Vapourware Chronicles of Elyria. Medieval serf simulator 2027.

[Ayreos]

I was amused when i saw this getting hyped because of some pretty writing (You'd think the mmorpg fanbase learned their lesson by now!), but they seem to be somewhat serious.

This game truly speaks for itself, so have some excerpts:

-Permadeath
Since the beginning of Chronicles of Elyria we’ve known we needed permadeath. Permadeath is vital to so many mechanics of Chronicles of Elyria that without it, it fundamentally changes the game. But we were faced with the question of how we can kill a character, while still allowing players to feel a sense of progression. The answer came in the form of skill ramps.

There are a vast number of Skills in Chronicles of Elyria, divided up into multiple categories including Fighting Skills, Crafting Skills, Survival Skills, Deviant Skills, etc… Over the course of a character’s life they will advance some or all of those skills to varying degrees. But if you were to spend every moment of your character’s life, they’d still cap out at some maximum before they eventually died of old age. Training skills takes time and, put simply, there are just too many skills to advance them all within a single lifetime.

[...] if it took you a week of active playing to get a skill to 50 points in your previous life, you can expect it to take significantly less in the next life.

-Dynamic, custom plot for each player(?)
The Soulborn Engine uses a form of astrology to determine the types of conflicts your character will encounter as they roam about the world. At that precise moment your character is born, each celestial body holds some position in the heavens - their gravitational force pulling you in different directions. Like a map of the future, the position of each planet charts a course that dictates the theme of your character’s life and the types of obstacles you’ll face. When your character finally grows old and dies, the passing of time will necessitate a new birthdate, and with it a whole new set of adventures.

-PCs are born to in-game families, which determines their skills
Your family selection, through a combination of nature and nurture, dictates many of your character's starting attributes such as your starting ability scores, starting skills, and the possible set of physical attributes your character can have. Of course, you have the ability to change and develop these things as you play, but it is your family that dictates your starting scores.

Characters begin with a set of skills based on their family. Intuitively, we all know we pick up the skills, knowledge, and habits of our parents. So if you want to create a Blacksmith with this character, it might be a good idea to go here and select "Blacksmith" as one of the occupations. This ensures one or both of your parents have a significant investment in the skills generally associated with blacksmiths. Add more skills to the filter and you can be more specific about the type of character you’re creating.

-Player interaction is based on legal contracts
Contracts give power back to the players, unlocking an infinite number of occupations and professions and allowing them to play roles in Elyria even we haven't thought of. The foundation for marriages, guilds, trade agreements, in-game mail systems, families, and even governments, Contracts play a crucial role in Chronicles of Elyria and solidifies its place as one of the first true sandbox MMOs.

You can read all the information about the game here (select "dev journals"): http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/1308/view/features

The website: http://chroniclesofelyria.com/

 

[belowmecoldhands]

I like the ideas somewhat since not many MMO's try it, given permadeath has never been well liked. The central issue is progression, or rather I mean the evisceration of it in the presence of permadeath. Richard Bartle has mentioned permadeath in some of his books and articles, giving it some positive properties, but noting its unpopularity.

I played some Diablo 2 on the hardcore servers. You died permanently. Fortunately, you level fast and death usually came before much time had elapsed. The pain of loss is still intense. When it hits, I got angry and confused at the same time. Once or twice it was due to lag. Other times overconfidence. I tried a few character and my highest was maybe 50-something. I remember once I was in hell and chatting with another player. The player must have been level 80 or higher. They were telling me how they'd been gone for a while and forgot how to play. Such a tame conversation. So some moments passed and then I saw "XXX is slaiin by...." or something to that effect. Poor SOB. Of course I myself met the same fate a week later.

I also have played some single player games where I never reload a game if my main character dies. I restart or quit. I havent done that lately. BUT I do routinely keep a journal now, recording all my deaths and some of my experiences.

I think whatever they say they're going to do now is not worth listening too. If this game isn't released and being played extensively by a live audience then you really cannot trust anything being said with any confidence.

 

[grimace]

$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."

Spoiler

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.