[lwansbrough]

I can elaborate a little further having extensive experience with Orleans:

- Various parts of this Minecraft server have been built as Grains

- Grains are basically class instances which are activated (instantiated) somewhere in a network

- Orleans has a very clean interface which allows one to use a class instance in regular code as though the instance were stored in local memory. In reality, the class instance may be instantiated on a different machine in the cluster.

- Orleans clusters are generally controlled/private, though I suppose there's nothing stopping someone from building an open network of Orleans silos. That means the distributed aspect of this project is in regards to how the code behaves within a datacenter, in most cases.

This seems to be an exploration of how to build game infrastructure using Orleans. Microsoft has done this with the Halo franchise in their most recent games (Halo 4 + Halo 5.) Seems to work pretty well. On a fast network you can operate on distributed instances of just about anything and have sub-millisecond response times. Mind you, that'll depend greatly on what work is being done.