CPNext

CPNext was going to be a new technology for Club Penguin. It started being used in the app, but never happened on the desktop game.

How it Would Work

Rooms

CPNext would work completely differently than the utilized server system. While in Club Penguin, each server is one "shard" of Club Penguin, meaning one reflection of the island which a certain amount of users can play, in CPNext, every room would be in effect a shard. As more users joined a certain room, more reflections of the room were created, allowing lag free play and busy rooms. In this system, many versions of a popular room could coexist with only one version of a less popular room, making it easier to hang out with more penguins. This would allow all rooms to have the same amount of penguins so long as there is demand for the room. The team also would have the ability to control the amount of penguins in a given room before another version is created.

Future Concepts

Spike Hike has stated that Club Penguin could conceptually have an unlimited number of rooms for penguins to explore, with rooms being revealed over time as penguins discover them. Missions like Operation: Hot Sauce that happen in-game could exist permanently, with the engine of the game grouping EPF agents who wish to play them in mirror versions of real rooms. You would meet friends by jumping to a friend, a new version of Server Jumping. Mascots would be met by teleporting to them from friends lists.

Benefits

On November 16, 2013, Spike Hike commented on the fan blog Club Penguin Memories about the benefits of the new technology here.

“	There are a lot of benefits – 1) We can better cluster the community together so the CP world doesn’t feel so empty. There may be places where the audience wants it to feel more empty and we can adjust that, but in general, the CP world will feel more alive more of the time. 2) It's way more efficient on the server side. Not necessarily a benefit you will see but way easier to manage for us which means we can spend more time on content instead of server maintenance. 3) We will be able to group people over time based on things we know about them. We would like to find ways, for example, to group you with your friends automatically without even having to teleport but we could group based on other things too. 4) We can serve you different versions of CP rooms based on the “mode” you are in. Imagine Operation Hot Sauce style missions that happen in the CP world. We can make those permanently available down the road. But the trick to those missions is that they are social. You want to be in the room with other agents. But people who are not in mission mode want to be in the regular version of the room. No problem. We can group you with other agents and give everyone else the regular room. That’s just one example but there is a lot we can do here. 5) We could – theoretically so I am NOT announcing this here, it's just an example – let you take over your own version of any room in CP and throw a party in it. You might also be able to decorate that room with your iggy items. Your friends could access that special party version of the room while everyone else gets the normal one. 6) We can make the CP world infinitely large. Imagine that as you play CP, you discover more rooms that you can go to and they unlock on the map. So for noobs the experience is really simple, but for rares the world is really big so you never get bored and there’s always something new to explore. The problem with this in “Classic CP” is that we can’t add more rooms anymore because they are always empty. Spreading out the audience more across empty rooms doesn't help the community, it hurts it. Now we can have more rooms and more to do but group people in ways that keeps the community together – across space and time in the game. 7) We won’t have to take the world down to launch parties and A LOT fewer overall bugs. 8) In the future we will be able to distribute these server rooms around the world so we can put the servers close to our users in each country and make the overall performance a lot faster. Today everyone is playing out of Las Vegas, so people in the US get a fast connection while kids in other countries get a slower one. We want the whole world to be really fast! Excited now? Don’t worry, we will be listening, tweaking, and solving all these concerns. Trust me, this is a far, far better technology to take CP into the future. Also servers on web will be around for a while – at least a year. So we have a lot of time to get this right and IF we need to we can do something like today’s servers using the CPNext technology for players who want that. So you can keep playing the way you want to on the web and we will evolve. Trust us, we know we need to get this right.	”
	— Spike Hike on November 16, 2013

Implementation in the Club Penguin (app)

CPNext was used in the Club Penguin (app) to create multiple reflections of players' igloos for their buddies to visit. It also rendered the 3D Penguins for the game, replacing almost the entire current main engine of the game. It was also used when waddling around the island in places such as the Town Center, Snow Forts and Dock.