What, if anything, does anybody remember about the lessons we learned from that original landing zone [the original ArcCorp from Alpha 2.0]?
TL;DRThe original ArcCorp landing zone was built as an isolated, skybox-backed area before procedural planets, so the lesson is that landing zones must now work for flying around and landing nearby, not just being inside.
They're mostly to do with frames per second.
I remember, actually, when I started, it was being worked on, but I didn't work on it personally. I think actually visually and the experience, I quite liked it. I remember watching it and I thought it was pretty good, but it was very specific to what it was built for. It was built before procedural planets was a thing, so it was a specific landing zone with essentially a skybox as a background, lots of buildings that were textures and simple meshes that went back, but the idea was you'd go down to a landing zone and there'd be nothing else on the planet to do. So that was a very specific plan for it. But obviously since then, landing zones are very different. You can fly all around them and they're on planets where you can visit more stuff. So I think lessons from that, and challenges from that, were how do we build landing zones where it's not "Okay, now you're in the landing zone, we just need to tailor the experience to being inside it." It's no, you have to tailor the experience to being inside it, to flying around it, to landing around it. That kind of thing is what I would take from that.