us track these down!

Art - Biome Development - Winter Forest Concept Art - As we are in winter season here at CSE, the artists have been inspired, and have been expanding art development for the winter forest biome. The Environment - A forest of snowy trees, frozen waterfalls, and lost shrines. Here, the wood has consumed once-great fallen beasts, now frozen by snowfall and ice over time. Expect unique sub-zones with flourishes, or red and cool blues. A biome filled with snow-covered ground and unique plant life that thrives in the low temperatures and winter shade. The team has been concepting a variety of different flora that with forethought in providing fun ingredients for crafting. The Wildlife - From small to fearsome, the art team has been exploring many species. From the peaceful creatures that breathe life into the surrounding woods to most fearsome beasts, with all the unique crafting resources they could provide.



As we combine and refine all these elements together in this winter forest biome, players will certainly enjoy exploring this cool zone!

As we are in winter season here at CSE, the artists have been inspired, and have been expanding art development for the winter forest biome. And as I said, there’s lots more, in the monthly update and beyond! Final Thoughts -by Max Porter Hey there reader, thanks for making it all the way to the end of Unveiled number sixty-two. As our updates have changed and grown, so too has the newsletter evolved, yet it continues to be a pleasure to put together. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this issue as much as I have in collating, editing, and writing it. As always, thank you for your patience and your kindness, your generosity and your interest. Let’s keep making a cool game in the new year!



THAT'S IT! That’s the last update from 2019. CU all in 2020! Note From MJ -by Mark Jacobs Hey folks! I wanted to end this final newsletter of 2019 on a quite hopeful note. It's been a long year, full of, as usual, ups and downs. And while it might seem that the last half of it wasn't quite as productive as the first half, well, appearances can be quite deceiving. This afternoon we let the first person who was not a CSE team member in to play and see some of what you folks are going to be playing in January. And, to our joy and a little bit of surprise, everything worked the way it was supposed to and it was an impressive site. Still early, non-optimized, but there were a lot of fun, joyful moments, and a surprise here and there. And that's what we will be giving you in January.



You've been patient and you deserve only the best, and you'll be getting that from us, and so much more by the end of January. Stay tuned, things are going to get really, really interesting, colossally interesting as a matter of, as the Christmas poem I hijacked and rewrote said. :)