Ah that makes sense then. I was working off the assumption that generating X amount of settlements and then instancing them would be the hardest part. Not the physically moving around.
As I said my coding knowledge is 0 and I'm viewing it from a its bigger therefor more complex angle.
Well, there’s different aspects to it obviously, and the difficulty and complexity aren’t necessarily all aligned.
But let’s look at the basic physics first.
When you’re in an instance in ED, it’s an instance of the entire solar system, and you are matched to a specific frame of reference within that.
Planet surfaces are pretty simple - you’re just co-moving with it. So it’s effectively a stationary background relative to the player. The player experiences gravity but all that’s needed is a very simple model because everything other than the force from the planet on the player is absolutely tiny in comparison and can be discounted. All that stuff is sorted for SRVs already, so it’s just adapting the existing mechanics for a walking style.
Outposts, Megaships and FC’s are a bit of a funny one, as there’s not supposed to be any artificial gravity in ED other than that created by movement. But we’ll… Magboots On. Anyway, they are also stationary relative to a player on them.
Stations are more complex, as although they and the player are both in the same co-moving frame of reference, stations rotate compared to that frame of reference. That rotation is in a fixed, constant manner though.
Ships on the other hand move with 6 degrees of freedom compared to the frame of reference. And someone on foot also moves with 6 degrees of freedom compared to the frame of reference. Changes in ship movement can be extremely rapid, and unpredictable. So you have in principle multiple players all moving unpredictably with 6 degrees of freedom, in things which are themselves moving unpredictably with 6 degrees of freedom. Plus all the design considerations around how players
movement needs to be adapted for ship movement - for example even just in simple situation of a ship rotating at a constant rate, depending on where in the ship the player they’ll be experiencing anywhere from zero force up to potentially huge forces, which at minimum would render them completely unable to move.
Like I say, it’s definitely not the only factor, and not every factor will follow the Planets ->Stationary->Fixed Rotations->Ships order. The fundamental movement mechanics however are pretty, well… fundamental.
Putting all that aside for one second, ‘station legs’ and ‘ship legs’ have always been set out to be their own specific separate major expansions anyway. If you’re talking about them being all part of Odyssey, then that’s not just about the order they do stuff in, but about the practicalities and commercial viability of delivering multiple forecast major expansions together rather than separately. (You’ve got to bear in mind here that a lot of people weren’t happy with the seasons approach from Horizons, where people paid in advance for a season of major updates, and that FD seem to have wanted to move away from that, at least in broad strokes.)
