World

From Shadowrun: Awakened

A 'World' in Shadowrun Awakened represents a collection of all zones in the game and their geographic relationships.

Game Rules Description

The game world is often referred to in these documents, but what is it really? Well, it is the virtual space of Shadowrun awakened constituted of as many individual areas as the content team can provide. This is the place where player characters and Non-Player characters interact to have fun. It is also an infinite canvas for content creators to populate with characters, stories, and environments.

The areas of the world will be connected by a realistic set of bridges, tunnels, roads, monorail, light rail, and sidewalks. The exact nature of these connections is an artistic choice, but they are intended to segregate each area so that they may be independently loaded and simulated. In the foreseeable future, walking onto a monorail car or driving into a tunnel may trigger a load screen, but eventually we would like the maintain the world as open and seamless as possible (quite the technical goal).

Technical Implementation

A world contains a collection of simulations, each relating to a single zone, and allows player characters, and some NPCs to move amongst them. Some things in the world, characters and objects, will be confined to moving only within a single zone. While some higher level objects, such as Major NPCs and vehicles, will be able to move amongst all the zones of the world. The limitations of a game object to either a zone or the world also controls when they can have their resources managed.

Realistically, a world will encompass just a single city, but the possibilities are truly limited only by available hardware and assets. All zones in the world will reside on one server at the moment, this server maintaining their relationships and distributing content as necessary. Later versions of SRA server technology are intended to allow for a distributed approach to hosting the world and content. A primary server will maintain the logical concept of the world and interconnected zones; the "world server". It will manage a flexible groups of "zone servers" that each maintain one or more areas in the game. The zone servers will maintain, with the help of the world server, their set of zones and their connections to maximize load balance and provide potential redundancy. Each zone will implement simulated game mechanics (such as sneaking, combat, driving, etc) while the zone servers and world servers work together for the highest level of scripting (major NPCs, world-wide weather, etc). "Patch Servers" will be able to stream necessary content to users when they enter the game world, both during initial connection for "updates" and when entering new zones for downloads of all data pertaining to a single area.