Multiplayer - networking without network view?

Hi all!

I am creating a procedural game (procedural/infinite terrain). No problem so far in single player. The terrain is chunk based, only a few chunks around the player are displayed of course, when getting far away from a chunk, it is getting destroyed and a new one is created.

The problems I have are limitation with network views. At least to my knowledge.

All child object of a terrain chunk (trees, rocks, enemies,…) and the chunk itself are destroyed when the chunk is far away from player.
But: if another player is still on that chunk, he will send networkViews update to all players. But as others do not have those object any-more in their game, errors pop-up as those networkViewsIDs were removed from their game instance.

Thus I wonder how I could manage networking this type of game.

  • Should I completely stop using network views? But then how to communicate objects/players/enemies updates?

  • Should I use only one master network view for all network updates? Using rather complex RPCs from that network view to update all object/player/enemy manually. In that case I could maybe filter incoming RPCs to check if the update received concerns an object present on ‘my’ game instance. Or even find a way to send from the server updates only to players that will need it.

I know that this question might be rather complex, and of course I am not asking for a code to do it, just a reflection on how you guys would try to solve this case.

Hoping my English was good enough and that I was clear!
Thank you all for your help

Sounds more like a logic problem than an issue with the network view component. Are you sending RPC calls to destroy the objects? If so you need to make sure RPC mode is set to server to avoid sending a message to all the players. RPCMode.Server. But why would one player ever want to destroy terrain in another players instance? Maybe when the player does something like mining where you destroy the terrain but just walking away from it should not destroy it for other players right? Keep as much local as you can. Now should you as far as the error is concerned, just check if the object you are trying to access is null before you access it.