Thursday, December 15, 2016

Space Engineers Entering the Beta Development Stage


Today, we are pushing all the features from last week’s enormous update to the stable branch. Just in case you missed the news, this includes the total block redesign, new multiplayer netcode, a tutorial campaign and much more! We wanted to make this great update available to all players, as you’ve been asking for it all week! 

This update marks the transition of Space Engineers entering into the Beta phase.

Throughout its time in Early Access, Space Engineers has become the first space sandbox game of its kind and size; as a result, we have successfully established ourselves as one of the leaders in the engineering genre. Very few games allow you to build such a huge variety of ships, stations, voxel based planets, and mods. It has one of the biggest workshops on Steam thanks to its amazing modding community, with more than 240,000 items and counting!

At the moment, a great multiplayer experience is our primary goal. We are proud of the strides we’ve made with our newly implemented multiplayer and are planning to improve it even further in the future.  


So what do you need to know about the Space Engineers Beta?

The most important thing to remember with this announcement is that there are still more improvements, optimizations, and contents to come. As an example, I can confirm that one of the things being worked on currently is a new HUD which should significantly increase immersion in game. Beta simply means that we feel the game now has a solid foundation. Some of the new models will be receiving adjustments because of feedback from the community. Thanks to feedback from the Space Engineers community, we were able to clean up many, many bugs and crashes that our players were experiencing regarding multiplayer and online play.

If you are a current player and fan, you can look forward to fewer bugs, more optimizations, an updated user interface (new HUD), and constant improvements in all aspects of the game.
If you would like to help, please leave your reports and log files in the bug section of our forums here: http://forum.keenswh.com/forums/bug-reports.326950/

What if I’m new to Space Engineers?

In case you are a potential new player, there is now a tutorial campaign to help familiarize you with basic gameplay once you purchase the game. Sandbox games can be overwhelming in the beginning because of their sheer scope of possibilities. The campaign experience can now introduce you to the world of Space Engineers comfortably, without the need to read guides or go through clunky tutorial missions. It also serves as a showcase for what all you can achieve with our visual scripting tool. We cannot wait for what will be the golden age for modders in Space Engineers history!

What about us modders?!

If you are a modder, we really want to thank you for sticking with us during this crazy ride. At the beginning of the development we wanted to make our game as mod-friendly as possible. We even published the source code on GitHub for our modders to poke around in and the Space Engineers workshop ended up blowing our minds as a result. There is constant contact between us and our modders. Some of their creations were even implemented into the core game, such as the fighter cockpit, corner lights, and corner LCDs. There may be time for additional mods after we polish and optimize the game during the Beta stage.

We know modding an early access game can be frustrating from time to time, because things are constantly changing and we want to make you happy. From now on you can look forward to a more stable environment for modding as well as official, updated modding guides. We also have plans for cleaning up and polishing the MODApi interface during the Beta stage.

You guys aren’t looking so small these days…

It’s true! Keen Software House has now grown into a company of 50+ employees! However, we still consider ourselves an indie company. Testers can talk to the leads, artists can walk over and discuss something with programmers, designers can call out to producers, etc. We maintain an atmosphere of openness and communication at all times, and enjoy the aspects of being an independent company. The plan is to continue this way now and for the foreseeable future.

The bottom line:

Our goal from the beginning has been to deliver the vision from the minds of our highly talented team to the people. More than anything else, the Beta period will focus on stabilizing and optimizing in order to realize that goal. Keep in mind that this is still a period of development. Over the next few months, we plan to make Space Engineers the best it can be so that we are fully prepared to launch the full version of the game. We have been humbled by the support of our awesome community, and we can’t thank you enough for all the ways you’ve helped make this game a reality. Whether you’re a modder, a user on our forums, someone who’s uploaded content to the workshop, or a fan playing to exercise their creativity- you are the reason we are able to exist. Thank you for allowing us to pave the way for a game like no other. We’re excited for what the future of Space Engineers holds!
---
Marek Rosa
CEO and Founder of Keen Software House
CEO, CTO of GoodAI
:-)

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Medieval Engineers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MedievalEng
Space Engineers on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SpaceEngineers
Space Engineers on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceEngineersG

29 comments:

  1. Been here since the start, it's amazing to see how far you people have come - not just with Space Engineers, but as a company and as a developer.

    Best of luck!

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  2. That smiley just seals the deal :-)

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  3. THANK YOU, MAREK!!! AND THANK YOU EVERYONE INVOLVED @ KEEN!!!

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  4. Thank you guys. The congratulations belong to Petr Minarik and his team; they managed to develop SE to this stage and quality!

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    1. @Space Engineer, you need to understand, that game is fully dynamic and you need to see what concepts developers used in new multiplayer. Just this game can't use any other multiplayer prototype, because this games are static. So why it developed a long time and have bad quality, but in the end it will be finished: developers will find the best solution, best prototype they made from scratch, computers will be more upgraded and work faster, internet will also me more faster, than now and all aspects like this will make multiplayer for Space/medieval Engineers is really high qualifyed. You need just understand it.

      And also you need understand why game use voxels, not any other fully-customizeable thing that may be very small and complex, like computers chips. Because if start making things more complex, than we have, computers will start overflow and game will be compleately unplayable. So why voxels make it simplifyer.

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  5. Thankyou for your transparency and open-mindedness throughout the whole development process. You all as a developer and publisher stand out in so many aspects. I'm glad for your success.

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  6. I came in a little late, in early 2016, and I started with Medieval Engineers first and then discovered its elder and 'future' brother (what a nice contradiction), and got captivated in the most positive sense by both. It's been barely a year (for me) and such a great time to share all this! Bright future ahead! Live long and prosper!

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  7. been a player of SE right about the time you removed ladders from the game, its been a wild ride with ups and downs, and im still happy to say that i enjoy the game just as much, things got better, then slightly worse, then much better! for me, SE has become an integral part of my gaming experience and a staple product of engineering games, you have delivered without fault much of the needed gameplay and mechanics (and graphics!) and i can only hope to see whats more in store for the future!

    Personally, id love to see Food mechanics, with that, i think it'l make the game immersion complete, growing and consuming food (and enabling/disabling it like oxygen) would be fantastic!

    albeit i know there's room for improvement on some areas (concerning Multiplayer mainly). you have taken in account a lot of player feedback to make it this far, and i can only sum it up with a sincere: "congratulations!"

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  8. Good to see that things are indeed moving forward. Big congratulations on moving into Beta.
    With that said. Have you fixed the issue with air in big space-stations/ships lagging like crazy? (Maybe consider giving that calculation its own thread if it's possible (or if you haven't done so already). Just a suggestion.
    Me and a couple of friends love to play on our own server, but not being able to build big in space, made us stop playing for a while.

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  9. long, long time ago i've seen space engineers for the first time.

    My first impression was like:
    What the hell is that?! ok.. place some realy huge cubes in space.. hm.. ok - neeext!

    A few days later i understood the concept and your dream. From this point i was addicted and i followed this tiny piece of game with an ambitious team.

    Many milestones were reached during this time - safe pistons, planets, bugfixing (all the time) and at last but not least - entertaining us - your com.

    I've spend a lot of time in your creation and i would like to say thank you. Thank you for allowing me to forget the time. Your game bring so much fun, so much innovation and experimentation abilities. I am over 30 years old and i feel like a child playing with lego bricks.

    This can not be bought with money, because it's the power of your dream. It makes us forget that we are grown up.

    THANK YOU!

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  10. I was playing a lot of multiplayer on dedicated servers this week (trying multiple servers), and Marek, I think you can/should keep your money for now. There are still significant client/server desync problems and bugs, and sim speed is still a big issue. Fortunately, the crashes seem to be largely resolved.

    I hope you'll keep up being refreshingly critical about the game; that's the only way to make things great. :)

    If funds are a problem in your development efforts, I think you could start assessing the possibility of releasing something for space engineers that costs additional money besides the game. Players seem to invest a lot of their free time in this game, which suggests to me that they probably won’t be cost-averse if they can count on getting better experiences in return. One of these areas could be a bigger multiplayer expansion or service. For one, I would be happy to pay even monthly subscription for a dependable and persistent official multiplayer server. Having your own server(s) and player base would give you a lot of data to mine for the purpose of further polishing the multiplayer aspect of the game. I’d really much rather pay more than to see the game being ‘finished’ without any really good way to play it multiplayer. :(

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    1. one of the good things about the game is how there is no nagging to buy additional stuff.

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  11. Will you push the new multiplayer code to GitHub as well? I'd be curious to find out what syncing strategies did you choose, as I read recently an extremely informative article series* about the methods of networking physics simulations (e.g. deterministic lockstep, snapshots and interpolation, etc.)

    * http://gafferongames.com/networked-physics/the-physics-simulation/

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  12. Are they any chances to get a console version of SE? I bought SE back in 2013 and I enjoyed this game very much, but with every update game become less and less playable on my PC. Sadly, after Planets update it became completly unplayable - average FPS counter is around 15...

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    1. Your computer may be a toaster from the early 2000's... a graphics card of decent speed and ram is needed to run most modern games with decent graphics settings.
      I recommend a gtx 1060 6gb. Fast, affordable and will play 90% of games at max quality settings.

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  13. Are they any chances to get a console version of SE? I bought SE back in 2013 and I enjoyed this game very much, but with every update game become less and less playable on my PC. Sadly, after Planets update it became completly unplayable - average FPS counter is around 15...

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  14. You guys are AWSOME. I cant wait for the new Updates to come and to suprise us...

    Thank you that you programmed this game

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  15. campaign was cool but fell through the last mission in the planet also the ship mission keeps crashing and will not load at all. congrats on beta classification i love this game so much.

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  16. With the 01.166 release I cant even get the game to get past the loading screen without a crash to desktop. So much for beta.

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  17. Now i want to ask something.
    When will you guys fix the Eror that happens when tryng to open the game.
    I have avery good pc but it says that my ghraphics card isnt good enough butnits actualy better thwn the requairements in the games description.
    I bought the game 2 months ago and i still cant pay it.
    I dont ask for a refund cuz i want the damn game.
    Its an awesome game and i love it.
    But its anoyng how i payed 23 euros and i cant play it.
    So please look inti this and fix this issue.
    Also its not only happening to me it hapens to may other people.
    Also congrats on tbe new updates and now getting in beta.
    But i do hope that i will be able to experience these new updates and features aswell.

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  18. So when is this coming to Xbox One?

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  19. Marek, I'm not sure whether it's just my computer or if it's SE, but the scrolling function (for things such as the G menu, the blueprints menu and changing the blocks with the cross sign) keeps getting stuck, so if I highlight any scrollbars (or the screen that the scrollbar is connected to) it whizzes strait to the bottom or stays at the top and I can't move it. With the blocks, it just cycles through each variant of the block (e.g. large and small thrusters) very quickly!! I think it might just be a bug in the game as I have no problem using programs such as Google Chrome.

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  20. "Beta simply means that we feel the game now has a solid foundation."
    Since when? The standard in software development is that Beta means feature-complete. Surely you must be aware of that?

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  21. I like S.E. because it's a game that's being developed with the community and that listens to feedback more than other games.

    However, I would really like S.E. to say it's now leading in the engineering genre and actually represent what engineering is :(

    You have made blocks look overly-complexified and that makes for machines that would break more often, would take longer to build and would be harder to repair. If an engineer saw someone trying to weld a new gravity generator, for example, he would laugh and hand him the alpha blueprint. The new models don't look like an engineer's anymore.

    Also the old tool were very representative of what an engineer would use: lightweight, simple and small. Now they look heavy, overly complex and very encumbering... that's not right. The hand drill looks like a wood chipper because of it's head that has the angle of a wood drill and the design makes it able to work only very soft materials like wood or fragile sandstone. The new welder is so bulky it must be a pain to work with in gravity and the grinder now has teeth that are made to cut through wood and would wear, chip-off or get stuck if ever used on metal when a teeth-free blade would stay sharp longer and cut through metal waaaay more easely. Also the casing of the grinder is so big it must be very encumbering to walk with it and when the character model uses this tool it feels like it weights a ton... why doesn't we have the tools we always had, they were way more practical and simple!

    Know your engineering KSH

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  22. I would appreciate any feedback why once bying and downloading the game, I need to go to your blog? I did pay 23 EUR, so what's going one here???? I would expect full profi set up and here I have really dev kindergarden set up. I am your blog. So now your turn, give me the hint, why your game does not dwonload. greetings, lena

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  23. I need to update my graphics card to direct x 11 to play space engineers so I updated my graphics card, but after I did the game still said I need direct x 11 to play but I have direct x 11 on my laptop and it still wont let me play on this game although I did not check to see what version it updated so if you can also send me a link to check that I can find out if I have direct x 11 if i don't and if I don't the I will update my graphics again.

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  24. Is the dx11 screen at startup really just just a bug and if so FIX IT!!!!
    I spent 30 bucks on this and after going through a few games im not losing this one like I did the last games. I also agree with this guy in every way.

    ///AlexDecember 18, 2016 at 8:33 PM
    Now i want to ask something.
    When will you guys fix the Eror that happens when tryng to open the game.
    I have avery good pc but it says that my ghraphics card isnt good enough butnits actualy better thwn the requairements in the games description.
    I bought the game 2 months ago and i still cant pay it.
    I dont ask for a refund cuz i want the damn game.
    Its an awesome game and i love it.
    But its anoyng how i payed 23 euros and i cant play it.
    So please look inti this and fix this issue.
    Also its not only happening to me it hapens to may other people.
    Also congrats on tbe new updates and now getting in beta.
    But i do hope that i will be able to experience these new updates and features aswell.///

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. would you guys with your petty problems please stop spamming this place? For bug reporting and getting advice how to solve issues there is a forum, here:http://forums.keenswh.com/categories/space-engineers.1006/

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