> Rather than sharding, consider federation. Anyone should be able to run a server and allow "doorways" or other access points to other servers, hyperlinks. >

> Rather than sharding, consider federation. Anyone should be able to run a server and allow "doorways" or other access points to other servers, hyperlinks. > You could host your own area and connect it to other areas hosted by other people. Sounds like Croquet/OpenCobalt/Qwaq/Teleplace/Terf (hooray for forks!). Different spaces can be hosted by anyone, like Web pages, and the hyperlink equivalent is a 'portal' which you can step through to go from one "world" to another. As far as I understand it, the client processes the world via a stream of events, which a p2p protocol tries to keep consistent between all of the clients (e.g. user avatars) inhabiting a world. Going through a 'portal' switches your client to the another "world", and hence another event stream, so there's no central authority. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt for example. Edit: It seems to be p2p, rather than server-based, according to: > The Open Cobalt application leverages peer-based messaging to eliminate the need for virtual world servers/commercial services and makes it very simple for end-users to create and securely share deeply collaborative virtual worlds that run on all major software operating systems.