uZone Introduction
uZone is a highly scalable instance manager for the Unity game engine that monitors several connected hosts and enables these to remotely start and stop game servers dynamically. As a connected host, or server machine if you will, you are able to have several instances of game servers running at the same time without having to worry about things such as port allocation or having the performance suffer due to an overload of running instances. uZone takes care of all of this! Not only does it take care of problems that might occur on each physical server, but it also keeps track of all the instances running in the system, and uses this information to balance the workload over all the connected machines.
uZone does not care about what type of game instance it is starting, but merely recognises it by what name it is registered under in the system, and the path to the executable file to execute on instantiation. This abstraction makes working with uZone a breeze. The only requirement that is put on the game itself is that it initiates uZone's server-side functionality, which establishes a connection to the uZone system and extracts startup parameters. uZone is also able to supply an instance with any number of extra arguments on startup, that could be of any type to make each instance customised to the user's preference. All of this is done using a single method call on startup. This makes a uZone-compatible game server almost completely indistinguishable from a regular game server, but with all the features and control that uZone brings.
uZone does not depend on any other product in UnityPark Suite, but it integrates extremely well with uLobby. Coupled with uLobby, it is possible to create a very dynamic system that can start and stop game servers through uZone, and register these in uLobby to present them to players connected to the same uLobby-host.