Phase 11: Zones

This phase is still ahead.

Ships

v0.11.0

Lesson

Ownership boundaries, handoff protocols and failure isolation

Depends on

Phase 10

• Decision Zone architecture: one process with many zone goroutines and a world coordinator (ADR 0005), with the internal messages between them written down in docs/design/zones.md so they can run between processes later (Phase 20). Write up the tradeoffs.
• Zone registry and routing in the world coordinator; a connection belongs to exactly one zone at a time.
• Handoff protocol: save state, transfer and spawn in the new zone, rolling back to the old zone on failure, tested with a failure injected at every step.
• Zone isolation: a panic in one zone’s tick is recovered and logged and stops only that zone; its players are moved to a safe point or disconnected cleanly.
• Zone and world chat, whispers and parties work across zones.
• Zones start on demand and an empty zone stops ticking.

• Zone transitions at map edges and doors, with a short loading screen.
• Interiors (an inn, a house) as small zones.
• World map window showing the zones and where you are.
• The three v1 zones blocked out (starting town and fields, Mosswood, the Old Ruins; working names), to be filled with content in Phase 13.

• Bots cross zones continuously for an hour with no lost characters or items.
• Crashing a zone mid-handoff leaves every player in a safe, recoverable state.
• make loadtest SCENARIO=spread at Case 2 Tier 2 (1,000 active players across 10 or more zones) on dev-m5, with CPU per core and zone tick p99 for every zone, in docs/perf/phase-11.md.

• docs/walkthroughs/phase-11-zones.md: ownership boundaries, handoff and failure handling, and why the boundary is a message protocol.
• Devlog draft, release notes, tag v0.11.0 and publish builds.

• Players walk between at least three zones with transitions under two seconds.
• Parties, whispers and quests work across zones.
• A zone crash affects only that zone’s players, who can reconnect.
• Case 2 Tier 2 in scaling.md (1,000 active players across zones) is met on dev-m5.