Sessions and routing
Elura separates an account identity from a live transport session and from the World node that currently owns game work.
Identity
An authenticated identity contains:
| Field | Purpose |
|---|---|
account_id | Stable account principal |
region_id | Geographic or infrastructure partition |
realm_id | Game realm/server partition |
user_id | Player or character principal |
generation | Account version used for revocation |
The login service issues a short-lived ticket with these claims. The Gateway verifies issuer, audience, signature, expiry, and replay state before making the identity available to a session.
Session lifecycle
A session moves through transport, authentication, active, draining, and closed states. The Gateway enforces an authentication deadline before allowing application routes. Heartbeats maintain liveness, and idle sessions are closed after idle_timeout.
Reconnect tickets let a client re-establish a session without replaying the original login flow. Sequence numbers help the runtime reason about delivered traffic around a disconnect. The exact client policy—retry timing, state reconciliation, and UI behavior—belongs to the game client.
Duplicate login
The online directory associates a player key with a Gateway/session lease. Available policies include allowing a new session to replace an old lease or kicking the existing session. Distributed kick_existing requires both a shared OnlineDirectory and a SessionControlTransport; configuring only one is rejected.
Use lease settings where:
0 < renew_interval < lease_ttlA typical generated distributed configuration uses a 45-second lease and a 15-second renewal interval.
Account generation
The identity generation supports revocation across active or reconnecting sessions. An AccountVersionStore can hold a minimum accepted generation. An operator can raise that value through the admin API, causing older identities to be rejected or logged out according to the configured session path.
World routing
Gateway routing keys include region, realm, and route. Discovery supplies a set of live WorldRouteTarget values for each key; the Gateway maintains a private connection pool to selected targets.
Route 0 is useful as a default target set. Applications may advertise more specific route IDs when different World groups own different business domains.
Ownership and sharding
For stateful workloads, an OwnershipResolver maps a player to a shard and an assigned World instance. Ownership metadata contains a shard ID, World ID, and epoch. The epoch prevents stale owners from accepting work after a rebalance.
Discovery answers “which instances can serve this route?” while ownership answers “which instance currently owns this player’s state?” Keep those two decisions distinct.