Telling the server about the world

I don't really like the Unity built-in networking system and for larger scale games it is just not reasonable to use. So I did some experiments with external server software and so far this approach is more in my line (clean separation of client/server code and much better efficiency).

Now I want the server to have full authority over the game state. To perform this role, he must know about all player objects and about the world. However, the server doesn't need to know about graphical stuff such as 3D models. How do you tackle this problem?

I want to use the Unity editor to build the game world. Now to give the server the relevant information about the world I thought about writing a script, which scans through all GameObjects in a scene and exports all BoundingBoxes and other relevant stuff as an .xml file. The server may then read this file and extract the important facts for the world simulation.

How do you think about that? Do you have any other (maybe better) ideas? I would really love to hear opinions about that topic.