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Vapourware Chronicles of Elyria

Mortmal

Arcane
Joined
Jun 15, 2009
Messages
9,158
QqsUbFS.jpg
 

funkadelik

Arcane
Joined
Jul 30, 2010
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1,496
Too good to be true. I play all the open PVP full loot games and they all sounded that good to begin and they're all still shit. Maybe once though...

Usually just ends up with me unsubbing for 6 months but getting bored of arena pvp games and wanting to loot/grief other players so I go back.

#1stWorldProblems
 

Alchemist

Arcane
Joined
Jun 3, 2013
Messages
1,439
Kickstarter for this is live...
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...a-epic-story-mmorpg-with-aging?ref=nav_search

And wow... this seems ridiculously ambitious. I so want an MMO like this to exist, but how can a small team pull this off? And for only $900k?

I'm tentatively in for $50 early bird tier - but I might still pull out if I come to my senses.

I really think they should start trimming down features now to make this even possible to do.
 

JamesGoblin

Literate
Joined
Jun 26, 2016
Messages
32
Location
Harare
Paying money to get married, have kids, age and die. Yay!...*cough

On a serious note - it can end up being much more than that. Not exactly topping my hypemeter, say - I'm cautiously optimistic.

Kickstarter for this is live...
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...a-epic-story-mmorpg-with-aging?ref=nav_search

And wow... this seems ridiculously ambitious. I so want an MMO like this to exist, but how can a small team pull this off? And for only $900k?

I'm tentatively in for $50 early bird tier - but I might still pull out if I come to my senses.

I really think they should start trimming down features now to make this even possible to do.

They had 0.5M before Kickstarter, where they got additional 1.4M, and the crowdfunding continues. Not exactly AAA budget - I guess it will end up anywhere between $4 and $10M pre-launch, depending on future investments and all kinds of other stuff.
 

SmartCheetah

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
1,076
One thing I don't like about it so far is that SJW is strong within' the community. And there are a lot of carebear role players. If they want the game to really suceed, there must be some risk behind everything, otherwise it would be boring.
Cautiously optimistic, just as you are.
 
Joined
Jan 4, 2014
Messages
795
One thing I don't like about it so far is that SJW is strong within' the community. And there are a lot of carebear role players. If they want the game to really suceed, there must be some risk behind everything, otherwise it would be boring.
Cautiously optimistic, just as you are.
Not every sandbox MMO/RPG has to be harsh. I've much preferred MMO's like Wurm Online and Mortal Online and Xsyon with PvP, but that doesn't mean I don't want Minecraft or a more accessible/friendlier sandbox to exist. I just don't want them coming to my MMO and bitching like children. Live and let live should be the standard we strive for. We're all differnet and should respect that.

The danger--I guess--is we all end up playing the same cloned game and become clones ourselves. "Live and let live" means to be tolerant of differences. It doesn't mean you let somebody else or somethign else step all over you until you're the same.

And that's just it. Maybe we can't be tolerant of difference. So we have to be the same. And maybe the reason we cna't be is because of conservation of energy? It requires too much energy to preserve differences, so they're normalized and scaled down.
 
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JamesGoblin

Literate
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SmartCheetah belowmecoldhands I'd say bigger challenge (besides fine tuning PvP as mentioned, which, of course, isn't trivial) is making and polishing enough of systems and content for the "casual" fans to stick with the game. The money and manpower needed are yet to reach that level, in my opinion. Of course, threads like this one matter in that regard - and, in general, spreading the word about the game is crucial.
 

SmartCheetah

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
1,076
I like most of the ideas behind that project (some of them are pretty huge. Eg. all the scripting behind Offline Player Characters - but I'll talk about that later in my post) but some part of the community once again shown that there are a lot of people who totally disagree with creator vision, trying to force something on him.
And I'm not talking about carebears and casuals this time. I'm talking about small "I backed few thousands in the KS, I want something more valuable for that" crowd and bigger group of people who keep crying about the inheritance/character life expectancy. They don't like the system Caspian described in the last journal because "It breaks immersiun!", "I want to play a kid for a longer time!", "I want to play my family only, not some weird NTC's!".

First group is retarded, because they knew what will happen after backing those few thousands. They knew what are the rewards, and now they(well, at least a small group) want more? Funniest gal was the one who said that every birthday she should be given enough story points to "buy" herself another queen title in case her current character dies, because "she paid for it". Lol. Good thing is - people reacted very negatively to these posts, so I'm ok with existence of such elements.

Second group is most cancerous tho. They try to force some kind of vision on developers, imagining things I can't even believe. While I'm totally with people who say "Hey, it's just a game, lets start with 15 years old characters who spawn out-of-thin air after our main character permadies" - because it's just a game, and I don't see any point in justifying the "realistic" and "immersive" aspect of that specific feature - I'm totally against people who are looking for realism and immersion on every fucking step. Some of them are already criticising Caspian and his team because of some design decisions which aren't compatible with their narrow minds.
But oh well - every MMO is plagued with communities full of such individuals. I hope Soulbond wouldn't bend to them. A lot of games got fucked because of vocal communities.


Now for the topic of OPC scripts. Do you guys think it's gonna be easy to implement AI which would take our toon to work, eat and come back home to rest at night? Personally, I don't. Maybe easy scripts like leaving a guy to work as a vendor, guard or something. Other then that, they should stick to abstract automatization. I mean, lets say you log off and your major profession is mining. Before you log-off, you could chose whatever you want to do. Maybe your character want to learn something new? Or maybe you want to keep mining and smelt the ore into bars?
Now, lets say you log-in after 7 days, so game is calculating your skill/item gains based on your choice and current skills/other modificators. Your character in the game world was still lying in the bed, or just wasn't there. Simulation like that could work, and shouldn't be that hard to implement.
Now imagine the same thing with your toon doing this stuff in actual game world. Pathfinding issues, depleted minining locations, burning forest, monsters or anything else and AI goes crazy. Personally, I don't believe in that feature. I'm still looking forward to design journal and their ideas about OPC scripts.
 
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JamesGoblin

Literate
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SmartCheetah I would be pleasantly surprised to see some more complicated AI scripts being made efficiently by a small indie team, that is - in addition to all things they are working on.

Speaking of forum groups, I heard that something similar is happening on Shroud of the Avatar forums: small groups of big (and I mean BIG) pledgers are putting insane pressure on the dev team. Of course, they are using finer wording and indirect arguments, but the point of the message is "We gave you all that money, so..."
 

grimace

Arcane
Joined
Jan 17, 2015
Messages
1,959
What is Chronicles of Elyria? | Pre-Alpha Progress Update
2,072 views

New to Chronicles of Elyria? Meet the team working on developing the MMORPG that's redefining the genre, take a look behind the scenes, and find out how the team is creating a living world run by players.


https://youtu be/h_ZG22ckzB0​



Here's the hype video!


$3,180,878 Total Collected as displayed on the website.
 

SmartCheetah

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2013
Messages
1,076
Latest updates are mostly talk about new "funding" packages, promotions and other stuff. It got to the point where you can buy basicly everything. Noone wanted to buy himself as a king(there was one slot left) on Eastern US server? NO PROBLEM. Let player choose the king! Of course if you want to choose, you got to buy a "token" for 10dorra. Person with most tokens will win!
Yeah, way to go Soulbond >.>

I followed this project and had some hopes for it. They are not aiming for the skies like Star Shitizen does, but still they try to milk their playerbase by just showing some models/pretty graphics from time to time.
 

grimace

Arcane
Joined
Jan 17, 2015
Messages
1,959
Did we all learn nothing from Scam Shitizen?

I followed this project and had some hopes for it. They are not aiming for the skies like Star Shitizen does, but still they try to milk their playerbase by just showing some models/pretty graphics from time to time.


What's the cost of hype?

It's always free to watch the train go by.
 
Joined
Dec 13, 2016
Messages
276
By early on their early-alpha release videos were nothing but storebought packaged pre-made assets from Unreal market + a team that was nothing but idea guys and 1 single developer that had only worked with HTML before, which sort of makes one hope that they used the early hype and money to actually fund good developers for this inane amount of content and magic to happen.

I'd hate to be someone who has to work on an MMO that functions on Unreal though, the amount of work you have to do to jerry rig the engine to actually function as an MMO engine is overwhelming to say the least.
Hell, I even remember talking to an ex-Tera developer (I swear to god that game runs like shit in the western versions for some reason) and the first thing he told me on the brink of asking why they used Unreal was
"We legitimately spent more time on reworking the engine than working on the game, and I wish we had just made one from scratch in the first place. Here's high hopes for that with Tera 2!"
 

luj1

You're all shills
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Messages
12,877
Location
Eastern block
I like that your journey is never truly finished, from boy to man to geezer, to skeleton, to soul.
 

grimace

Arcane
Joined
Jan 17, 2015
Messages
1,959
SpatialOS, self-stated "fabric of the game", is dropped due to "financial viability".

https://chroniclesofelyria.com/blog/23401/A-Year-of-Foundation

It's going to take me a day to read all of that.




Server Foundations
When talking about an MMORPG - or as we like to call games like Chronicles of Elyria, a Multiplayer Evolving Online World (Meow!) - there’s nothing more foundational than the back-end server. The back-end server is responsible for managing the entire state of the game, performing all the necessary computations for systems like AI, physics, pathfinding, and combat, and for receiving and processing all the input for, in the case of CoE, hundreds of thousands of connected clients. In January of 2017 we began the long process of taking what was mostly an offline, single-player game – designed primarily to validate user experience and gameplay feel – and turn it into a MEOW (what can I say, the Internet loves cats).

The process of building a scalable, reliable back-end server with all the gameplay mechanics for a game like Chronicles of Elyria can be divided up into two primary components. There’s the platform, necessary for providing infrastructure such as entity and state management, fault tolerance, load balancing, and a method of cross-process communication, and then there are the services or workers that are responsible for performing all the actual gameplay logic and processing the user input of all the clients.

Shortly after we announced development of Chronicles of Elyria we started looking around for ways to solve the typical problems associated with building a large, distributed simulation. In short, we were looking for ways to speed up development of the platform. As part of our research we got in contact with Improbable and as a first effort at bringing our game online, we began integrating SpatialOS in January of 2017. As a test, we built our own PhysX simulation in SpatialOS which, when integrated with our Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) client, allowed us to move around the world using our own custom physics engine in a way that provided all the benefits SpatialOS has to offer.

Of course, SpatialOS isn't a game engine, so while it provided a platform on which we could build our game, we were still responsible for writing all the systems of CoE. As we were developing those systems we discovered we could make headway faster, enable unique gameplay features, and leverage a large ecosystem of existing code by moving from C# to JavaScript/TypeScript as the primary language of our backend. Fortunately for us, as of SpatialOS 10.3 Improbable had an experimental JavaScript SDK, which meant we could continue to use SpatialOS along with our new chosen language and architecture. So in early spring we made the move from C# to JavaScript and, as a result, saw rapid improvements in the rate at which we could develop new features. This was also around the time we saw accelerated progress in the development of the VoxElyria client (formerly referred to as ElyriaMUD).

But, then we started encountering some issues. First, while SpatialOS provided load-balancing and fault tolerance for all our spatial workers, there were still many workers that were not spatial in nature. Workers such as our authentication and login server, our AI system, and our Procedural Story Engine. For these, we still needed our own load balancer, fault-tolerance, and cross-process communication. So, we began researching different technologies that, while not a single solution, would provide the scalability, reliability, storage, and communication benefits normally provided by SpatialOS.

Second, we started to have some concerns about the financial viability of SpatialOS for our needs. Whenever you use SpatialOS you're also signing up to have your game hosted by Improbable. That has the benefit of lowering operations costs, but has the drawback of passing all the hosting fees they pay to their cloud partner onto us. It also means we don't have the ability to choose a hosting partner - whether cloud, bare metal, or dedicated servers that meet our performance needs. And CoE has some very specific needs! In specific, our use of Offline Player Characters (OPCs), the extremely large size of our world, the vast number of entities in the world, and the way we divide our game server up into dozens of different worker types meant that SpatialOS was particularly expensive for our use-cases. Our philosophy has always been about keeping our hosting fees low so we could pass those savings onto you. With SpatialOS, our hosting fees would have been more expensive, which would have forced us to increase our prices - something we didn’t want to do.

Of course, we brought our concerns to Improbable, and over the last eight months they’ve done a fantastic job working with us to try and bring the price down. Unfortunately, it remains an expensive solution for us. To make sure we were prepared, we began looking for alternative technology that could fill any gaps left behind if we were unable to use SpatialOS for any reason.

As we had already started leveraging Docker Swarm, a Container technology for load balancing and fault tolerance of our non-spatial services, we knew we could transition to a full Docker stack if necessary for our spatial services as well. When we realized we were going to need to communicate between our spatial services and non-spatial services, we integrated RabbitMQ into our back-end, a super fast routing and message protocol used to serve 10's of millions of requests by banks and other high-traffic websites across the internet each day. And because we needed persistent storage for all our non-spatial data, we integrated PostgreSQL into our backend. Fortunately, PostgreSQL supports SQL, NoSQL, and even spatial queries, enabling it to act as a backend and persistent storage for both our spatial and non-spatial data.

All of the above technologies were integrated into our backend to solve non-spatial related problems, but we made those choices because we knew we could lean on them if worst-came-to-worse. And then we encountered our third and final roadblock. In the most recent release of SpatialOS Improbable deprecated their JavaScript SDK and marked it as unsupported. This left us with our biggest challenge yet - we no longer had a good way to interact with the SpatialOS backend.

When this happened, the engineering guild and I spent several meetings exploring our options with respect to shimming an interop layer between SpatialOS and our JavaScript-based backend. But in the end, we realized that it would be too time-consuming and error-prone to try to continue to use SpatialOS when we already had an efficient routing and communication protocol, an architecture that allowed for scalability and fault tolerance, and a persistent storage solution that enabled us to track and update the state of the world. So, as of the end of 2017, Chronicles of Elyria is no longer using SpatialOS, and is entirely built on the Soulborn Engine. We really enjoyed working with the folks over at Improbable and we are still looking forward to how their platform impacts the online gaming industry as a whole. Their technology is still an extremely powerful solution for virtually all distributed simulations out there. But for our particular technology choices and game mechanics, it just wasn’t the ideal solution.

As you can see, our non-spatial services required a large part of 2017 to be spent getting our core stack set up and creating the necessary components to have our own, proprietary platform. And because we were concerned about how things would end up with SpatialOS, we continued to make progress on these areas within the Soulborn Engine throughout 2017. In fact, we went to PAX West this year and showed off our jousting demo. This was the first time we'd taken a multiplayer demo to PAX since our combat demo back in 2016, but unknown to many, the Joust Demo was running on a locally deployed version of the Soulborn Engine. This means that everyone who played the jousting demo at PAX West has already played on our new server stack.

And finally, in December 2017, we released Version 0.1.0 of Chronicles of Elyria to our “Friends and Family”. This was the first time offsite users were able to play Chronicles of Elyria. Again, the milestone was completed using an entirely Soulborn-based game engine. So, what does this all mean in a nutshell? It means that in 2017 we began by using SpatialOS, and ended with something that, while not a single solution, does everything SpatialOS did - ultimately providing us all the same functionality as SpatialOS, while allowing us to keep our operating costs low and providing us more control over our server performance. With the transition complete, we’re now ready to move forward with more core gameplay mechanics in 2018.
 

SmartCheetah

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May 7, 2013
Messages
1,076
It's gonna flop hard. Project was way too ambitious for such a small team. Now we're hearing about downsizing of their studio, about leaving SpatialOS behind (few months ago every naysayer was answered with "DUDE, THEY USE SPATIALOS, THEY DONT HAVE TO DEVELOP THE NETCODE".
As I liked the project in the beginning, I've started to hate it after they monetized everything, trying to get money for every freaking package for a game that doesn't even exist yet. It's like poorer version of Star Citizen where you can't even "touch" what you bought. Now they have the reason to push even more crowdfunding options because of "no publisher" drama. Meh.
 

Intrigued007

Educated
Joined
May 4, 2015
Messages
62
Caspian says, "It really isn't anything to be alarmed about. Continue to support us as you have been, we will continue to push toward pre-Alpha and Alpha 1 and the release will generate enough residual interest and revenue that we can self fund. Just don't lose your shit and create a self fulfilling prophecy."

I'm sure the pre-alpha client will generate several hundred thousands additional backers, since 16,000 have already pledged after two years of development.
 
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grimace

Arcane
Joined
Jan 17, 2015
Messages
1,959
$7,923,369 to https://chroniclesofelyria.com/shop ... and there are some development issues ...

"The TL;DR is: we're experimenting with other programming languages and environments for our gameplay mechanics and platform in order to create a more efficient, scalable world and platform. Things are coming along slowly on that front, but will pick up shortly."

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChroniclesOfElyria/comments/f1bbw6/sbs_investigating_c_c_and_rust/

Quotes from Caspian on discord

We use Docker. Our initial implementation was with Docker Swarm, but we're likely moving to Kubernetes.

I'd considered the Mesos platform as well. DC/OS has some nice features, but there seems to be more complexity than we need.

Kubernetes is, so far, the right balance between Swarm and DC/OS.

We're also doing R&D on various programming languages for our service mesh.

There's a couple service mesh implementations out there that utilize a sidecar implementation. We're experimenting to see if that'll be efficient enough for us, but I don't think it will. So we're looking to integrate some of the sidecar features into our service hosts so we can get the same functionality: discoverability, short circuiting, g/b deployments, etc. without the performance cost of a proxy server.

The two main ones right now are the Linkerd proxy (Rust) and Envoy (C++). I've been experimenting with both.

Our first implementation used RabbitMQ as a pub/sub messaging protocol. We're experimenting with alternatives right now.

Heh. Ok. I'm done talking tech. Don't want to alienate people. The TL;DR is: we're experimenting with other programming languages and environments for our gameplay mechanics and platform in order to create a more efficient, scalable world and platform. Things are coming along slowly on that front, but will pick up shortly.

We're doing investigation into using C++, C#, or Rust now for our platform. We were previously using NodeJS, but the process overhead and large memory footprint of NodeJS made it unsuitable for the large scale world we're creating.

There's pros and cons to all three languages. C++ is fast but takes longer to develop in. It's also prone to mistakes. Something like 70% of all security hotfixes at Microsoft were due to buffer overrun or pointer mismanagement. However, we use UE4 for our client, so having our platform also built entirely in C++ would allow us to minimize domain knowledge.

C# is fast enough now. But it does have a slightly higher memory footprint than native languages, and even in server GC mode, can still create unexpected hiccups in execution doing garbage collection. But everyone on the team can develop in C# pretty quickly, and as about 50% of all games being developed now are in C#, it's really easy to find new people. But, it's harder to interop with UE4 and we just aren't certain yet whether the memory and GC will be a problem.

Rust has the performance benefits of C++, without the instability or security issues. It can be used with both C++ and C# with a 'C' extern library, but it requires a bit of overhead to do that. Rust is arguably the language of the future, game development in general, but it's the language the team is the least familiar with, so it comes with a learning curve.

At the end of the day, we know we need to port our infrastructure to a new language and platform to reach the scalability we want, but it's a tradeoff between performance, security, staffing, and time-to-market.
 

Alfgart

Augur
Patron
Joined
Feb 7, 2006
Messages
390
Divinity: Original Sin 2
It's dead. What a surprise, noone saw this coming /s

https://chroniclesofelyria.com/news/34919/State-of-Elyria-Into-the-Abyss

[...]

Into the Abyss
For the last four years, since May of 2016, Soulbound Studios has been a crowdfunded company. Our first game, Chronicles of Elyria, has been funded, thus far, almost entirely through the pledges and generosity of our backers. But that was never our intent. When we launched our Kickstarter back in 2016, it was with the plan to use the money to hire additional staff, put together a playable demo, and quickly attract publishers who would be willing to fund the remainder of development. So our plan was to use Kickstarter to, you know, kick-start the development process.

We were fortunate, or unfortunate as it turned out, to attract publishers very early on in our development process. We had publishers from all over the world flying in to meet the team, see our development progress, and get hands-on with the game. But after being in production for just a few months, there wasn't enough to show yet. So the conversations generally went something like "Either work faster, show us more, or we're going to want to take over development and make changes to the business model." This was unacceptable to us, and one by one the conversations with publishers fell silent. Fortunately, we were able to continue crowdfunding for another couple years, at which point we felt like we were finally ready to start talking with investors. The problem was, by two years into development, and two years being crowdfunded, our inability to get a large influx of several million in cash meant development was going slower than we'd have liked. It was all good development, necessary, and even appropriate for our team size, but slower than we'd have liked.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to find investors who understood that operating in a cash-lean environment doesn't allow for growth, and stifles velocity. What we did find were several investors who said "Why are you talking with us? If you're confident crowdfunding will sustain you, then you don't need us. And if you're not confident it'll sustain you, then we're not confident enough to invest." For better or worse, we suspected that in order to get an investor, development was going to have to be far enough long that they simply couldn't refuse because we were so close to being done. So our goal for the last year or more has been to push forward as hard and fast as we could, relying solely on crowdfunding, until at least the Alpha 1 was complete. And up until now, we were successful....

But to our great sadness.... with the failure of Settlers of Elyria, and five long months of only limited crowdfunding revenue coming in, Soulbound Studios has officially run out of money. Last night I was forced to do something I never thought I'd have to do. I closed the online store, put the SoE map back into read-only mode, and laid off all the employees...

Before taking the store down and laying off all the employees I had a long conversation with Vye and Snipehunter. We considered long and hard about launching our Kickstarterversary early this year, and being open with the community about our need for additional funding. We were pretty confident that if we made all of our previous promo items available for sale on the store, and were transparent about our needs, that the community would rally behind us, pledge more support, and sustain us long enough to get more playable content into the hands of our backers. With gameplay that was directly relevant to the aristocracy and nobility, with more information about kingdom and land management, that might have been enough to sustain us until we could get to Alpha 1 and land some investors.

But we decided not to. While we had no doubt that our backers would come to our aid, we're living in a volatile period in our world's history. With unprecedented changes to society caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, and with economies beginning to suffer all around the world, I made the hard decision not to try and get additional crowdfunding. I knew doing so would mean having to close the studio. But it was the right thing to do. I'd rather people spend their money on games they can play now, or better yet, food and shelter, rather than on the continuned development of Chronicles of Elyria.

So, with no additional funding, the Chronicles now descend into what is often referred to in the monomyth or the Hero's Journey as "The Abyss" or "The Ordeal." It's the period in a story where the protagonist reaches their lowest point, and is often marked by a figurative or even literal death, allowing them to travel into the underworld. And so, for the time being, Chronicles of Elyria heads into the darkness...

[...]
 

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