Folks,

  Happy Saturday all! We hope everybody is enjoying their weekend. On our end, we want to share a short progress report which will hopefully make your weekend even better! At 4AM this morning Eastern Time, the first phase of our new lighting system went LIVE on Hatchery! Yeah, some of the team were up that late working on it. So, first, thanks to George and JB who worked through the night to get that up and running. Before that, but still up late, Tim, Marc, Rob, Ben and Tyler were also up quite late fixing a problem with our new chat system, and working on some other Camelot Unchained items. Today, we fixed a problem with new patcher, so if you were having problems connecting today, that has been fixed.

   Now, as to the first stage of our new lighting system, I’ve said that our Backers will see the improvements from it in phases. This is the first phase, where the new code is added to the game and after some tweaking, we redo our textures to make them “fit” the lighting system. As per my other updates, we couldn’t redo the textures until we know exactly how the new lighting system was going to work, and then we have to wait till it is added to the game. Now that the system is coming into view, we will begin tweaking/redoing all the textures we are using in the game. This will result in a much better looking game, one whose look belongs in this decade, and not older ones. 🙂 Here’s a quote from Tyler regarding the system:

“So key thing here, we have not done a thing to actually make the textures/materials make use of the new system. However, the lighting change really fills out the scene much better.

The cu_environment_01_1200 image was from yesterday’s update, before the lighting update. You’ll see how the forest is basically just all dark, you can’t really make much out except anything against the empty sky.

At night, you now have a middle ground which did not exist before. Basically everything was either in shadow, or in moon light. Now you can actually see more and get a greater sense of depth.

Granted all of this is in flux and will change, but the point is – looks better/sexy/artists happy!

Imagine sneaking around in there!

The evening shot, the lighting color now better, and more accurately suffuses the scene.”

Not bad eh? Wait till Tyler and the art team can really pretty them up! Of course, we’ll be sharing more screenshots next week, and we’ll be running Alpha/Beta 1/IT tests next week to see how it performs on our Backers’ PCs. There will be some well, “interesting” shots where the textures don’t look quite as good (we’ve already saved some of them for posterity), but once the artists get to retouch them, they will look great.

It has been a fine Saturday in the office, with lots of stuff getting done (more crafting goodness from me) and the close of Backer Necromaniak’s amazing marathon streaming session with C.U.B.E. As to Necromaniak’s livestream, I hope you all got a chance to see his amazing work but if you didn’t, he can be found here (https://www.twitch.tv/cu_necromaniak). 

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

 -Mark