Unveiled: Camelot Unchained Newsletter #52 - City State Entertainment View this email in your browser Share Tweet Team Tidings -by Max Porter Hey folks,



Another month of great progress! Happy end of February to you, it’s been a good one! This month, we saw our engine crack 3.5k ARCs (Autonomous Remote Clients) and players in a small area--and then 4k!, make a significant framerate boost, and we began testing the initial pass of the long-awaited improved ability builder! BREAKING NEWS: (seriously, we’re testing right now, check your email from 2/28) We’ve hit 5100 ARCs, Players, and NPCs in the same small space, which includes over 4,500 ARCs and Players.



In the East Coast office of City State Entertainment®, while the cold weather has continued, it’s been much less wintry than the shiver-inducing mix we were experiencing last month. That leads to happy roads as we keep pressing onward with Camelot Unchained®! If anything, the brisk air only serves to refresh and invigorate us as we continue to make excellent progress.



Part of what I do around here is to tell you about that progress, so to that end, this newsletter contains a Dose of Design from Ben about putting the pieces of the game together -- a pretty exciting topic that shows how far we’ve come! We also have a piece from Brian on the new siege scenario we’re building, including some in-progress shots and talk on how that’s going! To round things out, I’ve added a summary of a few of the highlights from the month’s progress.



As always, and as our Backers know, we consider it our responsibility to be extremely open and scrupulously honest. 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 1 heats 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.



Don’t forget to click on the “view this email in your browser” link on the top right to see the whole newsletter! Thanks as always for your interest and your support--or if you’re new, thanks for checking us out! Read on for updates, articles, art, and all the goodness, and please enjoy this, the fifty-second issue of Unveiled.



Hot Topics



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Hot topics on the forums right now include discussion of the Arcs and AoEs in our latest tests, excitement over testing of the new ability builder, and some of the marvelous constructions that enterprising builders are trying out for Camelot Unchained! Dose of Design -by Ben Pielstick Putting the Pieces Together

Most of the time, progress creeps along at a slow but steady pace in game development, with small features appearing and improving little by little in a smooth buildup that gradually accelerates toward creating a finished product. However, once in a while, there are periods which are anything but smooth, and progress occurs in sudden jerks and leaps. For example, there are times when a big feature can’t easily be broken up into smaller pieces to be put into the game one by one. This can lead to a rather disruptive integration period, where the big new feature finally arrives and drastically changes a big part of the game all at once. This creates a huge and seemingly sudden improvement, when work that has been going on behind the scenes for weeks or even months finally comes together and starts to work for the first time. Right now in Camelot Unchained, there are two of these cases happening at once.



The first of the two changes has been termed “Characters 2.0” because it dramatically changes how characters are built, and greatly improves how they look. This isn’t actually the first time we have changed how we make characters. Some of you may remember our Alpha videos, which included some of CU’s more outlandish races, which have been absent from the game since the start of Beta testing. This is because our first version of characters was largely placeholder for testing, and didn’t support visually equipping and unequipping armor, or multiple animation sets. Then, our first set of Beta 1 characters was our initial attempt to give characters all the features they will need in order to launch the game. This included a variety of equipment, animations, and the ability to more easily share assets and features between the characters of different races.



We learned a lot of lessons from our Beta 1 characters. As our wish list of things we wanted to do even better grew, it became clear that a large rework to the fundamentals of characters could provide a huge boost; both in visual quality and an improvement to the workflow needed to add future characters and equipment items to the game. This is where “Characters 2.0” started, and now that it is finally making its way into testing, all the current characters are suddenly looking much better, even though the work to make this happen has been in progress largely behind the scenes for quite a while.



The second big change in progress right now is an improvement to our ability system. Abilities are one of the most difficult parts of making video games. This is one of the reasons why you see games where, for example, players just have to shoot a few guns getting released at a much more rapid pace than those with expansive RPG-style ability systems. Much like animations, this is not the first time we have made big changes to our ability system. The biggest change occurred during the lead-up to the start of Beta 1 testing, which we termed “Re-abilitation”. This massive change reworked the fundamental nature of abilities, from how they functioned on the server, to how they displayed to the client, to how we went about editing them in our development tools.



That effort definitely set us on the right track, but much like with animations, we still had room for improvement to make our workflow better, and most importantly, more easily support enhanced functionality to provide the dynamic engaging combat mechanics we’ve promised for CU. The ongoing work to the ability system doesn’t have a moniker like “Re-abilitation” because it isn’t that big of a change. It is still very significant however, as it provides a new way to for us to author abilities, and a faster path to expanding on the ability system in order to do all the new things we will need to get more classes into the game faster and with fewer bugs.



When making big changes like these, development tends to start on a separate ‘branch’ isolated from the main development version of the game until work has been completed, at which point the whole change in its entirety can be merged back into the main game. The process of merging can itself be a major undertaking, depending on how long a feature has been worked on separately, and how much has changed in the main version of the game in the meantime. As you can imagine, merging two of these branches at nearly the same time is even more difficult, which is what we’re experiencing as we stack ability changes on top of character changes, along with all the other general work that has been going on to improve performance and develop other features for the game.



For designers, these integration periods can often be difficult, because content implementation sometimes has to be put on hold until the process is complete. This can often be a good time to work on future designs and documentation, because with so many moving parts, there is too much instability to generally work on producing content. Once these changes finally come together, however, it will open up a huge range of new possibilities, and a lot of new content to be created. Once everything is ready, new playable races and classes, and new armor and weapons, will start to be added at a much more rapid pace than had been possible while these support systems were undergoing significant changes. It is always an exciting time seeing pieces come together so that work can shift from making the game work to making the game fun. We look forward to sharing more with you as these new features are put to use, moving the game forward toward our next phase of testing. Developer Quote “We are definitely overachieving right now. I really didn’t expect we’d hit 4K until we did some tuning work on some of our servers/net code.” -- Mark Jacobs Progress Spotlight -by Brian Ward So It Begins: Building A Battle



- graybox concept by Ben



At this moment, wheels are in motion to bring you an ambitious, brand new scenario. Imagine, if you will: an enormous keep, protected by a large wall, and a massive army that will attempt to breach it. Does this sound kind of like the Helm's Deep battle from The Lord of the Rings? Well, you'd be right on the money, because capturing that feeling is one of our design goals for this scenario: Part of the whole point of making Camelot Unchained and building our own engine is to be able to bring epic battles into the genre. This new scenario is the first step toward delivering on that promise.



After Ben created a rough design concept for the zone (seen above), we asked the Builders' Brigade to help us out to flesh out the details of the massive structure. Currently, their designs for each of the Realms are in progress (meaning they are still making them right now!) and we will ultimately pick one and use it in the Siege Demo zone. They will be submitting their finalized designs to us very soon. In the meantime, we've been watching as they've been sharing WIP images in the private #builders-brigade channel on Discord, and I'd just like to share a couple of those with you now.



The Arthurian Legend - by Bosk



Bosk leapt into action immediately to create this beautiful Arthurian wall. We know this is going to be a great design, and we can't wait to blow it up! A Tuatha Fantasy - both by Treville



Treville is really showing all of us the way forward on TDD design. Love those choices. Imagine lobbing shots from trebuchets at those beautifully ornate walls! :D



Process



Honing in on a consistent design language requires a lot of additional planning. Check out this massive staging area that Scott Florence made.



Programmer Matt commented that it looks like a movie studio backlot! - by Scott Florence



We are super excited about this new scenario, and we can’t wait to show it to you. It’s an amazing amount of effort that folks are putting in. We couldn’t do what we do without the help of all our volunteers, like the Builders’ Brigade--but also the Mod Squad, the tireless behind-the-scenes work of our Moderators, and our Translation teams -- and of course all our playtesters! Shout out to ALL of them for the amazing work they’ve been doing. State of the Build -by Max Porter Lots of progress to talk about this month! In this piece, I bring you a selection of a few choice items from our News updates the past month, so you can check out the highlights of the Top Tenish list we put out each week! Taken together with the date, these items often form a little story of the ups and downs, the hills we had to climb to accomplish some of the big leaps forward. You might call this the “highlights of the highlights” from the February news updates! Keep in mind this is just a short selection from a much, much bigger list! :)

Pushing The Engine (2/1/2019): Ability scalability tests: As mentioned last week, we continue the stress testing of our improved ability system using our ARCs (Autonomous Remote Clients). This week, we pushed past the 2809 ARCs and players in a single battle… to over 3000 ARCs and players in a single battle!

(2/8/2019) Tech – Rendering/Animation: Andrew delivered a set of character rendering/animation improvements that boost framerates in scenes with a large number of characters by up to 20% (depending on PC configuration). This was primarily done to support adding large numbers of attachment points to characters for spell effects, but it turned out to have a big impact on existing characters, even before adding those!

(2/15/2019): WIP – Tech – Physics: Colin refactored PhysicsNetworkState to make our physics networking more flexible. This is needed for networking building-placed objects, such as wall torches and chandeliers, which Matt is currently working on. Tyler also worked with Matt to figure out how to set up the art assets such that we can add more assets in the future that will adhere to the blocks.

(2/22/2019) WIP – Tech – Terrain and NavManager: Lee checked in the terrain and navmanger. While this is still waiting on continued work from Andrew, it will improve our terrain query quality and speed. This iteration will re-enable better syncing between player position on client and server (You don’t pop under the terrain when moving around) and is foundational work for future pathfinding tech.

(2/22/2019) WIP – Tech – Building Placed Objects: Colin worked on refactoring the physics network states to support networking BPOs. Matt has nearly finished his first pass of networking BPOs through the various servers involved, allowing the BPOs to be part of the building instead of individual objects. This will allow players to add torches and other lighting objects to their creations in offline mode and have them work after switching to online mode.

Improved Ability Builder (2/1/2019): WIP- Improved Ability System: Our gameplay team is busy bringing the improved system to life. Andrew, Christina, Rob, Anthony, and Caleb have all been working on getting the system into a state that will allow us, and you, to create some pretty awesome abilities!

(2/8/2019): Tech/Design – Improved Ability System – Mage Abilities: Anthony has finished the core abilities for mages in the improved ability system. They don’t have all their fanciest skill parts yet, but they can build abilities from different runes and shapes.

(2/15/2019): WIP – Tech – Improved Ability System: C hristina ported fall damage and rubble collision damage to the improved system. This will give us the ability to do more with those damage types in the future. C hristina also ported the slash commands to the improved system.

Caleb optimized the data capture inside the scripting layer. This will allow us to create fancier abilities that are more performant. T he first pass of importing the Winter Shadow, Forest Stalker, and Blackguard to the improved ability system has been completed by Anthony. W ylie has implemented all of the skill components for the heavy fighters and will be moving to the traits and shouts next week.

(2/22/2019) WIP – Tech – Improved Ability system: W e’ve begun internally testing some of the real abilities for the existing classes, using our archers and fighters. We can say that performance looks promising, in a test where more frequent skill use is happening to stress the system. This early testing will give us good data to determine next steps. A bility Builder: In this testing phase, we’re beginning to use the new ability builder tech, albeit with a devUI for testing. This is a long-awaited feature we plan to get initial testing on next week! A nthony has completed the first pass on siege abilities, as well as Mage, Archer and Healer traits. C aleb spent the week squashing bugs and optimizing abilities within the improved system. Performance is always important to support large-scale battles. W ylie worked on the ability components for the Heavy Fighter classes. Most of the components have been implemented and should be finished next week.

Christina ported abilities such as combat/travel stance, harvest, and sprint to the improved system. C hristina also worked on implementing health/resource regen and ability disruption in the improved system.

Adding Gameplay (2/1/2019): WIP- Art/Tech/Design – Mages: Coming soon to a test near you! B en and Anthony are busy creating mage abilities. Most of the Flame Warden runes, Mage shapes, and traits are complete. J on and Dionne have been creating wands and scepters for two of the mage classes. Wave Weaver gauntlets are next! M ike and DB have begun work on the VFX and SFX for the mage abilities. They are creating the starting abilities first (which will be used as placeholders), and then moving to all of the possible spell variations. S cott is wrapping up the shared set of mage animations using the 2.0 character changes.

(2/8/2019) Siege - Tech/Design: We have removed the ability to tab-target players, as that was not how we intended trebuchets to work. They can now only be fired using manual aim mode. We’ve also updated the models with the Realm-specific versions, and improved the existing VFX.

(2/15/2019) WIP – Tech/Design – Trebuchet Ammo Types: Ben worked on flushing out the design for Realm-specific trebuchet ammo. This will let us create more abilities for the siege engine, as well as further differentiate the Realms’ abilities and visuals during large sieges later in testing. Improving Art: Characters 2.0 (2/1/2019) Art – Characters 2.0: Better-looking and more performant characters! S andra and Scott finished retargeting all the Luchorpán 2.0 animations. At a later date, we’ll consider unique animations for these guys. Scott and Sandra have now moved to cleanup of the rough pass re-targeted animations in preparation for pushing them to master later. W e’ve tracked down and resolved numerous technical issues associated with getting the new skeletons, models, equipment, and animations to work correctly. While art cleans up the new work, we’re getting back to supporting improvements in the animation system, as well as integrating the artist-created character LODs.

(2/1/2019) Art – Updated Valkyries: Dionne, having just celebrated her birthday, has finished fitting the Viking armors to Jon’s new Valkyrie models. These assets, including the nude meshes, are in Joe’s hands to weight and get into game. Scott and Tyler prepped many of the assets awaiting the final models.

(2/8/2019) Art – Characters 2.0: Better-looking and more performant characters! A uditing: Tyler has been auditing all the new work this week, fixing bugs or assigning them out to artists. We’re hoping to get these changes merged into Hatchery soon, whereupon we’ll finish up the polish on the assets. V alkyries: We’ve completed the first pass modeling, weighting, and import of the new nude and armor assets.

(2/15/2019) Art – Characters 2.0: Better-looking and more performant characters! A uditing: Tyler continued to go through all the currently completed work, finding and fixing bugs. We’re planning on integrating this next week, where we will continue to look for bugs and further polish everything. V alkyries: We completed the undergarment set. L ODs: We’ve completed most everything on the asset side, and plan to start integrating these in after Dave wraps up the supporting code. A nimation and Weighting Polish: Sandra completed the three archer classes, as well as the Luchorpán variation. Joe completed the hair assets, and is working on further weighting polish. Scott completed further cleanup on the Physician, Empath, and Stonehealer.

(2/22/2019) WIP – Art – Characters 2.0: Better-looking and more performant characters! H atchery Merge: This week, we merged our changes into master on Hatchery. Tyler is getting to the tail end of bug fixes he can make. Next week, he’ll support ongoing polish work from the animators, as well as importing the artist-created LODs. F inal Skin Weighting: Joe finished off the Luchorpán and Human nude meshes, allowing us to use those as bases for the undergarment and armor meshes. A nimation Polish: Sandra updated the archer animations, including versions for the Luchorpán Forest Stalker. She’s currently cleaning up the Fianna human and Luchorpán assets, as well as some of the travel idle fidgets. Scott cleaned up assets for the Black Knight and Mjölnir. He’s currently working through the empty hand travel and combat idles and locomotion.

Art Development (2/1/2019): Art – Realm Specific Trebuchets: Joe has rigged all three Realm-specific trebuchets, which should add some added visual clarity in large battles. These will be available in the current siege scenario for testing soon.

(2/8/2019): WIP – Art – Mage Effects: dB and Mike C. have been busy working on the mage ability SFX and VFX, focusing on the initial pre-built abilities available before we have the ability builder. A rt – Mage Animations: Scott has completed the first shared set of mage animations we’ll use for testing. This week, he completed the right-hand animations for wands and scepters.

(2/15/2019) Art – Wands and Scepters: Jon and Dionne completed work on five wands for the Arthurian Flame Warden and scepters for the TDD Druid. These have been handed off to Ben to turn into items. WIP – Sound – Scenario Music: DB started working on new music to accompany our new siege scenario, which Ben mocked up last week. WIP – Art – Magic Mortar Concepts: We’ve completed several new concepts of our magic mortars, smaller, one-man deployable siege engines. We’ll get these in the hands of our artists to create next week!

(2/22/2019) WIP – Art – Wave Weaver Gauntlets: Jon and Dionne finished four of the five new Wave Weaver gauntlets this week, and are finishing up the last one today.



Art – Ability Builder: James finished up the final look of the Ability Builder styling, and has now moved back to creating icons for abilities. Final Note -by Max Porter Another issue of Unveiled come and gone! Thanks so much for reading our end-of-the-month newsletter update! It was my pleasure as always to put this together for your perusal, and especially when there are such neat things being discussed. I’m already looking forward to next month’s updates! That’s all for now, so until next time -- Max out!