Adding Zones

So I've been slow with the current work.  Last month I finished the feature of the master server spinning up and down the various zone servers.  This now makes possible the ability to fill out additional zones, as previously any zones in the game had to be started by the master server and couldn't be spun down.  This put a hardware limitation on the number of zones which could be running at the same time (around 5 on the relatively low spec test server, even though the current live server can support more than 3x that many).

Now I've been adding additional zones, currently I've been adding the Netherlands, North Sea, Baltic Sea, the Shetlands, and some ocean west of Scotland and Ireland.  The plan is over the next few months to add all of Europe and go out into the Atlantic towards North America.  I ran into a problem though with how I was triggering a zone transfer for the player.  What I had been doing, and was working fine up until now, is manually placing trigger colliders onto the map.  When the player enters a trigger collider for an adjacent zone the zone server would then attempt to send the player to that zone.

The problem though was in placing those trigger colliders by hand.  This was easy around the UK since the land provides some easy reference points.  When getting into borders between zones that are out to sea though there are no such reference points.  After struggling with this for about a week, I decided to redesign the system.

Now in code each zone is a list of bounding boxes, with a north west latitude/longitude point and one to the south each.  Already the zone server recalculates the player's lat/long position every second or two.  Now this will be checked against all zone bounding boxes, and if the location correlates to another zone then the zone server will attempt to transfer the player.

This should eliminate problems placing the trigger colliders, which when misplaced can result in the player transferring to another zone then immediately getting transferred back because of bad placement.  This will also eliminate the overlapping area between zone servers where two players can at the edge of a zone actually occupy the same location while connected to two different zone servers.

So I'm optimistic I will have this all completed within the next day or two and pushed out to the live server after testing.  After that I'll start working on the French, Spanish, and Portuguese coasts, and then the Mediterranean.  This will make for a much more expansive game compared to now, letting the player travel for hours discovering new lands.  :)

Edit:
The new zone transfer system and new zones are now undergoing testing in 0.7.11 and it has been very successful.  After additional testing is done, and some relatively minor bugs with the new zones are resolved, the build will be pushed to the Perilous cluster.