Celaria News

With the 1.1 update the game recieved a visual overhaul as well as a few graphical enhancements.



The main addition to this update is the shadow and AO system which bakes soft-shadows and approximated world-space ambient occlusion at runtime (during gameplay) on the GPU.

Shadows (Debug view)
Shadows are more or less straightforward, shading areas darker where light from the sun is occluded by geometry. It's noteworthy to mention that shadows get softer with distance mimicking the behaviour of light in real-life.

Ambient Occlusion (Debug view)
(World-space) ambient occlusion attempts to shade areas darker which are occluded from the sky/enviroment light. (The less visible an area is for the skybox, the darker the area gets.)
For example overhangs, corners or holes get darker as less light from the enviroment can reach those areas.

Due to some limitations which are related to the way AO is calculated it's only a rough approximation but the advantage is that this information can be calculated relatively fast on the GPU.




The game ships with precalculated lightmaps for shadows and AO for all singleplayer/campaign maps. However, custom maps downloaded from the workshop don't. (The lightmap information is not stored in the mapfiles.)

This means that this lightmap information needs to be baked/generated on your local machine.
However you don't have to wait for the lightmap baking process to finish. You can start playing a map without having to worry about the generation process. The game will generate the shadow and AO information behind the scenes while you actively play the game. Once the baking process finishes, shadows and AO will fade in and be visible on the map-geometry.

You can keep track of the generation process by checking the progression in the top-right corner of the screen:



The game will cache lightmaps on the HDD/SSD to avoid having to rebake them in case you want to replay a map.

All lightmaps are stored in 4K by default (texture size of 4096*4096 px).

• Adjusted overall look and tone of all block-colors
  
• Purple checkpoint block was recolored to red (same as the goal block)
  
• Added Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion ("SSAO". Can be enabled in the video settings)
  
• Bugfixes and stability improvements
  
• Added checkpoint counter to the HUD.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The upcoming patch (version 1.1) will add a new lighting system into the game which introduces (soft) shadows and approximated world-space ambient occlusion.




The goal was to have high-performance shadows which are still rendered at the same quality at long renderdistances. Baked shadows was the best option as it also allowed to add soft-shadows which are otherwise more expensive to render in realtime.

Ambient occlusion is a technique which attempts to simulate how exposed a given surface is to the surrounding light. (Corners or the lighting in caves are a prime example for that.)
Celaria is using a very rough approximation of ambient occlusion which has some drawbacks (it works best on more open maps, less so on those which are more enclosed/obstructed by surrounding geometry) but the advantage is that it allows the game to calculate AO (Ambient Occlusion) very quickly behind the scenes.

Shadows and ambient occlusion will be stored in seperate lightmaps which will then be applied on the level geometry.




All campaign maps of the game will be shipped with perbaked lightmaps for both shadows and ambient occlusion.

Gamemap files (.cmap) however don't store lightmap information. So custom maps which are downloaded from the workshop won't have them by default.

The game will automatically generate/bake this lighting information once you start playing a map.
To minimize waiting times the baking process will run behind the scenes while you actively play the game. This means that for a short amount of time (which depends on how large the map is) you will be playing the game without shadows/AO. Once the baking process is finished they will smoothly fade in and be visible for the rest of the playsession.

To avoid having to rebake them after exiting the map, all lightmaps will be cached in the savegame directory of the game on your HDD/SSD so that they can be later loaded in if you want to replay a level.

Here is an example how this process would look like on the map "Speedline" (from left to right):




There are some other noteworthy changes in the upcoming patch such as:

• coloring of blocks was adjusted
  
• Purple checkpoint blocks are now colored red (same as the goal block)
  
• Changed the appearance of the 3,2,1 counter at the start of a run.
  
• added new options in the graphics/video settings for the lightmap generation.
  
• Minor tweaks/fixes in the UI
  

A preview build of the upcoming 1.1 update is available as a new "Beta" branch on steam.
Open the properties page of "Celaria" and select the "Beta" branch under the "Betas" tab to download the preview build:



Note that the build is still work in progress so bugs/crashes can still occur.
You can give feedback or report any kind of issues which you encountered in this build on the steam forums or directly on the official Discord server of Celaria.

- Fixed character limit on steam-usernames
- added warning when exiting the map-editor
- tutorial now refers to frontal wallruns as "wallclimbs"
- Replays display the player name instead of "Replay"
- fixed bug where collected spheres didn't save if the target "none" was selected in the menu selection

- Leaderboard bugfixes
- internal fixes to improve stability
- Added chat commands (Chat-command descriptions were added to the server-setup tutorial)

- fixed "Next Map" button in singleplayer mode
- fixed "Collector" achievement
- Fixed placement errors on the map "Precision"
- Maps "Freedom" and "Precision" swapped places in singleplayer mode
- minor internal bugfixes
- adjusted freecam speed