I've finally gotten some time for myself between work and the holidays. Right now I'm working on finishing the "seamless" part of seamless zones; this was left unfinished for the sake of working on client parity. You could smoothly transition between zones, but what was in those zones was still exclusive to those zones, so as soon as you crossed the border, the items and players on the other side of it would disappear. Obviously, this is not actually seamless. However, addressing this involves some pretty fundamental server-side changes compared to the relatively easy stitching-together of the maps on the client side.

So, I've spent the last few days completely rewriting what the server considers to be "in the same zone" as you, to include the bordering tiles of all adjacent zones. This involved a long-overdue rewrite of how the server was handling zones, from the earliest days of the game; some of the code I've rewritten was last touched in 2020. This also means ensuring that when you transition zones, what was visible to you already from the zone you left is not transmitted to you, or else it would be duplicated. It should all ideally work as though the border between zones did not exist at all.

You can see a preliminary result below, but I still have more work to do on this to ensure that e.g. players moving between zones properly spawn and despawn for the players inside them, and you can interact with objects on the other side of the border just as though they were in your zone.