Not even the Seattle snows this past weekend could put a damper on Camelot Unchained. As its latest dev letter notes, City State’s multi-city dev team has continued working on performance improvements for siege rubble and buildings as well as character animations. The work on the Mage classes might pique your interest too.
“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,” CSE’s Tyler Rockwell says. “We’ve begun hooking up mage classes to the character creator in the patcher. They don’t do anything yet, but it is one of the first steps to getting them into the game. […] 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.”
Mark Jacobs is back for this week’s video Q&A as well; he covers one animation tweak that boosts framerate by 20% as well as acknowledges that the studio doesn’t really expect to host 4000 players online in a single battle – the tests it’s been running over the last few weeks, which have scaled over 3500 players and simulated players, are mostly to push the engine to its limit. The original promise was 500, but Jacobs seems to think it’ll wind up “somewhere north of a thousand” in the end and probably less than 2000 – but be completely playable while doing it.
