Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs Website Launch

Mythic has launched a new website for their upcoming Catacombs expansion for Dark Age of Camelot, which offers details about the graphics overhaul and four new wallpapers. Just in case you’re not familiar with the expansion, here’s a quip about the graphics overhaul:

Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs will feature completely reconstructed player character models. The polygon count of these models has been dramatically increased to allow for significantly improved visuals and fun additions such as blinking eyes and moving fingers. The changes are firmly grounded in the original character and armor designs. Accompanying the implementation of the new models is a level of detail toggling system which allows players to customize the bells and whistles to their liking in order to achieve the desired system performance. The option of turning off the Catacombs player models will be available as well.

Players who have Vertex and Pixel Shader 2.0, Direct X 9.0 compatible graphics cards will enjoy an additional feature – an enhanced texture tinting (armor dyeing) system. With Catacombs, dyed armors are no longer simply darkened to the selected color. A special masking technique is used to retain the highlights and shadows of the base texture resulting in a more realistic effect. For example, leather will dye a deeper color than metal, since the metal now keeps its characteristic shiny highlights.

In addition to the model and texture rendering improvements, Catacombs will incorporate the EMotion FX 2 real-time character animation system, an engine upgrade that allows artists to enhance the character models with more realistic motions. The efficiency of EMotion FX 2 provides a performance boost while also decreasing the memory footprint of the animation system.