Unveiled: Camelot Unchained Newsletter #64 - City State Entertainment View this email in your browser Share Tweet Team Tidings -by Mark Jacobs For the entire world, March has been a month that will be remembered for a very long time. Hopefully, what is unfolding now will be the last time any of us will have to live through this again during our lifetimes. It’s a terrible time for celebrating accomplishments with everything else that is happening around us. I hope you will forgive me/us for being proud of what we have accomplished during this month but proud I am. The team has worked hard, as usual, but under more pressure than ever because of having to WFH. That said, what we have accomplished this month and what is coming over the next month is exciting and wonderful for all of our Camelot Unchained Backers. Whether it is a new biome, Linux-based server (including a 24x3 server), classes being pulled in from Extender Packs and so much, we got an awful lot done. I hope you enjoy this newsletter and everything contained within it and the monthly update.



Here’s the link to today’s Livestream where I talked about so many of this month’s accomplishments - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xTJDAr0ei8. In addition, we have an update going out today, and we’ve kept you up to date with many live streams! 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.



Along with all the recent technical advancements, the art team has been in development of the RvR battleground terrain and environmental features. Many of you can recall when we made a push with the overall look of our character models in the Characters 2.0 advancement late 2018 and early 2019. We are now giving the environment the same upgrade and with that the enhancement and footprint of all the individual biomes for the islands of CU. So as we develop this RvR scenario using the biome of the Coastal Flatlands we hope to show you as it evolves for not only the battleground scenario, but CU as a whole. As the devout classes get further developed as we have more magic to show you with this refined cauldron staff. concept. Didn’t get enough balance of HelBound weaponry before? Well here are some additions in action on both the life and death side of things. Giving the crafters a bit of love; Here we have some of the craftable leather and wood barricades currently in the first stages of concept. New CUBE material options have been implemented as we hope to encourage and support builders in their creativity. Thanks art team!



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. 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 a great deal of discussion around our recent side project announcement, the big Cherry Keep tests, and all aspects of the future of Camelot Unchained! Come join the discussion and participate in our thriving Community! Dose of Design -by Ben Pielstick Distance Development As with game developers all around the world in the midst of the coronavirus epidemic, I currently find myself working from home. Some developers greatly prefer working remotely, because it presents fewer distractions, and allows them to work for longer periods of time uninterrupted. Others greatly prefer working in an office environment, where they have easy access to other developers and can much more easily point out things on their screen with someone looking over their shoulder. I’ve discussed this situation with several of my friends who are also game designers at other studios, and as far as working as a game designer goes, opinions seem to be very mixed on whether this is a tenable situation. While game designers do spend a lot of time on individual tasks such as writing design documents, scripting game events, or refining calculations in spreadsheets, it is also very important to collaborate with other developers. Formal methods of communication such as email, instant messaging, and meetings can happen more or less the same way working remotely as they do in an office, but a lot of the important communication for game designers happens informally. Oftentimes taking a break to talk something over with someone who happens to be nearby, or getting someone’s attention to quickly point out something on your screen, can lead to unexpected new ideas being explored which wouldn’t happen in a fully remote environment. It certainly can be argued whether these kinds of informal communication should be treated as disruptive and avoided, but personally I feel it is a good thing to let a lot of design improvements come about purely through informal casual conversation, because that is how humans typically interact day-to-day and tend to feel the most comfortable. Contrast that kind of organic communication with scheduled meetings, that take place only at a specific time, for a specific duration, with specific people, with a specific purpose, and I think you can see that the results can be quite different. Another thing that came up in talking about remote work with colleagues at CSE, was that it's easier to work remotely with people you’ve previously been working with in person. For one thing, humans pick up on a lot of things in person that don’t come across the same way over text communication or even voice or video conferencing. For another, spending a lot of time with people gives you a much broader understanding of their unique idiosyncrasies, and teaches you how to understand and interact with them more effectively, in a way you’d probably never be able to without getting to know them in person. And so the current situation of temporarily working from home on a team that had previously been working together in an office, is quite different from that of many small independent game studios where most or all of the developers work remotely and may never have their employees meet in person. Of course CSE does have some team members who work remotely full time, as well as two separate main locations in Virginia and Washington, so even before the current health crisis, we’ve had a lot of experience working with some remote coworkers. While I think it would definitely be better under normal circumstances if we had everyone at the studio in one physical location, having this experience as part of our daily operation has helped to prepare us for the current circumstances, as now we’re simply remote with everyone instead of only those in other locations. I can imagine this transition being much harder for studios that previously had all their developers in one location, who now have to adapt all their processes to working remotely with no prior remote workflows in place. And so for those of you following CSE, rest assured that we are still hard at work making progress on Camelot Unchained, and will continue delivering new features and moving forward along our roadmap even under these difficult circumstances. None of us know how long it will be until things return to normal, but until then development will continue, and you can still expect to see some exciting things showing up in testing over the next few months. Developer Quote “During these difficult times, if we could all just be a little kinder to each other we would help make the world a better place” -- Mark Jacobs CMsphere -by Brian Ward In just the short span of a month, our entire world has been changed by the current situation with the Coronavirus. Each of us has been forced to take immediate personal action to confront the new reality which has materialized around us. At this point in time, it’s not clear if these dramatic steps will be enough to curb the spread of the outbreak, but we know that it is vitally important that we try to do so for the benefit of ourselves, our families, and our neighbors. At CSE, as is the case with most of you who work in an office environment, we’ve responded to the situation by implementing a work from home (WFH) policy. What this means is that we’ve set up workspaces in our houses and we remote into work in order to operate as though we were all in a physical office together. We accomplish this in part by using Google Meet throughout the workday. Virtual Standups — The Core Tech team discusses linux servers via Google Meet. One of the benefits of being a bicoastal organization, maintaining a smattering of permanent remote employees on a regular basis, is that we’ve already had much of the infrastructure in-place needed to pull off working from home on an organization-wide level for quite a while. Aside from physically setting up the hardware and workspaces in our homes, for many of us there wasn’t too much involved on the software side of things, which meant that there was almost no learning curve aside from basic acclimation to our new work habitats.



Working From Home: A Quick Primer In a roundabout way, this brings us to the subject of today’s CMSphere: Acclimating to the new WFH reality. George circulated an email to the team last week which, among other things, contains some pointers about working from home. Since many of you are probably in a similar situation now, it seems worthy of sharing some of the more universal thoughts on this subject in the hopes that maybe it will be helpful to you. I’m mostly paraphrasing: Re-create a physical context for working that you can “travel” to in your house. When you’re there, you’re “at work.” If you normally have tea while working, go make some. If you normally listen to music through headphones while working, put some on.

Keep regular working hours. It’s easy to let your working time slip into personal hours and vice versa. Let others in your household know your working hours and ask them to respect that.

Use a dedicated device for work, and another for personal use.

Stay connected to other people on the team. We use a Google Meet session so that we can quickly ask questions to each other as if we’re working in the same room together.

Communication is super important. In fact, it’s probably worth over communicating just to be safe. Don’t assume that others have heard what you know. Touch base with other involved parties often to confirm.

Be interruptible and respond quickly if someone asks you a question, even if just to acknowledge that you’ve seen their request.

Keep track of what you’re planning to work on next. It will help you to organize your thoughts. You can also look back at the previous day to see if there are things you need to follow up on.

Everyone will get blocked at some point, not just on a hard problem, but writers or artists block. The most important skill for working from home is to recognize when you are stuck and take steps to break out of it. If you get blocked, you can: recognize it, switch tasks, take a break (make tea or coffee), talk to other people on the team.

Don’t get blocked by technology. If your internet goes down or your VPN stops working, you can still accomplish things. Work on concepts, design, tech documentation for an upcoming task. Read up on some area of code or design that you’re not familiar with but you know will help in the future. Get started on new coding tasks that you won’t be able to test out until your connection is restored.

Take care of yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally. Some of us are holed up without roommates or families. Reach out if needed, or if someone else seems to need it. This is a difficult time for all of us, and it seems it may go on for a while yet. Many of us are operating completely outside of our zones of comfort. It’s going to take a lot of extra effort, but we can pull through and continue to be productive.



To those of you who are unable to work from home, who are working the front lines in an essential industry like healthcare or grocery stores, you have our sincerest thanks. To everyone: Stay safe and stay well! State of the Build In this issue we are highlighting the Top Tenish list and progress being made. So much has happened in just a short amount of time.



You can also check out MJ going through all these thing on the monthly livestream. Check it out there, or in the monthly update email going out! Tech, Design, Gameplay: WIP - Tech - Ragdoll Updates and Fixes : Mike D. has completed a second phase of improvements for our new Ragdoll system. Most significantly, the system has been updated to incorporate a selection of skeletal constraints that prevent entities from folding into blobs of limbs. Instead, the system now produces a more realistically constrained range of motion between limbs, head, and torso. Enabled by this, ragdoll entities now collapse more realistically into an infinite variety of poses upon death. We also improved ragdoll versus ground interactions where ragdoll bodies previously would flatten out on the ground and remain flat even after getting pushed around or knocked back up in the air. This has been fixed, such that body parts in motion more realistically indicate the aesthetic of momentum you'd expect as they get knocked around. Also fixed is corpse sliding where dead bodies no longer slide across the terrain like frozen sacks of meat on ice. While they still fly through the air when hit with sufficient force, they will now thud to the ground and come to a stop into a final morbid pose. Lastly, some key optimizations have been made that reduce the cost of running ragdoll simulations for dead entities, freeing up client CPU cycles for other animation needs.

WIP - Tech - Pathfinding: Progress continues steadily with our navigation mesh system, as Lee's focus on the complexities of interior spaces has led to some solid gains in our ability to support user-generated keeps and other structures. During internal testing of the system, we have successfully generated paths leading through the halls and stairways of some of our multi-level test zones. This is a significant milestone in supporting NPC movement in the sophisticated environments we and our players are creating. With most of the major complexities solved, Lee's attention now turns to hunting down and fixing the various special cases in 3D pathfinding that we need to address in order to offer a complete, robust, and high-performing system serving all our needs.

WIP - Tech and Art - In-game Scenario Map: Koo worked on the layout work for the scenario map for the upcoming CU scenario. Christina and Matt put code in place to ensure the client has all in the information that it needs to display the new map.

WIP - Design - The 24x3 Scenario: This month we have done a lot of work toward finishing the CU Battleground Scenario, including: Design for Keep Lords and other defensive NPCs with new abilities and behaviors. Preparing plots for the Builder's Brigade to provide new Keeps and Towers they have built. Scenario scripting which will manage the ownership of objectives, provide notifications to players when objectives are under attack, and display updates on the map so that it is easy for players to see the state of the zone at a glance

WIP - Tech - Improved Siege engine interactions: There are new visuals and better interaction indicators made by Mike C. which now make siege engines aligned with the ground instead of the billboard. This helps show WHERE interactions are. New visuals for interaction TYPE allows players to see the difference between different locations on battering rams, but all interactions can have a different in world visual icon based on the interaction type. So again with the rams, you can tell the difference between the "push" locations and the "use abilities" location. And now when hovering over entities for interactions, an entity with multiple interaction points (see battering ram) will show off its interaction points, not just the one you are currently hovering over. As before, when you are at a valid usable range to an interaction, and hovering over it, the icon will change from white/grey to yellow/gold to indicate it is valid to be used. Lastly, when interacting with an entity that has multiple interaction points (see battering ram), we improved the desired interaction picking to allow taking into account player position.

WIP - Tech & Design - Trap Item: Camelot Unchained was always meant to have a dedicated class for crafters. As a part of this class, one of the important features was to allow them to create traps, which, along with other field fortifications, could allow them to control space on the battlefield in support of allied combattants. While crafters eventually will be able to actually craft traps with various effects, as an initial offering, the Scrapwork Trap ability lets crafters cobble together a trap from whatever spare materials they may be carrying in order to lay down a trap without taking time to craft one ahead of time. The effects of this trap depend on the materials it was made from, so crafters can use whatever they happen to have on hand, or make sure to carry a specific type of material so that they can use it to create a trap should the need arise. Since the full crafter class is still not implemented in CU, for now the ability to create traps, along with all existing crafting functionality, will be available to all classes of all Realms. Once more of the functionality for crafters is ready, we will be opening up the ability to create a dedicated character of the crafter class, and limiting these features so that only dedicated crafters can utilize them.

WIP - Tech & Design - Soul Essence Shards: For a long time Mark has wanted to use the idea of “Souls” in Camelot Unchained in some way. Eventually souls are meant to be used in some form of crafting, but since we already have an easy-to-use feature for dropping and collecting items in Final Stand: Ragnarok, we decided it might be fun to add a temporary version of Soul pickups to Camelot Unchained for some initial testing. Right now the design is that when players die they will drop Soul Essence, which can then be picked up by the enemy player who killed them. These Essences will increase the health, damage, and healing power of the player who picks them up for a limited time, and the player who died will lose the same thing for the same duration. For now this feature should help provide an extra incentive for killing enemies, as well as extra motivation to avoid dying.

WIP - Tech & Design - Spawn Protection Bubble: Spawn camping is always a concern in PvP games, and has been a problem in past CU testing, simply because we haven’t had time to build a feature for preventing it. We’ve taken advantage of some of the engine’s new features to provide a spawn protection effect around the starting spawn points of each Realm in our new scenario zone. This effect will benefit allies and penalize enemies, reducing damage to those it protects, and causing feedback damage to any enemy who damages them. This means that if you decide to spawn camp, you are very likely to kill yourself as soon as you start damaging your targets.

WIP - Tech - Item Instance Support: This feature allows some items to render more efficiently on the client.

WIP - Tech - Channeling Tech: the basis of this tech has been made but we need to put it to the test against abilities in-game. That is the next step for this tech! We have implemented them against Song abilities and hope that in future playtests we can gather more feedback on the user experience and any potential bugs in that space.

WIP - Tech - Trigger Volumes Tech: we’ve made additions to trigger volumes such that they can now move with an entity. This will likewise need to be tested against real abilities in-game as it has not yet been implemented on any actual abilities thus far. We expect cool and fresh things to come for the future of abilities with this tech as well as the channeling tech above.

WIP - Tech - Ability Bar Customization: Players will be able to have multiple ability bars and move them into groups. Abilities can be added and removed from the ability book for more customization.

WIP - Tech - Warband overhaul: We’re getting warbands into a fully functioning state with safeguards against future regressions on the system. It should be faster, more reliable, and provide an easy way to update in the future.

WIP - Tools - Content Pipeline Changelists: The content pipeline is distributed and able to update assets in real time. This is a blessing for fast iteration and allows many people to contribute assets all at once but we don’t always know where all of those assets come from. Changelists is a system to allow us to track assets changes and apply them to shards in batches allowing us to keep the fast iteration while also having a history!

WIP - Tech - Server Orchestration P1: Containers and Discovery: Server orchestration is an all encompassing concept around deploying, managing, removing, connecting, and monitoring servers. CU has many disparate servers each with their own needs and as we’ve grown the number of them, we need to be sure we have good tools in place to manage them. To this end, we’re starting off with containerizing our servers which allows us to host them cheaper and more reliably and adding in service discovery which allows our servers to communicate with each other without every server having to know where every other server is located.

WIP - Tech - Server Performance and Production Readiness: As we push further to live, our shared server tech has many operational requirements to meet. Part of that is our ability to monitor servers and collect effective logs so we’ve been iterating on the format and information our server logs give us and effective ways to store and process them. We’ve also been increasing and differentiating the kind of telemetry we do on each server to make sure we have a good understanding of the health of our servers.

WIP - Tech - NPCs: in addition to making the wyvern behave like a real NPC, we are looking towards more immersive interaction with NPCs in general across CU. Having NPCs patrol particular routes and achieving goal based movement are the current steps we are taking towards their behaviors.

WIP - Tech and Gameplay - Keep Lords: We’ve made a lot of progress on Keep Lords, including adding new Overmind features in order to control them, new AI behaviors, and their own set of special abilities.

WIP - Tech - Projected Particles: The projected particles code has been brought out of our backlog. As a recap this lets us cast particles onto meshes, causing the effect to wrap smoothly around uneven surfaces.

WIP - Gameplay - Scenario Progress: First pass scripting of the CU scenario is in a good state as we move forward on building out the environment and feel of the map. Technical development of Keep Lords, as stated before, is moving forward. We are full steam ahead with realm keeps and NPC behavior which have been implemented. The full core scenario loop is really coming together and we are moving quickly to get those assets into the map so that testing in earnest can begin.

WIP - Tech & Design - Progress on the Devout Classes: All of the non-resurrection Runes (the components that specify effects) are drafted. A majority of Shapes (components that specify delivery of Runes) are done, but we found that some components will need larger tech improvements and be revisited in the future. What remains (Infusions, Foci, and something called Modals for the Helbound) are on the horizon. Then we can start testing all of these components for obvious bugs or flaws in the logic. With the ability components done we will go back and take a pass at the class Traits (it may seem weird to do something for character creation last, but many of them modify how certain aspects of abilities work, so it’s best to know how exactly those components are constructed). Because of his quick work on the first pass on this class, Ben was able to move on to working on Spirit Mages.

WIP - Design - Spirit Mages: The Dread Caller, Slaughterwolf, and Morrigan, which now have completed first pass designs, and Scout classes: the Specter, Wisp, and Arisen, which are still currently a work in progress. CUBE: Completed - CUBE - Blueprint Fix: Issue with saving and viewing saved blueprints has been fixed.

Completed - Art - New CUBE Blocks: We added 32 new block sets to CUBE! This includes the latest realm materials shown previewed in previous updates. Art: WIP - Art - Arthurian Class - Abbot Crosier Staff and Animation - With the newly made Crosier staff weapon, Abbot is now in the animation stages of production.

WIP - Art - Viking Class - Helbound Masks, Staves, and Animation - New concept art has made its way down the line for both Helbound staves and masks. The unique Hel staff forged with the duality of life and death elements is currently making its way through the modeling stages. Animation is also in progress for this class.

WIP - Art - TDD Class - Blessed Crow Cauldron Staff - Concept has continued to develop for Blessed Crow weapons and on track for selection and 3D modeling.

WIP - Art - TDD - Armor - New TDD medium armor with a dark fool inspiration is making its way in the model and sculpt stage, and soon from there into materials.

Done - Art - Wyvern - Model and materials are finished and currently in rigging stages. From there it will move into animation.

WIP - Art - Deployable Items - Deployable Barricades and Traps are in the works. Concept art is rolling along on material unique barricades as well a variety of traps.

WIP - Art - Soul Essence Shards - In tandem with tech development, concept art is developing for the visual look of this pickup feature.

WIP - Art - Environment - Terrain - New terrain functions in the works. To include slope adjusted pivots (like cliff wall meshes being spawned at an angel) and a new additional system of randomization for terrain meshes.

WIP - Art - Environment - Height Shader Tech - New height mask shader for meshes. Currently only available for terrain materials. Andrew is bringing this tech to all 3D meshes allowing the art team more flexibility in blending materials for better visuals

WIP - Art - Environment - Vertex shader Tech - Vertex painting allows for controlled blending between 2 materials on 3D models. This helps optimism materials usage while allowing effects like Moss at the base of an object or burnt wood near a fire particle. This is a manual process BUT gives the art team a lot of flexibility by not having to make a slew of one off materials for simple instances. In game the player will benefit from gaining a more emerivise and dynamic world that can be achieved by our small team.

WIP - Art - Environment - World Aligned Materials - Currently available in CUBE and terrain mod Andrew is bringing World Aligned Materials to or 3D models. This will give the art team more freedom in how models are implemented. This means simple rock can be scaled and placed anywhere in the world all while keeping a consistent material and resolution to all other rocks that share the same material. This will free up art from making material sets for large, medium, and small rocks. Now ALL rocks of a certain style will share the same material.

WIP - Design - Overmind - Mark has been working in a number of areas within Overmind. He has been focused mainly on speeding up the ability of design/engineering to work with and iterate on Overmind-based scenarios.

Phew, that’s a lot! And yet, as I said, there’s lots more, in the monthly update and beyond! Final Note -by Mark Jacobs As always, we thank you for your support and patience. No matter what, please stay safe, be kind, and be strong over the next few months and I hope all of us come through them with as little personal sadness and tragedy as possible. I'll be repeating that same line until all of us around the world come out of these challenging times.