Spectrum

An object container is a designer-made group of entities streamed together, while a zone is a physical space; designers often make the container's root entity the zone host, so in the demo they were effectively the same.

The maximum visible player count depends on client performance and scenario; the aim is for about 100 players to see each other at reasonable framerates, but the absolute limit can't yet be predicted.

Unstowed ships persist in their shard until stowed, but a landed ship that logs out is planned to be auto-stowed if no players are nearby, though one left behind and destroyed could mean waking in a med bed.

No, assets can't cross shards unless stowed in an inventory first, and within a shard, entities like missiles can span server nodes while bullets are spawned separately on each client and node.

The "i" in icache stands for item, not Ignite; the icache service is largely custom-written, though the wider backend uses open-source technology and may move parts to a cloud-native architecture.

QUIC isn't suitable because it is stream-based and prone to head-of-line blocking, whereas the game's custom UDP protocol uses per-entity semi-reliable messages, and connection problems are mostly bugs rather than network protocol issues.

The actor networking rework makes humanoid movement server authoritative, improving validation and handling of poor connections, and plans to sharply cut the artificial remote-movement delay, with some already-implemented client patching still needing tweaks.

Servers simulate as fast as they can up to a maximum frame rate, independent of clients, which affects AI reaction speed but not intelligence; higher server rates are possible but not currently being considered because of cost.

The developer says the graphics pipeline does not wait for server updates and server or netcode performance does not drive client FPS, and that fixing performance is slow because the game pushes the engine beyond its design while chasing high fidelity.