jovial tree
Pretty specific scenario here but it highlights a more high level question.
It appears that dedicated server builds have a lot of features and systems that I would think would be stripped considering there is no graphics device in the terminal.
This can be seen by doing a Dedicated Server build and when you launch it seeing "Shader" errors spammed in the log.
A secondary issue popped up that was really confusing for our developers with our MMO project so I'll explain.
Our project is setup like a traditional MMO with zones and zone-lines with loading screens between them, each zone has it's own client world and server world which we use ports to move players between zones when the player changes zones.
We have a webservice api that the client requests the server ip and port of the zone it's trying to connect to and that webservice can control load balancing, matchmaking, versioning etc so our server load can be distributed across our own metal servers or under high load spin up cloud servers in aws at a higher cost.
That all works fine in production where the server has no client worlds, and the client has no server worlds.
The problem becomes noticeable in the Editor where it acts as both a Client and a Server, we initially had one client world and one server world created when we drop you into the initial spawn position of the player, but recently working on some workflow improvements experimented with still one client world being created, but spinning up a server world for each of the connected zones with no client world connected to them in the bootstrap just so they are ready to go when the client transitions from one zone to the next.
Strange things started happening, the different zones have different rendering settings, different lighting, different skyboxes, different fog and in one zone we were seeing additional lights rendered that were from a different zone that did not have a client world for it.
See screenshots attached. Extra lights in one.
stoic mortar