Table of Contents
The replication is used to keep read-only copies of managed objects on one or more nodes. These copies are called object replicas, or simply replicas. The Core automatically keeps object replicas up-to-date during their lifetime.
Replication serves two main purposes:
To keep up-to-date copies of objects needed for world presentation on client nodes. Server nodes decide which objects are relevant for the presentation (i.e. visible and/or audible) and request their replication to client nodes.
To optimize communication between objects, especially to reduce the communcation latency. If server node-side code wants to read properties (or call constant methods) of objects potentially owned by a different server node, it can request replication of such objects in advance and access object replicas instead of accessing the objects themselves over the network (using synchronous RPC for example).
On a single node, either object itself or its replica can exist, but never both of them. Replicas have the same object id as the original object and can be accessed using a weak pointer to the object (see Section 7.4, “Accessing Object Replicas”).