[swaminarayan]

Very cool project. MMO server codebases tend to accumulate a lot of architectural complexity over time, so starting fresh with a cleaner separation between networking and game logic makes a lot of sense.

Curious about the sector-based delta sync — how do you avoid packet bursts when a player enters a busy area with lots of items and mobiles?

Also interesting to see NativeAOT used here. Was that mainly for deployment simplicity or performance?

[squidleon]

Thanks! Yeah, one of the main motivations was exactly that — after years working with legacy UO codebases where networking, persistence, and game logic were deeply intertwined, I wanted to see what a clean-slate approach would look like with modern .NET.

On sector sync bursts — this is something I'm actively tuning. Right now when a player enters a new sector, we sync all ground items and mobiles in the surrounding sectors (configurable radius). For busy areas that can mean a lot of packets at once. The current approach is:

  - Sector enter sync only sends the delta  sectors the player wasn't already seeing, so a simple move into an adjacent sector doesn't resync everything
  - Sectors close to the player (within 1 of center) are always resynced because the UO client silently drops items beyond its visual range (~18 tiles), so you need to re-send them when the player comes back
  - The outgoing packet queue handles the actual send, so the game loop isn't blocked waiting for network I/O

  That said, there's definitely room for prioritization (mobiles first, then nearby items, then distant items) and spreading the sync across multiple ticks instead of one burst. It's on the roadmap.

  On NativeAOT — honestly, both. The single-binary deployment is great for Docker (small image, instant startup), but the real win is predictable performance. No JIT warmup, no tiered compilation surprises
  mid-session. For a game server where you care about consistent tick timing, eliminating that variable is worth it. The tradeoff is you lose some runtime flexibility, but source generators fill most of that gap
  (packet registration, serialization, etc.).

[serf]

>Curious about the sector-based delta sync — how do you avoid packet bursts when a player enters a busy area with lots of items and mobiles?

doesn't look like there is much going on to protect packet bursts there aside from smart-ish proximity sector loading. the work is done at boundry.

dove into it because i have been recently working on frustrum spawning to reduce net burst in a similar project, was kind of curious if something similar was used as a method to pre-warm the upcoming sector but I didn't catch anything.

fun and easy to read. thanks op and parent for getting me to look through it.