Development of server seams for nengi.js. In the gifs above the edge of the grid is the border between two separate game servers. Each gif is progressively getting closer to the goal. It begins with just seeing across a server boundary, to seeing both ways, to interacting across lines, and finally efforts to make things feel more and more seamless. Still not done is the player or npcs crossing the server boundary smoothly.
This is different than the instancing in most AAA mmos where instances don’t share true borders -- they merely pretend to, and players can see everything phase into existence as they cross one of these server boundaries. A dozen players can walk out the front gate of a town and they won’t necessarily end up together. That form of instancing (which is really easy in nengi) is great for having 500x instances of the main town b/c there just too many players to all be in the same spot at the same time. But this experiment is about treating a world as one big place. I miss UO.
For those wondering about the performance, I gotta say I have yet to get it working well enough to make a legitimate grid of servers but it is looking pretty light. Having a server border so far is about as intense as having a player (a border and a player are both just a rectangle that can see stuff), and this thing can have a lot of players (100-400 depending). I guess if the border were hugeeee that might change.
