🏰 Server Infrastructure & Scalability
A game like The Crownless demands both immersion and resilience — a seamless world where thousands of players can shape history without performance or consistency trade-offs. Our infrastructure approach is designed for modular growth, regional load balancing, and future-proof scalability.
🌐 Phase 1: Modular, Instance-Based World (Launch Architecture)
At launch, The Crownless will operate using a zone-sharded architecture optimized for rapid deployment, player density management, and early-stage resource efficiency.
The continent is divided into geographically and narratively distinct “zones”
Each zone runs as a dedicated instance on scalable cloud or bare-metal servers
Zone transitions happen in-world through gates, mountain passes, boats, and teleportation rituals — maintaining immersion
Server boundaries are abstracted from the player experience through loading screens and seamless data handoffs
Benefits:
Faster development and testing cycles
Improved crash isolation and debugging
Enables targeted scaling in popular areas (e.g., PvP hotspots, event zones)
🚀 Phase 2: Distributed, Persistent World (Post-Funding Upgrade)
Upon reaching key funding milestones, The Crownless will evolve into a fully persistent, cross-zone synchronized world leveraging advanced backend technology.
Key Upgrades:
Transition to a clustered infrastructure capable of syncing multiple zones in real time
Support for dynamic population balancing, enabling population overflow redirection or seamless zone instancing
Integration of global services for economy, governance, auction houses, and faction states
Scalability Targets:
5,000+ concurrent users per world shard
Real-time event propagation (e.g., world boss spawns, weather shifts, conquests)
Persistent player-driven structures and cities with long-term impact
⚙️ Technology Options & Backend Resilience
To meet future concurrency demands and maintain design flexibility, The Crownless will be engine-agnostic at the server backend level, with optional support for:
SpatialOS: For dynamic zone stitching and cloud-based spatial computation
Heroic Labs: Scalable open-source backend for matchmaking, leaderboards, and live services
Custom Microservices: For lightweight, event-based systems like token sync, economy, and player logs
Unreal Engine Relevance Culling: Native optimization for reducing tick load and actor replication
📡 Network Optimization Strategies
All networking systems are being built for efficiency, modularity, and low-latency interaction, including:
Relevance-based actor visibility culling to reduce server overhead
Async state replication for housing, trading, and low-frequency interactions
Event-driven architecture for combat, resource generation, and governance updates
Decentralized economic services for token operations and smart contract verification (blockchain layer)
From a modest first step to a continent-spanning infrastructure, our server design grows with the world — and with the ambitions of its players.
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