As Chronicles of Elyria’s ambitious domain and settlement selection process kicks off today, the folks at Soulbound Studios have released a new dev diary that delves into the details of how the selection process is going to work and discusses the challenges that the domain and settlement selection team has faced in preparing for the land rush. Basically, the domain and settlement selection team is divided into three codependent departments: content, metadata, and web.
The content team lays the foundation for the project by literally creating the world, which has presented considerable challenge to the devs, as “developing a world the size of Elyria […] has proven way more computationally expensive than [the devs] had anticipated,” and because of this, the devs had to “migrate execution of [the] world generation tools to a cluster of 72 core machines in the cloud,” and although those machines are working as quickly as they can, “it’s still taking too long.”
And seeing as the metadata team — which is responsible for taking the maps generated by the content team and calculating things like “the precipitation, water retention rates of the soil, the angles of the terrain,” and so on — is obviously dependent on the content team’s output, the slowdown in world generation has thrown a wrench in the whole operation. As such, “the Domain & Settlement Selection world generation tools are not yet complete, and won’t be fully complete for several more days, in addition to the time [the devs] need to thoroughly test the website.”
Nevertheless, domain and settlement selection is moving forward as scheduled, with the dev team working directly with the game’s 20 monarchs to provide them with the information that they need to select their kingdoms and duchies. However, the devs say that Dukes, Counts, and Mayors should have “full access to the Domain and Settlement selection map interface” by the time their turns roll around. For the full details on the process, as well as an update on the Influence system for royalty, if that’s of interest to you, you can find all the info over on the game’s official site.
