For those still following the updates from Chronicles of Elyria, a new dev blog was posted earlier this week, showing off the work being done to the backend of the MMO (and Kingdom simulator).
The incredibly technical dev blog by Jeromy "Caspian" Walsh was released earlier this week and goes into detail about the work that has been done so far (with many a visual aid). The post goes into detail the work being done on the Spatial Partitioning System, something he went into detail a bit with last month's blog post explaining the need for building it out. Effectively it's a system in the backend that runs checks on things such as collisions, proximity checks and more.
Since this post went live, Walsh has posted an update on Discord stating that work on Aura, which is part of the Spatial Partitioning Service, has been completed.
The post shows a ton of visual aids to, in the words of last month's blogpost, show that "work is progressing." The blogpost also shows work on a new visualizer that Walsh is building for Elyria, despite there being many visualizers out there in the wild. The videos showcasing the work on the Spatial Partitioning System were made using this visualizer.
The reasoning behind this is in part because visualizers from Unity or Unreal Engine are licensed, while the "Soulborn Engine is client agnostic." Eventually it seems the goal is to be able to license out the Soulborn Engine itself to other developers without the need to develop a separate viewer for either Unity or Unreal.
He also explains that his own viewer allows for control over the client, with Walsh claiming that this visualizer is "more peformant, engine-agnostic," and "here to stay."
However, obviously many those who have poured money into this vision for years, some to the tune of thousands of dollars, aren't necessarily going to be impressed by a ton of backend work that, in some backer's eyes, should have been done already. One post on Reddit sums it up pretty clearly:
Commentby u/DontStandInStupid from discussion CoE Developer Blog: April 2023in ChroniclesOfElyria
Walsh closes out the blog post exhorting backers that "[t]hese are exciting times", and that now that the core game engine and platform are nearing completion, Walsh can begin working on the game mechanics.
"These are exciting times! While we've had visualizers in the past, this new one is significantly more performant, engine-agnostic, and is here to stay. Likewise, while we've had spatial partitioning and physics before, they were always client-side authoritative. Now we're finally entirely server-side authoritative. There's still more work, but the core platform is nearing completion, as is the core game engine. After that, it's just game mechanics and more game mechanics."
Back in January, Walsh stated that the upcoming Kingdoms of Elyria: Settlements, a stand alone product that Walsh says the dev work on this product is dev work on the promised MMO, will launch this year. Long-time readers will also remember that Soulbound Studios and their faced a lawsuit from backers who sought refunds after the studio laid off its staff and shuttered in March 2020, only to roll that back a few weeks later. The lawsuit itself was dismissed late last year.
