Separate scene control between client and server

[ddaa2000]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Say I need to create a online game with multiple scenes. For each player, he/she only exists in one scene, but can travel between scenes. While for the server, all the scenes are managed and the state of the scene is synchronized with players presently in the scene. Many online games like World of Warcraft is like this. However, presently network scene management is not flexible enough. It seems that the server can decide what scene to be loaded while the client can only react to it passively. So if I want to achieve the feature I want, the only thing I can do is to abandon scene management and put all clients and server in the same scene, and put the different "scenes" in different places to avoid them interrupting each other. However, this solution ruins the isolating feature of scenes.

Describe the solution you'd like There are two things in Unity which we can consider as a scene. The first thing is the scene by definition, an asset which can be loaded and unloaded from the present game space/ gameObject hierarchy. The second is the hierarchy space actually exists in the game. While Unity allows multiple asset "scene" to exist in the game, only one hierarchy space can be loaded at a time. It will be great for netcode to support having multiple, separate hierarchy space to be loaded and any client can connect to one of them.

Describe alternatives you've considered Another way which can solve this problem is to create an isolation strategy for developers, just like the "layer" concept for collision, but have impact on all kinds of interactions like rendering, script controlling, triggerring.

Additional context

[ezoray]

Have you looked into disabling scene management and handling it yourself?