Space Engineers: Airtightness & In-game Help

SUMMARY:

• 5-year anniversary of Space Engineers released on Early Access!
• New in-game help - for better onboarding of new players
• Major overhaul of airtightness and oxygen
• Major overhaul of asteroid clusters
• Good.bot - an AI chatbot from our sister company GoodAI Applied
• Relative inertial dampeners
• Support for mods bigger than 2GB
• Many features moved out of experimental mode -> becoming official features

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Hello, Engineers!

It’s time for another major update! Coincidentally, it’s also the fifth anniversary of Space Engineers being released in Early Access! A MASSIVE thank you to everyone who has supported us since we launched the game and welcome to all of the new Engineers.

I’m happy to share a lot of exciting news and updates about several things we’ve been working on during the past three months. This update is much bigger than I expected and is focusing on better player experience and it’s also addressing a lot of requests we received from you, our great community! Without any further delay, here are the things we’re bringing you.

New In-Game Help

Space Engineers is a very complex game, and we understand that it can be quite difficult for new players to learn how to play it. To smooth this learning curve, we’ve worked on the new in-game help and contextual text which explain basic functionality, features and provides descriptions about blocks and tools. For example, after a new player selects a block for the first time, in-game help text will appear on the screen via Good.bot, and teach the player the basics of building. Once the player has successfully completed these basic building tasks, the in-game help text will disappear. We have designed more than 30 simple objectives. Additionally, players will be able to access in-game help in multiplayer by asking Good.bot questions through typed messages. I hope you will find it useful and easy to use, as we’re trying to make Space Engineers more enjoyable for everyone.

The reason we are adding in-game help now is due to the fact we wanted to make sure that the game features are finished, fully tested and fine-tuned before we start adding in-game help for them. It also takes time to align features into our long-term vision for Space Engineers, because as you know, we change things here and there from time to time :) And the in-game help was one of the steps that needed to happen once we were happy with what we have in the game.

Airtightness

Airtightness has been the top voted and the most frequently discussed feature at our Space Engineers support site. With several additions, performance improvements and adjustments to this feature, we are making it an official, fully developed, tested and optimized part of the game. With that, we are of course moving it out of the experimental mode.

We also introduce some small features and rebalances to complement the renewed airtightness.


Your suit oxygen will now automatically refill whenever you are in oxygenated environment. This means that your suit will replenish oxygen when the player enters a pressurized environment or while dwelling on a planet with a breathable atmosphere.

This was done to give more incentives to preparation, building pressurized environments and to generally let oxygen be a more significant and exciting game play element then it used to be.

Asteroid Clusters

Another feature we are adding into the game are naturally generated asteroid clusters, which were part of our game roadmap! Asteroids will now spawn either as lone asteroids or together in clusters. This was done to get more varied results and create unique environments for players to explore and settle in. We are adding more than 100 types of asteroids. Fractal generated asteroids have been replaced with prefab asteroids, which go through a add / subtract merge generator to alter their shapes by creating caverns and adding debris. 51 new prefab asteroids have been added to ensure variety and many asteroids are now riddled with naturally occurring caves and tunnels.

New asteroids are implemented for all new games since the release date. Old, saved games will not have this feature enabled.

No more space donuts!

Good.bot

We’d like to welcome our new AI friend, Good.bot to Space Engineers! Good.bot will help with answering basic questions about the game, such as queries regarding blocks, tools, resources and movement in Space Engineers. We have fine-tuned Good.bot’s knowledge of the game and we will continue to improve its ability to help answer players’ questions and offer hints and tips to make them proficient Engineers. We hope that this will improve your overall experience with Space Engineers.

Good.bot has been developed in our sister company GoodAI Applied --- which is also a sister company of our another sister company GoodAI 😉 --- and is currently being deployed in many banks and telco operators around the globe.

Relative Inertial Dampeners

We have reworked the functionality of relative inertial dampeners. Now, with the updated relative dampeners, you will keep the same speed as the speed of the moving grid you’re connected to. This helps especially in cases when you’re working on a moving ship, or an asteroid, so you don’t need to manually adjust your dampeners.

Other new features to check out

Support for Mods bigger than 2GB: in cooperation with one of our very active modders, Sektan, we have changed the size of the mods which can be downloaded from the Steam Workshop. Now you can enjoy huge worlds and creations which were not possible to be downloaded before. This also opens the doors for all moders to unleash their creativity and upload crazy things currently gathering dust in their drawers :)

Render Optimization: our team also worked on some interesting render optimizations. The campaign performance improvements include better threading, voxel peaks optimization and the improvements of occlusion culling. We have discovered special paths in execution that can be compressed and done with less computation. This process is always incremental, basically you add optimizations on top of your existing optimizations, always trying to get more out of your hardware. We have  achieved significant performance improvements that you’ll be able to experience in the game. I’d like to mention:

• Incremental culling which was improved by up to +15% 
• Occlusion culling in shadow cascades up to +25% 
• Regression of Red Ship rendering improved by up to +60% 
• Skip unused shadow cascades was improved by up to +270% (2,7x)

i5 @ 3,2GHz, 4 cores	Before	After
Mission 4	7,8ms	3,14ms (248%)
16 Red ships, flying	27,8ms	11,1ms (250%)
16 Red ships, inside	30,3ms	2,75ms (1100%)

Moved from experimental mode:
After the last major release (Major Overhaul of Multiplayer, July 2018) we have received a lot of questions and requests to move some game features from the experimental mode. I’m happy to share with you several features we’re moving from experimental mode, and they are becoming official game features. These are:

• Lobby
• Realistic sounds
• Workshop worlds
• FOV slider being available in safe mode

What’s next?

I have already mentioned our plans in the Multiplayer overhaul blog post and I will repeat it here. With this release - we have updated the game to be more accessible for new and existing players (user intuitiveness). The next release for Space Engineers is going to focus on balancing and consolidating various game systems (how you respawn, resources, etc). We still believe there can be other things accomplished, but this is only the beginning of our work in this area.

Space Engineers has been in early access for five years now; we know it’s time to get the game out. We are very close. We want to make sure that the game will be fantastic when it goes out of early access.

As Space Engineers nears the completion of its first installment, we are focusing on polishing, optimizing and fixing existing features.

This first installment of Space Engineers was always about bringing up the building blocks in order to lay down the structure for physical volumetric engineering in an open world and open ended setting - player sets his/her own challenges and objectives. We are basically there. The next steps that will come in future installments, will focus on other aspects of gameplay, new game modes, new challenges and objectives, as well as pushing the technology further.

In the long-term, we plan to extend the game and the whole engineering genre into new pioneering directions - just like we did in October 2013 and since then. However, this is still far off and too soon to talk about it now.

Feedback & Bug Reports

If you have any questions or requests, please do not hesitate to contact us. We will do our best to solve your issues. Our Community Manager, Jesse Baule, will address all your questions and comments as quickly as possible. Feel free to use our support portal: https://support.keenswh.com/

Conclusion

The same as with many our previous major releases, I am super happy with the work our team has done and super excited to share it with you all!

I would like to thank everyone who stood with us patiently for all these years, who kept supporting Space Engineers, who helped with public tests, modders, YouTubers, people running their dedicated servers, people creating new content, people who helped other players to get into Space Engineers and people who believed in our team.

Space Engineers is still in development. Everything in the game is subject to change.

Thank you for reading and we look forward to hearing your feedback on this update. For full list of new features and improvements continue to the full update changelog.

We would be also very happy if you can submit your feedback at our Space Engineers Steam store page and encourage us to do better. We welcome both positive and negative comments, as it helps us to create a better game for you!

Marek Rosa
CEO, Creative Director, Founder at Keen Software House
CEO, CTO, Founder at GoodAI

For more news:
Space Engineers: www.SpaceEngineersGame.com
Medieval Engineers: www.MedievalEngineers.com
General AI Challenge: www.General-AI-Challenge.org
AI Roadmap Institute: www.RoadmapInstitute.org
GoodAI: www.GoodAI.com
Keen Software House: www.keenswh.com

Personal bio:
Marek Rosa is the CEO and CTO of GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence R&D company, and the CEO and founder of Keen Software House, an independent game development studio best known for their best-seller Space Engineers (2.5mil+ copies sold). Both companies are based in Prague, Czech Republic.

Marek has been interested in artificial intelligence since childhood. He started his career as a programmer but later transitioned to a leadership role. After the success of the Keen Software House titles, Marek was able to personally fund GoodAI, his new general AI research company building human-level artificial intelligence.

GoodAI started in January 2014 and has over 30 research scientists, engineers and consultants working across its Research and Applied teams.

At this time, Marek is developing both Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers, as well as daily research and development on recursive self-improvement based general AI architecture.

Reflections on the Human-Level AI Conference 2018

SUMMARY

• This month GoodAI organized the Human-Level AI Conference in Prague. 
• Over 500 people attended to see over 40 speakers. 
• I met some great people and had some excellent discussions and would like to thank everyone involved.

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GoodAI team, conference chair Tarek Besold and the AI Safety panel share the stage at the end of the conference.

This month over 500 people attended the Human-Level AI Conference in Prague, which was organised by the team at GoodAI. The attendees got the opportunity to see over 40 experts in the AI field covering a wide range of topics.

The conference was a combination of three established conferences AGI, BICA and NeSy, as well as an extra Future of AI Track aimed at a wider audience.

The range of issues discussed was extremely impressive, from detailed research on human-level AI to issues such as AI safety, societal impacts and investment.

The conference truly exceeded my expectations. The quality of the keynote talks was fantastic, the media coverage (see a few examples in Czech and English below) was extremely wide and the atmosphere was very warm and welcoming. Both participants and speakers seemed to enjoy themselves very much! 

Dileep George (Vicarious) delivering a keynote at HLAI 2018

One of the highlights for me was welcoming the finalists of our Solving the AI Race round of the General AI Challenge to take part in the AI Race and Societal Impacts panel. You can read about some of the discussions surrounding whether to publish an evil AI in Futurism. 

One of the things that made the sessions, and the conference as a whole, so interesting was the diverse group of contributors sharing their different approaches to general AI or human-level AI. We had representatives from some of the top tech companies (Microsoft, Google DeepMind, Uber AI Labs, Facebook AI Research and more), from the top global academic institutes (University of Cambridge, Harvard, John Hopkins, University of New York, UCL and more), from international organisations (United Nations, DARPA, Aspen Institute and more) and from exciting private sector organisations (ARAYA, Vicarious, SingularityNET, Zeroth.AI to name a few).

It was this diversity and representation from across the world that added real value to the lively discussions. However, it was not just in the official sessions that I found such thought-provoking people. We were lucky to have a brilliant selection of volunteers helping us coordinate the conference and the participants too were extremely interesting. I had many fascinating conversations and my only regret is that I did not have time to talk more with all of our friends and participants.

The Investing in AGI panel

Throughout the conference I felt like I was constantly exchanging ideas and learning, from the sessions and the social activities. It was inspirational to see so many people with a genuine interest in general AI / human-level AI.

AI enthusiasts enjoying Hybernia Theatre

I would like to send a huge thank you out to everyone involved in this conference. I would like to thank my team at GoodAI, especially Olga Afanasjeva, Daria Hvizdalova, Will Millership, Marek Havrda, Tomas Strouhal and Lucie Krestova, who all worked tirelessly putting it together. My big thanks also belongs to Tarek Besold, the conference chair, who did an excellent job of making people feel at home. I would also like to thank the speakers who flew in from around the world, our volunteers, our sponsors, community partners and media partners, everyone at AGI, BICA and NeSy, and finally all the AI enthusiasts who visited the conference!

You can now watch all keynotes and AGI sessions as well as a selection of videos from the AI Race & Societal Impacts session.

Thanks for reading,

Marek Rosa

CEO, CTO, Founder at GoodAI

CEO, Creative Director, Founder at Keen Software House

For more news:

Space Engineers: www.SpaceEngineersGame.com

Medieval Engineers: www.MedievalEngineers.com

General AI Challenge: www.General-AI-Challenge.org
AI Roadmap Institute: www.RoadmapInstitute.org
GoodAI: www.GoodAI.com
Keen Software House: www.keenswh.com

Personal bio:

Marek Rosa is the CEO and CTO of GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence R&D company, and the CEO and founder of Keen Software House, an independent game development studio best known for their best-seller Space Engineers (2.5mil+ copies sold). Both companies are based in Prague, Czech Republic. 

Marek has been interested in artificial intelligence since childhood. Marek started his career as a programmer but later transitioned to a leadership role. After the success of the Keen Software House titles, Marek was able to personally fund GoodAI, his new general AI research company building human-level artificial intelligence. 

GoodAI started in January 2014 and has grown to an international team of 20 researchers. At this time, Marek is developing both Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers as well as daily research and development on recursive self-improvement based general AI architecture.

Medieval Engineers Update 0.6.4: Major Overhaul of Combat

SUMMARY:

• Major Combat Overhaul
• HUD and Chat Improvements
• New Sounds and Environmental Ambience

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Hello, Engineers!

Medieval history has countless examples of conflict and war. For this reason, combat has always been part of my plan for Medieval Engineers. In this update, we are creating combat mechanics to make fighting more intense and exciting for players. In the future, we will polish it even further with the introduction of more decals and enticing particle effects!

Improved Combat System

I want to start talking about the combat system by saying there are a few core ideas that are driving our design.

“Combat shouldn’t take away from engineering.”
This is the primary idea that is reinforced by all of the other ideas. I see engineering as the core of our gameplay because it’s what makes engineers games different from similar games.

“Combat should be easy to learn.”
There shouldn’t be new controls, purposefully difficult timings, or combination moves to make fighting harder than it has to be. You should understand it well enough after only a few minutes of practice.

“Combat should rely mostly on skill to win.”
Winning should always be possible if you are more skilled than your opponent.

“Combat should be short.”
You shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time on combat if you don’t want to.

The only advantages that you can bring into combat are better equipment and more health.

The combat system is still based on attacking and blocking but it is enhanced to provide a greater variety of attacks and blocks. There are three zones around each character that can be attacked and defended, which creates a directional approach to combat. There are two kinds of attack: standard and charged. Charged attacks are more powerful than standard ones but they are also slower because you have to spend time charging them. You can defend two of your zones at once using a shield. This makes defense easier, but shields take damage quickly and they can block your vision of the enemy...

Combat makes use of the stats system introduced in our last update. Attacking or successfully blocking will use stamina similar to how it did before, but now there is an additional adrenaline effect. When you are fighting you will hear your heart beating and your vision will narrow. This is the adrenaline effect which makes your attacks and blocks faster than usual. If you build up more adrenaline than your enemy you will be faster, but it will fade quickly if there’s a break in the fight.

The part of combat that makes zones possible is target-locking. Since our goal was to keep the controls simple there is no button to lock onto a target. Equipping a weapon, attacking someone, or being attacked will cause you to go into a combat mode. In this combat mode you will be able to lock onto anyone you look at. This is a ‘soft lock’, meaning that you can break it easily by looking away or by moving out of range. While you are locked your character and camera will track the enemy and you will be able to aim attacks and blocks. You can also strafe to the left and the right and remain locked onto your target.

 

HUD and Chat Improvements

All of these combat changes touch on many other parts of the game, which we have been improving at the same time. Our barbarian AI had to be updated to use the combat system, so we took the opportunity to streamline the barbarian behavior. They now focus much more on players and less on attacking blocks. You will want to make sure that you protect your spawn points because the barbarians won’t give up.

Parts of the HUD are being updated to display the new combat reticle. I want the HUD to look good and be easy to read, so we are also updating the quest and chat displays with larger text and dark backgrounds to to make them easier to read. The chat is also being upgraded with a movable and resizable window, a scrollable history, and new channels for local, house, and private messages.

...and more!

I’m always paying attention to how the game looks and feels, which is why I wanted new combat animations and sounds. While we were making them we had to develop some new options for our animation controller and some new ways to define how sounds are used. This gave us the foundation we need so that we can add environmental-based sounds and music. This means biome-specific background sounds and even combat music!

We are giving you additional features for server admins, things like a remote API to monitor your servers similar to the one in Space Engineers, chat logging and offline chat to keep up with players, and a message of the day to announce rules and events.  For modders we have updates to subparts, new definitions for biomes, and updated entity effects. The new chat channels are moddable and all of the new combat related features are available for use in your mods.

List of New Features:

• New combat system
• Resources rebalanced for faster gathering and building
• HUD improvements for chat and readability
• Toolbar behavior improvements

For Modders:

• Updated subpart system
• New biome definition format
• New chat system with moddable channels
• New entity effects

For Server Admins:

• Message of the Day
• Chat logging
• Remote API and VRage Remote Client

Read the full list of new features at http://news.medievalengineers.com/update_0_6_4/patch_0
Purchase your copy

New Support Community

We welcome all feedback from our community and that’s why we have decided to launch a new support portal. This is where you can provide feedback and find support for all our games in one place. The portal should be a single destination for all your ideas, issues, and technical support needs. You can find it at: https://support.keenswh.com/

Medieval Engineers is still in development. Everything in the game is subject to change.

Marek Rosa
CEO, Creative Director, Founder at Keen Software House
CEO, CTO, Founder at GoodAI

For more news:
Space Engineers: www.SpaceEngineersGame.com
Medieval Engineers: www.MedievalEngineers.com
General AI Challenge: www.General-AI-Challenge.org
AI Roadmap Institute: www.RoadmapInstitute.org
GoodAI: www.GoodAI.com
Keen Software House: www.keenswh.com

Personal bio:
Marek Rosa is the CEO and CTO of GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence company, and the CEO and founder of Keen Software House, an independent game development studio best known for their best-seller Space Engineers (2.5mil+ copies sold). Both companies are based in Prague, Czech Republic.

Marek has been interested in artificial intelligence since childhood. Marek started his career as a programmer but later transitioned to a leadership role. After the success of the Keen Software House titles, Marek was able to personally fund GoodAI, his new general AI research company building human-level artificial intelligence.

GoodAI started in January 2014 and has grown to an international team of 20 researchers. At this time, Marek is developing both Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers as well as daily research and development on recursive self-improvement based general AI architecture.

Medieval Engineers Banner Contest

SUMMARY:

• Starting today, August 3rd, 2018 and ending on August 13th, 2018
• Create your custom banner and have it immortalized into the game.

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Hello Engineers!

As preparation for our next release we’ve decided that it’s time again to kick off the next banner contest! The last time we ran this contest we were amazed by the amount of interesting banner designs we received from players, and now we want to give you guys another chance to get your own banner designs immortalized into the game!

To provide some inspiration, here are the winning designs from the previous banner contest:

SaturaxCZ

Szudrix

OmEgA_StOrM

This contest is open for anyone who wants to participate, including the participants from the last time we ran the banner contest. From the submitted entries, we will select our 5 favourites, which will be added into the game with the release of Medieval Engineers 0.6.4. The winners will be announced on the the release stream.

You can enter as many times as you like, but we will only pick one entry per player. An entry consists of the following documents:

• A screenshot of how your banner looks in the game.
• A background image, 512x512 PNG file.
• A foreground image, 512x512 PNG file.

You can follow the official banner modding guide to learn how to put your banner into the game.

General Info

• Each player can submit as many entries as they like, but you can only win once.
• We will pick 5 winners from the submissions.
• Deadline for submissions is August 13th, 2018.
• Screenshot should have a minimum resolution of 1080p, but the higher the better! 4K and above would be great!
• The banner images should be 512x512 pixels, PNG format.
• Avoid using copyrighted material in your banner designs.
• By entering the contest, you agree to follow all rules of the contest. If you don't submit according to the rules, you can be disqualified.
• All entries of the contest become the property of Keen Software House. This means we have the right to use and modify your entries in our game, on social media, on our websites, etc.
• We reserve the right to modify, cancel, or postpone the contest for any reason.

Prizes

• The selected winners will have their banner included in the game.

How to submit your banners

• Send a zip file containing the screenshot(s), and the banner layers, to our email: press@keenswh.com with the subject “Medieval Engineers Banner Contest”.
• The deadline for submissions is August 13th, 2018.

Thanks for reading and we look forward to seeing what you create!

Medieval Engineers is still in development. Everything in the game is subject to change.

Marek Rosa
CEO, Creative Director, Founder at Keen Software House
CEO, CTO, Founder at GoodAI

For more news:
Space Engineers: www.SpaceEngineersGame.com
Medieval Engineers: www.MedievalEngineers.com
General AI Challenge: www.General-AI-Challenge.org
AI Roadmap Institute: www.RoadmapInstitute.org
GoodAI: www.GoodAI.com
Keen Software House: www.keenswh.com

Personal bio:
Marek Rosa is the CEO and CTO of GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence company, and the CEO and founder of Keen Software House, an independent game development studio best known for their best-seller Space Engineers (2.5mil+ copies sold). Both companies are based in Prague, Czech Republic.

Marek has been interested in artificial intelligence since childhood. Marek started his career as a programmer but later transitioned to a leadership role. After the success of the Keen Software House titles, Marek was able to personally fund GoodAI, his new general AI research company building human-level artificial intelligence.

GoodAI started in January 2014 and has grown to an international team of 20 researchers. At this time, Marek is developing both Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers as well as daily research and development on recursive self-improvement based general AI architecture.

Space Engineers: Major Overhaul of Multiplayer

SUMMARY:

• Massive overhaul of multiplayer in Space Engineers
• What were we aiming for?
• Public testing
• Female engineer!
• New features (e.g. safe zones) and performance optimizations
• Dedicated servers
• New support site for the community 
• Q&A

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After six months, we are releasing the next major update, which is focusing on the complete overhaul of multiplayer in Space Engineers, and a number of new features and optimizations.

The following multiplayer trailer was captured in-game and resembles real gameplay featuring 16 players in multiplayer session, where each of them was building and destroying in real-time, with a constant sim-speed of 1.0. This, and much more is now possible in Space Engineers.

Some of you may recognize the trailer scenes from our recent KCN stream: 1st part and 2nd part.


Update Stream

Note: Due to the nationwide internet outages that prevented us from streaming today, here is a brief video going over the update and our thoughts behind it. We hope you are having fun with the new multiplayer!



Motivation

Main objective: to solve multiplayer, once and for all.

This was a massive overhaul and that’s why it wasn’t possible to make this update in weekly increments.

We had to redo major parts of the engine and there was a lot of experimentation - for example changing the prediction protocol on client-server and observing if it’s better for user experience or worse, and many more. Space Engineers has many systems and special care had to be taken for each of them: player character, jetpack, ship, wheeled vehicles, voxels and planets, fast moving objects, deformable entities, antenas, player standing on a moving grid, colliding grids, rotors, pistons, and many many more.

We started by defining a clear measurable goal (KPI):

• to guarantee a 1.0 sim-speed (seamless performance) 
• in multiplayer scenarios with 16 players
• 100,000 PCUs per world (explained later)

With this, we wanted to bring a new level of experience where you can trust our settings and recommended configuration; one which will guarantee no lag and good game performance, so you don’t need to tweak it. However, we still allow you to choose your own game settings, but we cannot guarantee the game performance to be smooth - however most of the time it is good and above our expectations.

For example: our target was 16 players, but during the public tests we discovered that even 32 player servers with heavy activity ran constantly on at 1.0 sim-speed. Some people even successfully tried a 64 player FPS combat server (more fighting, less engineering).

Below are some stream highlights of multiplayer testing ran by Xocliw during his recent streams.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/283868664?t=04h38m03s

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/283868664?t=05h05m05s

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/281215536?t=02h30m30s

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/281215536?t=04h41m28s

As one of the Keen Software House mottos says: ”Reality is the best game designer”, we decided to run several multiplayer public tests and we involved the Space Engineers Multiplayer Community during the development. The feedback we received was very valuable and helped us discover many areas for improvements. I’d like to thank everyone who participated and who provided feedback to us.

History

Space Engineers is a very complex game with volumetric and destructible physics. There are infinite ways how to play it, how to build things, what blocks to use, how to integrate them, where to travel, what to do, what to destroy, and how large and complicated players can decide to make their ships.

The first version of the multiplayer (January 2014) was a barebone implementation, just to make the multiplayer somehow playable. It was far from finished and we knew it. We were still adding and changing features at that time, so we were not focusing solely on the multiplayer.

With today’s release however, we came back to multiplayer and we spent a significant amount of time doing it the right way. We hope that you will see the results.

Looking back, I can say that multiplayer was the biggest and most challenging feature in Space Engineers. Planets, physics overhaul, visual tweaks, or any one of the hundreds of previously implemented features, don’t come even close to the scope of multiplayer.

It took more than four years, constant setbacks, experimenting with different alternatives, and then just a lot of hard work deciding how to connect all the systems together, so they work in an unreliable multiplayer environment. If this doesn't prove that our team is dedicated to its goals, resilient, and never giving up, then I don't know what will :)

What was the most challenging?

1. Multiplayer netcode
2. Game performance

To have a smooth multiplayer experience, we first needed to invent a multiplayer architecture that can handle heavy physical and dynamical simulations, which players in Space Engineers tend to create. At the same time, the game engine needs to stay open for further enhancements and different directions where we can push it (e.g. MMO).

Changes were needed on both the server and client side, a lot of code was rewritten and many experiments were made with you, our players. Because Space Engineers is the only game of its kind (having specific scope and properties), there are no available resources and experiences (R&D papers from academia, other game studios etc.), we had to discover all solutions by ourselves. With this update we can confidently say that all major issues are solved and multiplayer is finally a fun and pleasing experience.

Together with netcode design changes, there was also a big part dedicated to performance optimizations. We carefully profiled every game play session, hunted performance peaks, memory leaks and then optimized the most annoying issues and bugs. Some of them were tricky, as they only appeared in multiplayer games with a specific amount of players doing specific activities (and often in a specific order). We are proud that we solved most of them..

For example, check how we tracked statisting of one EU server. You can compare the number of players playing in the game together with CPU performance and memory consumption. Note that CPU is mainly under 100% (which means simspeed = 1.0)  and memory has very low increasing tendency. The first part of memory statistics is an example of leak, which we were supposed to track and fix.

On top of the development work, we paid a lot of attention to testing. When we perform any kind of test internally, we are biased to do it in a certain way. But when we opened it up to you, our players, you gave us fantastic feedback that helped to make this release great. On top of this, we cooperated with an external company which tested the game for three weeks as well.


Female Engineer

With this major release we are also introducing the highly requested female engineer! Please welcome her on board and give her special attention while enjoying the game.

We are adding the female engineer as a result of our cooperation and feedback from our community, as it was one of the top voted ideas at our feedback portal. You are helping us to make the game better, and this is our way of thanking you for your fantastic suggestions.

Our female engineer was created from scratch, with brand new animations and movements. You can customize her with all of the skins that are currently available for the male engineer.

To people who are curious about the technical aspect of adding the female engineer to the game, we needed to:

• Make a 3D model of her face and body (male and female anatomy are different)
• New set of animations, just for her. Not only because males and females move differently, but mostly because her proportions are slightly different from the male engineer’s
• Record new sounds - when she collides with an obstacle, when she doesn’t have enough air
• Implement switching of the characters
• Quality assurance - test it all! Very important!

New Features

This multiplayer overhaul brought many new features. There are many I can mention, but I’d like to highlight the safe-zones, reworked warnings and its UI, new player respawn system, new experimental mode, updated animations, performance optimizations for all blocks to reduce their system usage, updated server lists and dedicated server management and many more.

We would like to thank all of our modders who gave us great ideas about some nice features we are introducing to the game; we really appreciate their passion and dedication to Space Engineers. My special thanks goes to rexxar, Jimmacle, and Equinox for their great ideas about the server admin tool features. You can read the technical description at our Keen website: https://www.spaceengineersgame.com/dedicated-servers.html

Besides new features, we worked on many optimizations that can be grouped into the following categories:

• updates of the layers frequency displaying
• data sending for inactive entities
• priority checking
• dynamically changing frequency depending on load
• buffer fixes
• fixes of several inefficiencies in the multiplayer
• block consumptions and its optimization

Safe Zones

The newly introduced Safe Zone is a spatial area where specific actions can be limited. A Safe Zone is displayed as a colored transparent area and can only be defined by a server administrator, who can limit actions like shooting, welding, damage (per safe zone or globally). Entering the Safe Zone can be limited per player, character or faction. A Safe Zone behaves like an inverse gravity field (box or spherical), so everything that has access denied is being pushed away. To avoid breaking gameplay consistency, we decided that Safe Zones can only be static for now. Safe Zones were part of our game design since the beginning.


PCU Limits

PCU (Performance Cost Unit) Limits are the next iteration of block limits. Its purpose is to keep server performance in a more effective way than just limiting block types. Every block has its own defined PCU value, which says how much performance impact a block has under full load (when all its systems are activated). More PCU, more performance heavy the block is. PCU can be defined per world, as a pool, which can be used for building. This pool is then split per player, per faction, or global. Limits per faction are also a new feature introduced in this build. Please note, that you can change the default PCU limits in the Experimental mode.

For example: The world has 100,000 PCU pool, there are only two factions, red and blue, there cannot be more factions. So each faction has 50,000 dedicated PCUs. A player which does not belong to any faction cannot build anything. Removed or destroyed blocks PCU are returned back to the faction PCU pool. A player who wants to change the faction, needs to check that all his/her blocks PCU are within the faction limit he/she wants to join.

Some examples of PCU of well known ships:
Red ship: 14,714
Fighter: 3,000
Pilgrims Curiosity: 14,000
ESS Platform: 6,500
Amanda Tapping: 530,000 :)


Experimental mode

Many experimental, unofficial and not fully developed features are hidden under the Experimental Mode checkbox in the Game Options menu. These were the features that we added to the game throughout its early-access development, but are now not considered to be officially part of the game. However, we don’t want to remove them from the game because many players are used to them. Everything will stay the same as before in the experimental mode.

New players are in safe mode with only selected features and limits. All existing players have experimental mode enabled by default. If you want to join an experimental server, or a custom game, you have to have experimental mode enabled in your game options.

It’s still possible that in the future some features could move out of experimental mode if we discover a way to make them viable and performance-friendly.

The experimental mode was introduced because we want to guarantee flawless gameplay, but we can only do this if we can control the boundaries. Mods, unsafe settings, or unofficial features are out of range what we can guarantee.

One of the features moved to experimental mode is locally hosted multiplayer. We introduced the new netcode to it, but so far invested the majority of our resources into dedicated server multiplayer as we believe that this is the best way for playing Space Engineers with others.

Some game scenarios have been temporarily affected by this change, but we will be revisiting them during the upcoming development anyway. In non-experimental mode you will not be able to see some scenarios and they won't be customizable.

We are planning to improve the game and dedicated server user interface in the future to clearly mark what is and isn’t experimental mode. The current experimental mode features are

• Advanced options (programmable blocks, airtightness, etc.)
• Local multiplayer
• Unsafe grid values for piston, rotors
• Mods

Quickstart

We reintroduced the old quickstart where you started on Easy Start Space platform, in creative mode. This is just a temporary introduction to the game, before we redo the whole "get to know Space Engineers" part, before we create a proper tutorial.


System requirements

We have updated the minimum and recommended requirements to better match reality and players’ expectations. The actual requirements of Space Engineers haven’t changed in the past years - in fact, as we have been optimizing the game in past 3 years, now you can run more complex scenes on less powerful computers. However we are updating the system requirements so that new players have a better idea of performance requirements.

In the past, minimum requirements were bare minimum and would not guarantee a good experience in more complex conditions and scenes. So we wanted to communicate this more clearly and give all players the correct expectations. You can still run Space Engineers on hardware bellow minimum requirements, but we cannot guarantee good performance in all cases.


Dedicated servers

To make sure that we will bring the best multiplayer experience, we have decided to provide official Keen dedicated servers. With servers located around the world, we are bringing you fantastic gaming experiences. We plan to increase the number of dedicated servers which will also give us valuable data for further game improvements and changes. Official Keen dedicated servers are highlighted with a star. Later, we will consider awarding reliable community servers with this star highlight.

These dedicated servers will be free of charge during the first month. Then we need to think about how we are going to fund their maintenance. This is still an open question, because the Space Engineers’ revenue model with a fixed price doesn’t support long-term recurring servers costs.

Technical specification (might vary slightly in different regions):
       Intel  i7-6700K
       4 core / 8 thread - 4GHz /4.2GHz
       32GB DDR4 2133 MHz
       SoftRaid 2x480GB SSD
       250 Mbps bandwidth

One physical server runs a bunch of dedicated Space Engineers servers, each one consuming approximately 3 CPU cores / 6 GB RAM.

More GHz is better (during spikes when there are heavy physical calculations that can’t be easily parallelized), so we are considering even 5GHz machines.

A new challenge for us is that our team and a group of selected community members will do 24x7 oversight on these servers - technical and gameplay. We will be monitoring the world nonstop and if we spot a problem, we will be ready to step in and fix it.

During the public testing, we monitored how a server ran after being live for 7 days and the results were very positive. Now that the update is live, we will be looking at how servers run after being live for multiple weeks, even months!
Players who want to run their own dedicated servers (as before) can still do it, and may benefit from a new server admin tool - read the technical description.

New Support for Community

We welcome all feedback from our community, therefore we have decided to launch a new support portal, where you can find all information and support for all our games in one place. The portal should be a one stop place for all your queries, comments, tickets and questions. You can find it at: https://support.keenswh.com/

As I’ve already mentioned, we ran Space Engineers multiplayer public tests for several weeks. During this time we wanted to discover and fix as many problems as possible. I’d like to share some of your feedback we received during testing:

Nova Dragon
Smooth! Most other games have already introduced a battle royal mode, or are improving their system to tap into the reward center of the brain. But you guys... you guys are fixing stuff, and doing a dam good job!

rivvion
Keep up the good work no matter what people say!

jetstream016
YES YES YES. I never thought I'd see the day where SE had actual playable multiplayer...but my experience in the test servers has renewed my faith.  AMAZING JOB KSH!

lilbigmouth
Words cannot express how excited I am for this update. OMG. Also, as much as this is showcasing the new stability (which is looking good), I love seeing the amazing creations of the community yet again. :)

The Gamer Dad
This game is getting more and more epic with each update. Only a few hundred hours in the game here, but I don't think I've ever loved a sandbox game more than SE.

Tom Spiers
wait what is this?! space engineers running smoothly on MP? wow... All jokes aside great work keen! it looks like you've done a brilliant job with the MP code!


Prior of the Ori
Absolutely fantastic! What exactly are you doing to improve it? Improvements to the engine or something else? I am too excited! Which means something because I have had a serious love/hate relationship with this game for a looong time.

Public test stream with Q&A with Marek

Over the last couple of months I have been visiting the various official servers and playing with our community, even though some people didn’t believe it was me :-)

Xocliw and I played the Space Engineers Public Multiplayer Test alongside some Keen developers and YouTubers on the Keen Community Network & Space Engineers YouTube channel on Friday, July 13th. We addressed a lot of questions and comments from the community. You can watch the entire stream here: 1st part and the 2nd part

Questions and Answers

Q: Why did it take four years to come up with solid and working multiplayer?
A: Since we first released multiplayer in Space Engineers, we’ve considered it as a working prototype and we knew it’ll take more time to get it finalized and properly finished. With our early access game, the priorities are changing quite often. We were focusing more on new features, new blocks and gameplay and therefore the multiplayer was still in the same state. However we were listening to our community and at a certain point where features were finalized we knew it's time to focus on the multiplayer. With that, we decided to work on optimizations and many other things closely related to multiplayer.

Q: You were apparently inspired by community creations and MODers’ work. Why did you take this from them?
A: We are grateful that modders have implemented some popular requested multiplayer features that were missing in the core game over the years. But we always planned to implement these features ourselves, because they are part of the core and should be in the vanila game. We are very thankful to our modders for all the great discussions we’ve had over the years and we hope to keep this cooperation alive in the future. Special thanks to rexxar, Jimmacle, Equinox, and others!

Q: Why can't Space Engineers support more than 16 players as other multiplayer games? For example Medieval Engineers, Fortnite, etc.
A: 16 players is just our recommended setting for default multiplayer scenarios. During the public tests, many servers ran at constant sim-speed 1.0 even with 32 players doing heavy activities. Some people even successfully tried 64 player servers and were very happy.
There are specific technical requirements for Space Engineers. There are usually many moving interacting objects with real-time physics in the Space Engineers. Everything has to be taken care of, detected for collisions, physical reactions integrated and synchronized over network. To be more specific: imagine a Space Engineers scene with 16 players, each one in his 6-wheeled car, driving, crashing - this equals to approximately 300 interconnected physically simulated grids synchronized from server to clients. Whereas in other multiplayer games, where the only dynamic entity are characters - and maybe bullets and explosions and stuff - this
number would be 16.
Summary: comparing system requirements of Space Engineers with other games is not possible, there are no other games having such complex networked volumetric physics.

Q: Why did this release take six months to go live?
A: This overhaul was not an easy task. We went from a deep dive of technical root cause analyses to optimizations and then to thorough testing. Only for better understanding, one test cycle took three weeks and it included a couple thousands test cases. I’d like to highlight the fantastic job that both our development and testing teams did in this release. All the credit goes to them for their outstanding work.

Q: Are you abandoning the game?
A: Definitely no. We are just getting warmed up :-) We love Space Engineers, we love what we do, and we love what you keep creating. There is the same team working on the game as last year and the years before. We have hundreds of ideas what to add, and the grand-vision for the gaming universe we are creating is still unfulfilled. Miner Wars was the first step, Space Engineers is the second step. The future is long and beautiful!

Q: Why can't we use mods in the default multiplayer (why we need to switch to experimental mode)?
A: There is no way we can guarantee that the MOD will not degrade or halt the game. The mod responsibility is completely on the author of the MOD, and that’s why it requires more experienced players.

Q: Has your game engine VRAGE reached its limits and it’s no longer possible to optimize or extend Space Engineers?
A: No. Our game engine is an open system, we are constantly upgrading it, optimizing, changing the architecture, doing principal changes, changing the core inner workings. It’s not a static unmodifiable system. It’s a living organism. We have plans for even more fundamental changes for future installations of our games.
One spoiler: events and calculations should be asynchronous by default, allowing a physical reality where one slowly calculating event doesn’t halt the rest. This idea is basically about granularity of entities and calculations and is similar to actor-model paradigm. We already have parallelization and event-driven parts around the place, but there’s always room for improvement.

What’s next?

Even though we usually do not disclose our future plans, we are going to make an exception this time.

Our next major update will focus on:

• balancing and consolidating various game systems (how you respawn, resources, etc)
• making the game more accessible for new and existing players (user intuitiveness)
• re-do and polish default scenarios (Easy Start Space, Empty World, etc.)

Space Engineers has been in early access for almost five years, we know it’s time to get the game out. We are working to get there. We do not have the date yet, but we want to make sure that the game will be fantastic when it goes out of early access.

As Space Engineers nears the completion of its first installment, we are focusing on polishing, optimizing and fixing existing features.

This first installment of Space Engineers was always about bringing up the building blocks, to lay down the structure for physical volumetric engineering. We are almost finished. The next steps that will come in future installments, will focus on other aspects of gameplay as well as pushing the technology further.

In the long-term, we plan to extend the game and the whole engineering genre into new pioneering directions - just like we did in October 2013 and since then. However, this is still far off, too soon to talk about it now.

 
Feedback and bug reports

If you have any questions or requests, please do not hesitate to contact us, we will do our best to solve your problems. Our community manager, Jesse Baule will address all your questions and comments as quickly as possible. Feel free to use our newly launched support portal: https://support.keenswh.com/

If you are aware of any situation during which the sim speed drops below the 1.0 level while using the recommended settings, please let us know via our new support site.


Conclusion

The same as with our previous major releases, I am super happy with the work our team has done and super excited to share it with you all!

Space Engineers multiplayer now behaves the way we have always envisioned: fast, robust and solid.

As Space Engineers is still under development, there may be bugs (our testers spent hundreds of hours testing, but this is nothing compared to tens of thousands of hours played by our community immediately after every update). Nevertheless, we will do everything we can to fix any issue as fast as possible.

By the way, most likely we will do a few hotfix updates in the days after this multiplayer update.

I truly enjoyed working on this update, it took a lot of hard work and determination, the whole process consisted of over 800 tickets (work tasks) for my team and myself. It has been my main priority over the last 6 months and the whole process has been a pleasure.

I would like to thank everyone who stood with us patiently for all these years, who kept supporting Space Engineers, who helped with multiplayer tests, modders, YouTubers, people running their dedicated servers, people creating new content, people who helped other players to get into Space Engineers and people who believed in our team.

Space Engineers is still in development. Everything in the game is subject to change.

Thank you for reading and we look forward to hearing your feedback on this update. For full list of new features and improvements continue to https://forum.keenswh.com/threads/7401427

We would be also very happy if you can submit your feedback at our Space Engineers Steam store page and encourage us to do better. We welcome both positive and negative comments, as it helps us to create a better game for you!

Marek Rosa
CEO, Creative Director, Founder at Keen Software House
CEO, CTO, Founder at GoodAI

For more news:
Space Engineers: www.SpaceEngineersGame.com
Medieval Engineers: www.MedievalEngineers.com
General AI Challenge: www.General-AI-Challenge.org
AI Roadmap Institute: www.RoadmapInstitute.org
GoodAI: www.GoodAI.com
Keen Software House: www.keenswh.com

Personal bio:
Marek Rosa is the CEO and CTO of GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence company, and the CEO and founder of Keen Software House, an independent game development studio best known for their best-seller Space Engineers (2.5mil+ copies sold). Both companies are based in Prague, Czech Republic.

Marek has been interested in artificial intelligence since childhood. Marek started his career as a programmer but later transitioned to a leadership role. After the success of the Keen Software House titles, Marek was able to personally fund GoodAI, his new general AI research company building human-level artificial intelligence.

GoodAI started in January 2014 and has grown to an international team of 20 researchers. At this time, Marek is developing both Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers as well as daily research and development on recursive self-improvement based general AI architecture.