Crusader Kings III News

Hello!

Welcome to another Dev Diary! This time I’m back to tell and show you a little behind the scenes of what we have been doing with Audio & Music for Royal Court


► Read our Dev Diary #76 - The Royal Audio

💡 To experience the full threads and comments, please visit our forums or website.
💡 Enjoy the FAQ Royal Court and read all there is to learn about our upcoming Expansion




The room matters!

The introduction of Court View made us really excited in the Audio Dept and also a new challenge! After working so long with games that mainly use paper maps, and finally having a 3D space there was some extra room to play around with Sound Design and also getting a bit creative.

Of course, we want to add sound effects onto certain different objects like fireplaces and chandeliers and also including room ambiences for each type. But we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to give more “life” to the court rooms by adding something we call “walla”. Or perhaps known more for the common tongue as a “crowd recording”.

Since restrictions did start to loosen up more in Stockholm, and also it’s a fun activity, we thought about recording some of our team members from the CK team (also more colleagues from other projects)

Now you might be wondering how you even do something like this? Of course, it requires a bit of patience and having a couple of microphones!



So this is me and the Sound Designer working on Royal Court, sitting down in one of the Sound Studios and doing pre-work before the big recording session. So we’re testing out all the equipment, making sure all the cable works as intended and it all sounds great!

After all that we did manage to book the biggest room we have in the office, which is called the Library. Not only was it to ensure that we would be able to have distance between all people while recording all their voices, but also it had the best acoustics to match the size of the Court Rooms.



The next question would be what kind of script we were using for this recording. It’s rather difficult to record “walla” in all languages, so instead, we did use a script made of Latin. Not because that we all are fluent in Latin (would have been cool though!) but from my experience that has been some of the best languages to use when you need some “gibberish” talk in the background. Especially since we had a big mix of people with different accents.



It was a fun big session we had and everyone was happy to be part of such a big team event again after not seeing each other for such a long time in person!



So we did go a bit extra to make these new fancy rooms in CK3 soundsounding more alive and enhance the experience for you players. :)

How will all this sound in the end? It will change depending on your Court Grandeur level! The higher, the more of the crowd will you hear in the room, and this will also work the other way around, so less Grandeur the fewer people.


Royal Tunes

Hi everyone, it’s Yannick and Robin from Audinity. After having written music for several Paradox games and expansions, we’re happy to be on board again for CK3: Royal Court and share some insights into the new music for this expansion!

The soundtrack for this Expansion will consist of some new ambient Mood Tracks, Cue Tracks and even a new Main Theme.
The main direction for these new tracks was trying to make them sound a bit different compared to the existing music from the base game. Medieval music can have many different sounds, but since we are at the Royal Court this time, the keyword for the music for this Expansion was “Royal”. So you can hear some powerful fanfares, noble strings, and a medieval guitar ensemble that make you feel like standing right in the King’s hall.
While the Mood Tracks will add some noble flavours to the general ambient music, the Cue Tracks will play when you are Holding Court in your Kingdom. And when starting the game, the new Main Theme will welcome you to this Expansion and to the Royal Court!
We did not only record several fantastic solo musicians playing some fancy historical instruments for this soundtrack, we also wanted to go a bit extra on the orchestral side, so we actually went to Prague and recorded the music live with the FILMharmonic Orchestra at Smecky Music Studios!
This was the studio before the recording session...



...and this is what it looked like during the session with over 60 great musicians at work!



Two happy composers :)



We could keep writing about the music, but we think you get the best insight into the soundtrack for CK3: Royal Court when listening to some of the music itself!
So we are happy to share with you the “Holding Court” Cue Track for Western Europe as a preview!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

So back to Metal King, I hope you enjoyed this week’s Dev Diary, understand it might not tell you so much about the features but at least we got to show you a little behind the scenes when we do work with Sound Design & Music.

In today’s dev diary, we’ll be going over the new court-type event. New stories & drama to be lived!

► Read our Dev Diary #75 - In the Event of Court Events

💡 To experience the full threads and comments, please visit our forums or website.
💡 Enjoy the FAQ Royal Court and read all there is to learn about our upcoming Expansion




many of you will likely have seen them a bit already in a few preceding dev diaries, but for the rest, allow me to formally introduce court-type events:



This new event type is seen exclusively within the court view, where they replace standard character-type events.

We added these because one of the major design limitations with character-type events is that they’re uhh… they’re small. Really, really, really small, and having comparatively little space to work with means they impose a lot of restrictions on their use.

Those of you who mod, or have dabbled at modding, will likely know what I’m talking about: generally, a character event can only fit about three paragraphs of copy and 3-4 options before it starts to look a little naff. Less if there are characters or titles involved with very long names, or if you have to do a lot of paragraphing.

There are good reasons for them to be this small - they get in the way less when popping up, it encourages concise delivery of information, and it frames the portrait characters in each event nicely.

For the court scene, these considerations are (generally) moot, so we wanted to play around with a more liberal event format. We don’t need to worry about framing characters in the traditional sense since we show them in the scene, the player always opts into a court-type event and thus can’t have one pop-up unexpectedly, and though information (and options) still need to be reasonably concise, it’s nice to have a little room to flex the meaning of “concise” somewhat.




From a player’s perspective, you’ll mostly interact with court-type events through the not-at-all-confusingly-named court events pool. Similar to random yearlies, court events reflect the life of your court just existing, with all the petty drama and courtly intrigue you’d expect from a medieval monarch’s household. They primarily involve characters consistently within your court (rather than far-flung vassals or guests), and often tie into court grandeur and your different levels of amenities.




Other than their tone, size, and occasional number of options, the biggest differences that players will notice are their usage of different camera shots instead of backgrounds and portraits…



… and their optional nature. Unlike yearly events, court events are opt-in, meaning that you don’t have to take them if you don’t want to, in which case their default (neutral-ish) option will be selected after a long-ish time-out period.

To open a court event, you simply click on a button that’ll appear floating over one of your court’s relevant characters. Whenever you’ve got court events you could be checking, you’ll be notified via the Royal Court button in the right-hand panel.




From a scripting perspective, court-type events share a fair amount of DNA with character-type events, but differ mostly in the form of their court_scene block.

Usually, I’d go on to explain everything in a bit more depth inside the dev diary itself, but since court-type events can be tricksy to script till you get the hang of ‘em, we’ve included an example court-type event inside one of the event files that breaks down their make-up:



^^ Hopefully, this should be a solid annotated example, but just in case, here’s a few pre-emptive clarifications:
1) Every court-type event must have a button character, even if that character is just your character, so that must always be set up.
2) The group parameter defines which spot in the scene that character stands in. These groups themselves are scriptable (with a bit of work) elsewhere, so you can arrange characters inside the court however you like. The groups shown in the example actually contain multiple different preset positions within the court scene, one of which is selected randomly for each event when it tries to fire.
3) For animations, we can access all the standard ones, plus a slew of new animations created specifically for the court scene.

Finally, just for fun, let’s have some more court events:


Oh, right, yes, I titled the dev diary “and friend” too, didn’t I? Welp, the new court-type isn’t the only event type we’re adding with this expansion (just the most exciting). We also have the new duel event type!

Duels were added as part of our first flavour pack, but I’m sure you’ve all noticed that the space for ‘em is pretty limited, and the animations don’t work so well for this context. Welp, we’ve revamped both of those with this new type, giving duels a face-lift:



… Naturally, the weapon held by either character does correspond to their signature weapon type, or whatever weapon artefact they have equipped (if they’ve got one).

And that’s all from me, folks. As ever, I’ll be around in the comments for an hour or so to answer questions, but otherwise, see y’all next diary!