Instances and Zones

[Karlman]

Straight from Alex_dev_cig, one of the CGI operations team, a more detailed description of instances and zones:

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/5603917/#Comment_5603917

@alex_dev_cig

BoMbY | BoMbY said:
Short follow up: So, you have a 1:n relationship between instances and zones? But who is authoritative about the zones, and the >>information flow between the zones (and where is the information flow happening)? The client or the server?
And can you move zones to other instances, eg. if a zone gets very crowded and would be better handled by a larger server?
Or would you have to move the whole instance (including all zones handled by it) to a larger server?

The server is always authoritative but the purpose of the zone system is to limit the data being sent to the client. If you think of the bridge of a ship as a zone and the rear compartment of a ship as another zone, they are in constant motion together as the ship is flying those zones will probably never exist in two different instances, I can picture a situation where they may live across multiple servers perhaps for massive ships but they would always be in the same instance, if they needed to be migrated to a larger server they would all move together. As far as information goes, the severs have minimal latency and have tons of bandwidth so they would pass each other all the data, the zone system restricts data passed from server to client to only the parts of the instance that the clients needs (i.e can see). So while laying the the sleeping compartment of my ship I don’t need to be streamed the movement information of the 20 ships outside in the same instance. If I decide to go EVA and can see all the ships then I do need that information but I no longer need the information of movement inside my ship, so out of the 50 zones in that particular instance I may only need updates from 15 of them.