Marek's Dev Diary: March 27, 2025

What is this

Every Thursday, I will share a dev diary about what we've been working on over the past few weeks. I'll focus on the interesting challenges and solutions that I encountered. I won't be able to cover everything, but I'll share what caught my interest.

Why am I doing it

I want to bring our community along on this journey, and I simply love writing about things I'm passionate about! This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly. Any plans I mention aren't set in stone and everything is subject to change. Also, if you don't like spoilers, then don't read this.

Space Engineers 2

• We have started with weekly updates, adding new blocks every Thursday
  
  
• I am amazed by everything our players are creatively building in SE2. Some recent examples:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• We've started work on improving the jumping animation. The current problem is that we only have one animation, irrelevant of whether the jump starts from the left leg or the right leg. The result is that it feels unnatural and quite bad, to be honest. Our solution will be to detect which leg the character will land on (left or right) and then play the corresponding animation. We will have to do this for walk, run, and sprint animations.
  
  
• VS 1.2 is almost done. Work is frozen now, so we are just doing the last rounds of testing.
  
  
• Emotes will come to the game soon, in VS 1.6. But the main motivation isn't just so you can play the emotes. The real reason is that we want to be able to play arbitrary animations in-game. This will allow us to use them in trailer production, have characters do specific things, and move us towards more story-oriented trailers. This system should also include "two-character animations," allowing, for example, two characters to interact during a trailer.
  
  
  
  
  
• Voxel debris will be coming soon.
  
  
  
  
• Consumables are coming to Survival in VS2.
  
  
  
  
• Flora rendered in the distance.
  
  
  
  
  
• Wind in grass – I really have to share this, it just feels so amazing!
  
  
  
  
• Target Base Gyro is coming to VS 1.2! (Sorry to mention it so many times, but I think this will improve ship piloting very much.)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Off-center camera (another feature very close to my heart!) coming to VS 1.2 soon!
  
  
  
  
• We are prototyping a new kind of detailed decorative block that will help you design interiors and exteriors to feel more like real places, not just structures made from 25cm armor blocks. Don't get me wrong, 25cm armor blocks are great, but they can sometimes feel too blocky and low-poly. Real environments have a finer level of detail.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Some new foliage:
  
  
  
  
  
• And here is subsurface scattering on the flora (a special shader that makes it look more real):
  
  
  
  

AI People

• We are moving more and more towards a post-apocalyptic RPG, where you try to survive together with other characters on an island. I am really excited about this; I want to turn this game into a fun experience.
  
  
  
  
  

Groundstation (GoodAI Swarms)

• In GoodAI, one of our projects focuses on adding AI to drones, aiming to make them intelligent, autonomous, and powerful! Here's a demonstration of one algorithm that allows the recreation of a 3D scene from a video stream while simultaneously locating the drone in space. This demonstration was recorded right here in our office.
  
  
  
  
• Because autonomy is crucial, our drones need to be autonomously rechargeable. So, we created this docking station where a drone can land and automatically recharge its battery, requiring no human operator.
  
  
  
  
  

Marek's Dev Diary: March 20, 2025

What is this

Every Thursday, I will share a dev diary about what we've been working on over the past few weeks. I'll focus on the interesting challenges and solutions that I encountered. I won't be able to cover everything, but I'll share what caught my interest.

Why am I doing it

I want to bring our community along on this journey, and I simply love writing about things I'm passionate about! This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly. Any plans I mention aren't set in stone and everything is subject to change. Also, if you don't like spoilers, then don't read this.

Space Engineers 2

• Destruction improved a lot. Not just the fracturing system on blocks, but now you can use debug gun to destroy voxels (coming in VS 1.2)
  
  
  
  
• The level of polish we're doing for SE2 is really amazing, and already it feels so good to do things in the game and get satisfaction from environment feedback (visual, audio, physics).
• Lukas did amazing work on new and reworked sounds, for example: absolutely amazing idle sounds for blocks (assembler, radio antenna (with a little something in it - go and check it once we release VS 1.2), gravity gen, reactor, etc), jetpack charge up and boost, destruction of solar panels, walking via crouching and sounds of clothes, new GUI and HUD sounds, destruction sounds (there are now so many variants - based on the block type (thin, thick, heavy, solar panel, etc) and also based on the distance to listener).
• Target based gyro is done and will be available in VS 1.2. It's a new way of controlling rotation of your ships where you point the cursor and the ship rotates there. It's much more pleasant than the old way. There may be some edge cases (especially when ALT-rotating the camera angle) that we will be testing over time.
  
  
  
  
  
• We balanced the health and damage thresholds for armor and functional blocks (non-armor blocks), made it more balanced (armor should be stronger than functional blocks) but at the same time you also want to see some damage on armor when you shoot it. Now it feels more balanced.
• Acceleration-Based Camera Shakes - basically, camera should shake a little when you are accelerating (increasing speed). It's still not fully done, we will have to do another iteration.
• Medbay, Death & Respawning - these are the first parts of Survival that already works. I mean, it has been in the game for at least 12 months, but now as we are preparing for VS2 (Planets and Survival), we need to finalize it all and polish. So now when I enable survival mode in game, I can manually respawn to my medbay (or medbay I selected as my home base), I can change suit color, recharge my health and other stats, and when I die, my backpack floats away.
• First person mode and camera position and rotation without unwanted offset - it's done! Now when you look around in character mode in first person, it's just the camera rotating around, no more parallax effect. This is so correct!
• Next Thursday we are starting with Weekly Updates. This is a new thing but it's basically similar to what we were doing with weekly patchmasses that some of you will remember. There's one difference: we will be focusing only on adding new blocks, with limited or no functionality (temporary). It's a way to keep new content flowing to the game between our bigger updates (vertical slices).

Marek's Dev Diary: March 13, 2025

What is this

Every Thursday, I will share a dev diary about what we've been working on over the past few weeks. I'll focus on the interesting challenges and solutions that I encountered. I won't be able to cover everything, but I'll share what caught my interest.

Why am I doing it

I want to bring our community along on this journey, and I simply love writing about things I'm passionate about! This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly. Any plans I mention aren't set in stone and everything is subject to change. Also, if you don't like spoilers, then don't read this.

Space Engineers 2

• On Monday we released our first update (VS 1.1) - Steam Workshop. Now players can share their blueprints and worlds. I can see a lot of activity there.
• We are now focusing on VS 1.2 and polishing the last few things, and then the testing period begins.
• Our graphics team is hard at work on planetary features planned for Vertical Slice 2. They’re currently focused on improving flora draw distance and developing new foliage for a variety of biomes, including high mountains and savannas.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Today we are finishing the design for Dynamic Music. Here’s a short summary: The music system will feature dynamic tracks based on context, including missions, and sandbox exploration. Music selection will prioritize combat scenarios, playing faction-specific tracks if applicable, or generic combat music otherwise. Location-based ambient music will play when no combat is detected, with unique loops for different planets (Verdur, Byblos, Kemik) and biomes, underwater areas, and space. Combat and danger states will trigger specific loops with a 15-second cooldown before reverting to ambient music, while transitions from danger to combat or ambient to danger/combat are instant. 
• Adding support for emotes/animations + here you can also see the Inverse Kinematics on character’s feet
  
  
  

We are also streamlining our animation tools

• We are improving the 3D UI for Partial copy selection. Currently it’s a bit confusing where the selection volume is because it is rendered without depth-testing. We will enable depth testing and also add more contrasted edges.
  
  
  
  
  
• More and more survival mechanics are being added (for VS2), for example here is “manual respawn”. The block dropped after death is a current placeholder for the character backpack. ;)
  
  
• There’s a Brown Dwarf in the center of Almagest System, here’s how it will most likely look (The in-game side is just the first iteration - so far without any added effects).
  
  
  
  
  

Space Engineers 1

• SE1 team is almost finished with the 206 update, and soon to start working on 207. Looks promising!