NMS fakes its solar system and planetary bodies. When you are on the planet the sun is behaving like in standard games with day night cycles, when you are in space planets do not rotate and sun is just a skybox, you can never fly to it. It doesnt have a rotation. Also there is clear 'loading' when you are approaching ground, so transition is not seemless, in Star Citizen if object on the planet is big enough you can see it from orbit.
There were games that did seamless transition from space to ground, like original Elite, new Elite or a 'little' game called Evochron, but non of those do have micro detail and multiple bioms on those planets.
Thats not it. WoW is fully instanced and have zones separated by loading. They also have restrictions to amount of players per shard. I think Guild Wars 2 would be better example.
But its not interactive world, you cannot take some stuff to your arms from one part of the world, travel and drop it somewhere else and every player that will go to the location that you dropped the item will see it.
What server meshing will be is seamless distribution of servers for zones in the solar system.
To better explain it, i need to explain first Object Container Streaming technology they developed:
Basically it containerize parts of the world and allow communication between those all assets within that bubble inside between zones below and above it.
So for example all rooms in the building are separate containers, then you have big container for a whole building, then you a landing zone that is a container containing all buildings containers and then your container is a whole planet with everything within.
This system is dynamic depending on the needs and distance, so for example closer you get to space station the more containers you load and the more granular the simulation is.
They already have it working client side, they are finishing server side part of it and then they will be incorporating dynamic allocation of servers to server based containers, so for example you have a cluster of space stations nearby that have one player on each station, so in this situation you only need one server to handle simulation of those objects and those players
In other case 100 players spawn on each of those space station, now every space station get their own server dynamically, but those servers still communicate with each other, so you have a party members on different space station you can still communicate like you would on the same server. Of course this is not restricted to objects, it can also containerize space, so for example you have quite a bigger battle, but cluster of ships are separated, then every cluster of ships get its own bubble with own server, separation should be similar to how the EVE Online handles the visible grid, but EVE cannot containerize it, so at most they can have one server per system.
This will create illusion that game only have one server, like in EVE, where everybody plays and can interact.
