Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs PC Game

Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs is the third retail expansion pack for the award-winning MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot. It will feature expansive underground areas, dungeon instancing, and graphical upgrades to the player race models as well as old world buildings, dungeons and monsters. While we work on gathering content for the official website, we wish to present the following information regarding the technology being utilized in Catacombs plus some in-game screenshots of the updated race models.

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.