Camelot Unchained’s beta has gotten a bit wider this week with the addition of more backers into the testing phase. It’s still beta one; it’s just that beta two donors are now playing too. Make sense? Awesome. So what are they testing? The “massively multiplayer” part of the game’s warfare system.
“How do you define a massively multiplayer battle? One of our Backers asked on our Forums whether, based on what they saw today, we should use a new phrase instead of ‘Massively Multiplayer’ to define our battles,” City State says in its latest newsletter.
“That’s because of what our tests today showed as we continued our ongoing testing of the improved ability system. We had over 2,809 (which is why the date for this update is 2809!) ARCs (Autonomous Remote Clients) and players moving around an open battlefield using abilities, more often than we expect most players to do! Wrap your heads around that folks: 2,809 players and ARCs running around the screen in the same battle, in a tiny, by industry terms, space. And not 2,809 NPCs, but 2,809 connected clients, consuming bandwidth/servers like players and using the server-based physics system. That’s a heck of an achievement for the team, especially when you think about the fact that ‘500 people in the same battle, at 30FPS’ was the goal we stated during the Kickstarter. While there is still more work and performance improvement ahead, these numbers are much increased over our pre-Beta 1 numbers on the old system!”
Worth noting is the devs aren’t necessarily saying that 2809 people is ideal for fights in the game; the idea is that if the game can handle all of that in terms of rendering and networking, then the devs can layer in “NPCs, crazy siege engines, VFX, and more” and thereby “expand [CSE’s] vision for what a battle can look and feel like.”
“It is quite freeing in that way,” says the studio. “It also means that if we can do that, but not require the best CPU/GPU to play, more people can play our game.”
