It took its time - but now it's done: Instead of using my homegrown "network filter" that basically sent the message to each player individually and directly (in loops for all kinds of groups), Traces of Illumination is now using Unity's built-in networking-scoping. So, now I'm finally using this feature that I had requested for Unity.

It was a bit tricky because unlike I had originally intended, I became a little lazy in the implementation of my "networking filter" and made it "perfect for me", but not exactly perfect for porting it to the way Unity does it now. After some fiddling around however, it turned out that I can do pretty much all I need. I did waste a bit of time because originally, I changed all calls to my Networking API into calls to the Unity networking API - just to find out that instead of changing the calls to my API, I could simply change the implementation. Fortunately, I'm using the Asset Server - so it was (almost) just a revert changes to fix that thoughtless action.

Using the new approach also required some refactoring because in a few locations I relied on having my own collections of whom I would send the message - and there was one particular case where this was incompatible with the network-groups (which are per NetworkView). The cool thing was that this refactoring was a nice improvement to the design. So, in the end it turned out that this was not done nicely originally anyways - and now was the time to fix it.

I still have to test if changing the level designs (optimized physics / collision detection) and the networking gives me the performance boost I'm hoping to get - but in any case things are cleaner now, which means: more maintainable.

So, next step is finishing the level-refactoring / cleanup (which basically means rebuilding the first three levels in a much more organized and optimized manner which will also set the workflow for the levels that still need to be designed).