A Big Set Back - Chronicles of Elyria Drops SpatialOS
Chronicles of Elyria announced today in a lengthy post that they will no longer be using SpatialOS and will instead work on in-house solutions. The game's developers cited "financial viability" of continuing to work with the folks at Improbable (SpatialOS Owner) to solve various problems that arose while using SpatialOS.
Chronicles of Elyria Head Honcho (Founder) Jeromy "Caspian" Walsh explained:
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.
While it's reassuring to hear Jeremy Walsh talk shop and continue to press on, the loss of SpatialOS is a big set back for the game. In fact, it's quite alarming. In the original Chronicles of Elyria Kickstarter page SpatialOS was cited as "the fabric that our game is built on" and was touted as being one of the core technologies that would allow the game to achieve scalability.
SpatialOS owner, Improbable, raised $502M in May, 2017 from Softbank to continue developing their technology, which is a huge vote of confidence for SpatialOS, especially considering how few games currently use the technology.
