Dev diary #69 - Nice, Throne Room Artifacts!

[Carlberg]

Hello everyone!

In this dev diary it is time for us to have a look at some of the artifacts that you may come across, steal or create yourself for your Royal Court. With the introduction of the new throne room scenes we are for the first time in Crusader Kings taking a step into the interiors of our courts. This has given us an opportunity to move artifacts from only being seen as 2D icons in an inventory screen like in CKII, to being visual 3D objects you can show off to increase the grandeur of your court, or give it your own flair.

Also, as always, the pictures in this dev diary are of work in progress.
​

Artifacts presented in your court​

Within your court you will be able to show off the artifacts in your possession, from the smaller artifacts on pedestals and reliquaries holding the venerated remains of saints, to fine martial weapons forged or taken, to grand statues or fine furniture. These artifacts can be equipped in a number of slots around your court rooms for viewing of the ruler and his guests. Below is a small selection of the smaller artifacts, usually presented on different pedestals befitting your court.​

A Pratiharan volume about revelry.

A reliquary containing a piece of the crown of thorns, you think.

A fine urn taken from the Abbasid court.

A chest of valuables made in the finest of ivory
​

Designing artifacts of the middle ages​

The artifacts we’ve added to the game cover a variety of different categories, small and large, and even to adorn your walls. The creation of these artifacts have gone through a few stages of development before making it into the Royal Court.

Research
As in all our games we go through a stage of historical reference hunting to find artifacts relevant to the time period and within the cultures we are depicting. This can be both easy at times and complicated at others depending on the amount of material that has survived the decay or been documented since the middle ages.​

Carved and painted Ivory chests.​

During this stage we both look at the aesthetics and historical references we can find and verify. When references are sparse, we still try to extrapolate good looking and aesthetically plausible designs. However in some cases like in the Middle East and other areas there is for example close to no and at best sparse levels of statues or paintings of people. Depending on where this can be for religious or cultural reasons and in those cases where other cultures would show human statues, we’ve instead shifted to area appropriate symbolisms, patterns and art.
​

A marble statue from southern Europe, and an islamic golden falcon.
​

Creation
While using reference images is an easy task to do, we must also consider the original state of the artifact, since a reference from today could be of a possibly 800 years or more old object. So grime, damage and aging needs to be reconsidered and balanced, while still keeping the object in a used looking state. An artifact could still be owned by a ruling family for long enough to become an antique in its own time.

An icon clad cabinet, don't tell the iconoclasts!
​

Dynamic objects​

Banners and some other items in the court have shader support to show the ruler's own flair, since they would be made to the ruler's specifications. The banners below for example read in the primary title held by the ruler to show off your heraldry.​

What is a lord without his banner to display his Coat of Arms?
​

There are also tapestries, where we use a similar system to the clothing shaders to generate interesting patterns and designs to adorn those stone walls in your great halls.​

Bringing some color to the hard stone walls in your halls.
​

And that brings this dev diary to an end, we will be showing off more of the courts in the future!

​

 

[blackninja9939]

> Banners and some other items in the court have shader support

Would you guys be able to inform us if these Shader Support additions extend to the portrait system (clothes, accessories)?

As in, would it now be possible, if a modder wanted to, to use this COA system in order to create Coat of Arm Tabards, (so our wonderful knights and soldiers can wear the wonderful coat of arms into battle) which pulls dynamically from the players coat of arms,

In my mods such as the Kingdom of Heaven, I've been manually texturing these, but from the dev diary it sounds possible in the throne room, but wondering if it made it to the portraits as well.

Cheers - Uber

Now I'm not a shader guru, but I think that may already be doable? I know the units have the coat of arms passed to them already for instance and I know we use some colour data from them in the portraits too. So might be we have the info there already to do something fancy maybe?
Though I am not a super shader person so not 100% sure either way

 

[Trin Tragula]

The other artifacts look great, but the height to width ratio on this book looks a bit off to me. I can't recall ever seeing a book that was 3x taller than it was wide.

You’re likely thinking of European codices. Ck covers a much larger are than Europe though and this particular book is an Indian palm leaf manuscript, a type of book with very different proportions.

 

[PDXOxycoon]

I'm going to try to answer some questions that have been asked, but note that I'm a coder and I haven't worked on the artifacts myself, so take my answers with a grain of salt. I also apologize if some of my answers are a bit vague, as I don't want to make any CD angry with me for saying something too early.

Is there an artifact limit per ruler?

Do these artifacts have any bonus/mechanic while in the inventory or they only affect grandeur while they are in the throne room?

Are artifacts unlimited, like in CK2, or we have have limited slots to fill, like in IE?

These ask pretty much the same question, so I'm going to answer them together. There is to my knowledge no limit to how many artifacts you can have in your inventory, however there is a limit to how many you can use at the same time, both on your person and in your Royal Court. Artifacts will only give bonuses if you have them equipped.

Looks awesome, very much looking forward to this expansion! Will there be some historical artifacts that are known to have been in possession of certain rulers/dynasties or just randomly generated one?

There are some historical and ahistorical artefacts in the history files that I have seen, but I'm not going to say which.

Will there be some unique artifacts that only one person can hold?

To my knowledge no, but I believe there are some artifacts that will have reduced efficiency if you don't meet certain criteria.

Can you tell us how many artifacts are in the game?

I frankly cannot, there are a bunch in the history files and more are generated from the game's start.

Could you start to give us teasers for the next dev diary, like HoI4 and Vicki 3 do it?

I would love to, but doing so is dependent on how busy everyone is and how nailed down the next DD is by the time we release the prior one. We have a plan on our diaries, but some times we change them up because the ones responsible for writing them have priorities that shuffle the Dev Diaries down in their stack of workflow, and we want the diary to be as up to date as possible with what we are showing in them.

Will we be able to capture artifacts in the same way we capture people, and will we have the option to keep/destroy them for bonuses?

I believe they can be captured from sieges and raids, but someone will have to correct me on that.