Locations can be thought of as instantiations of a scene.
They allow scenes to be connected to a session that can be shared between multiple devices at the same time.
An instance is an individual session running at a location, in which users are connected together in real time. This allows the deployment to scale events and locations to potentially millions of concurrent users without having to support them all on a single instance.
There are two types of instances:
- World instances: Handle the spatial objects in the scene. (such as avatars, vehicles and grabbables)
- Media instances: Handle realtime audio, video and screenshare.
Media instances can be tied to a location, or exist ephemerally as a group call (called parties).
Instances can also be customised with the matchmaker functionality to create private rooms.
Locations can be loaded via the /location/<locationName> route, where locationName is the name of the location.
iR Engine always adds locations default, apartment and sky-station by default to new projects.
Adding a new location is done from the /admin/locations route, and live instances can be viewed from /admin/instances.