With the help of SpatialOS, a new high-tech simulation system, the world of Chronicles of Elyria is to be populated with hundreds of thousands of players, NPCs, and mobs.
Recently, we reported that the team from Soulbound Studios had faced the questions of “Chronicles of Elyria” fans on Reddit, addressing the crucial question of how the small indie team plans to handle such an ambitious project.
In this context, Jeromy Walsh (Soulbound CEO) explained that he has been working on an architecture for years, which he now applies to Chronicles of Elyria. Furthermore, they aim to acquire as much middleware as possible, so they don’t have to develop everything themselves.
And this is where the newly announced partnership with the technology company Improbable and their SpatialOS comes into play.
Improbable is the developer of a new high-tech simulation system called SpatialOS, “which enables other developers to create simulations populated by millions of complex objects (such as mobs and NPCs); and at the same time allows game worlds and other simulated environments to run effortlessly on thousands of servers in the cloud.”
By placing these complicated technical aspects in the hands of specialists and focusing on the creation and support of the “core server features”, the team from Soulbound Studios can now fully concentrate on the essential gameplay mechanics of the sandbox MMORPG. Jeromy Walsh explains with reference to the new tech:
“Many of you have asked how we plan to implement our goal of populating the largest game world ever created in a game with hundreds of thousands of players and NPCs. This is how!”
With the help of SpatialOS, we can achieve our goal faster, and all of this even with a significantly smaller team.”
But this was not the only highlight of this week, as a new tech preview video for Chronicles of Elyria was released, introducing character interactions with the game world, following the last video on weather and snow:
Matthias says: “A burnt child fears the fire,” and that applies to me as well; I have seen too much in all these years. Somehow, SpatialOS reminds me a lot of Storybricks AI, which promised something similar for EQNext on a smaller scale.
On the other hand, SpatialOS already makes a much better impression, as while Storybricks was more the ambitious idea of a small indie team that previously failed on Kickstarter, SpatialOS is a development already in its final testing phase of a 90-person company that has millions in backing.
And that this is not just pure “PR talk” is also proven by some other ongoing projects, such as Worlds Adrift and Ion, where Improbable’s technology is already being utilized, and whose developers are as enthusiastic as the Soulbound team.
What is Chronicles of Elyria? The MMORPG with the aging process has made it!
