Hi Folks!

The summer of crafting continues, now with added progression and titles! We’ve added a series of progression trees to help customize your crafting capabilities – you can now specialize in crafting certain types of weapons or go with a bit broader approach. Titles display your prowess in certain areas, and unlock more sections of the crafting tree. Read all about these and more below!

Top Tenish for July 2023

1. Done – Engineering – Player Titles
   1. Players can now obtain titles through the progression system.
   2. These titles can be viewed on the Progression UI->Titles tab.
   3. Titles can be a requirement to purchase a Progression Node or in a Player Lock (such as being a requirement to equip an item or craft a recipe).
2. Done – Engineering – Player XP
   1. We have introduced the concept of multiple types of XP to Camelot Unchained.
   2. Design has the ability to create multiple types of XP, which can be spent in the new Progression Tree system.
   3. We plan to reward different types of XP based on the types of things you do in the game. For this month, we’re seeding player’s with a handful of XP so that they’ll be able to try out the new Progression Trees.
3. Done – Engineering – Progression Trees
   1. Player classes now point to multiple Progression Trees that are associated with their class.
   2. These trees are made up of a collection of nodes, which can be purchased for XP as long as all of the lock conditions have also been met and all parent nodes have been purchased.
   3. This information can be viewed on the Progression DevUI, which is accessible from the Progression button on the top left part of the screen.
   4. Each node can give out multiple rewards.  The reward types that we currently support are:
      1. Crafting Upgrades
      2. Player Stats
      3. Player Titles
   5. In supporting the new progression system, some old progression code related to Ability Component levels and stat levels has been removed.
4. Done – Design – Crafter Progression Trees
   1. For this release, all players have access to 7 progression trees related to crafting.
   2. In order to purchase nodes in the more specific crafting trees, each player will first have to work their way through part of the “Basic Making” tree in order to obtain the Player Title of “Adept Maker” which gives access to the other 6 trees.
5. Done – Engineering – Crafting Updates
   1. When crafting with Alloys, you may now add multiple non-stacking alloys to the same ingredient slot in a Vox job as long as the alloys are of the same type. Example: if crafting a sword cost 3x metal alloys, you could add 2x 50% Steel and 1x 10% Steel.
   2. There are now 3 categories of modifiers to a crafting job: player progression, vox modules, and random crafting events.  The math for each system is now applied to a different layer of the LAEs that calculate the output of the vox.
   3. Adding the ability for these crafting modifiers to affect jobs based on the gear slots present on the output item. EX: -1% crafter time for Upper Body Armor
   4. Exposing crafting related game settings to the CU UI to prevent us from having data like this hardcoded in the UI.
6. Done – Engineering – Crafting History – The total number of crafted items is now tracked in the player’s history. These can be viewed in the CraftingHistory tab on the CraftingDevUI.  These counts are used in the Progression locks.
7. WIP – Engineering – Improved Lighting – Wylie continues his efforts to improve our lighting systems and give our designers more control over lighting and lighting effects. Most recently, he implemented improvements to Skybox controls that allow easier access to Time of Day features. This allows Design to change lighting for specific times and blend between two different periods of lighting – for example, having day blend into a sunset and then blending into night.
8. WIP – Engineering – Bug Fixes and Improvements
   1. Fixed a bug where some random crafting events would not be cleared if a job was canceled.
   2. Fixed a bug where the devUI wouldn’t count down its timer after canceling the queued job and being taken back to the running job
9. WIP – Engineering – Entity Resource Updates
   1. In this case, entity resources refer to concepts like Blood, Barrier, and Stamina.
   2. Updated the identifier for Entity Resources to change it from an enum to a generic ID.
   3. This gives us the ability to be more flexible about what Entity Resources exist in the game and allows Design to create new ones without code updates.
   4. The client now has now special knowledge of any Resource types and only serves as a pass through between the server and UI.
10. WIP – Engineering – Patch Client Improvements – Work is continuing on the patch client improvements that we started last month.  We’ve got the data format specced out and mostly implemented.  We’re adding better support for resuming downloads that get interrupted and adding a migrator for the old format so that you don’t have to re-download everything again.  The new format is also much better at cleaning up orphaned files and is all around a better steward of disk space.
11. WIP – Engineering – Performance Improvements – Rob has been working on a series of performance improvements, most noticeably with ability delays. While significant progress has been made so far, Rob is continuing to optimize and improve upon this aspect.
12. WIP – UI – UI Improvements – The UI team is continuing to push forward on improvements to the Inventory, Equipment, and Warband menus, as well as to the Alerts system.
13. Done – Engineering – Animation Debugger – James has put the finishing touches on the Animation Debugger he’s been working on! This tool will greatly help the Animation team on diagnosing skeleton issues on models moving forward.
14. WIP – Engineering – Continuing Behavior Upgrades – Mike D is continuing his ongoing quest to improve NPC behaviors and add new behaviors. These upgrades will improve current NPC behaviors and allow the implementation of more nuanced and intelligent behaviors when interacting with players.
15. WIP – Engineering – Shadows System Upgrade – The rendering team continues to make improvements to our shadow solution. Recently, the focus has been on improving lighting within cracks and gaps in a material, so that they appear as deep as they should be and reflect less light from side angles.
16. Done – Animation – Winged Armor Fixes – Joe and the rest of the animation team have completed a run of fixes on armors for the Winged Races. This involved fixing some minor seams and small holes in geometry to ensure they looked good from all angles.
17. Done – Engineering – Server Metrics Fixes – Rob made a series of fixes to server metrics so that they display correctly. This was a consistent issue in previous builds, and having this information correct will help us diagnose server issues down the line.

Let’s progress on to the details below!

We’ve got a quick look at one of the crafter progression trees  – specifically for Basic Making. Over the course of your crafter progression, you’ll gain benefits to making specific types of equipment and ways to reduce the amount of resources consumed by crafting.

There’s also the armor fixes that Joe has been working on! These should fix a lot of small issues with seams and holes in meshes, along with clipping issues. This affects winged races, which include the St’rm, Valkyrie, and Hamadryad.

And that wraps up our look at progression and some of the other updates we’ve been working on. We plan to build out progression trees for more areas than crafting down the line, with all kinds of ways to customize your character the way you want – keep an eye out for more progression in the future.

We appreciate and thank you for your continued support of CU and CSE!

Have fun exploring the crafter progression tree and picking up new titles! 

– Jane