Marek's Dev Diary: January 30, 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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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

This week was very special - on Monday we launched SE2 on Early Access.

The community reception has been very good, with most players understanding why we're releasing an alpha and doing open development, sharing the journey together with them.

Of course, SE2 doesn't have as many features as SE1 yet, but it brings significant improvements (new VRAGE3, new visuals, new fractures, unified grids system, new animations, blueprint building, and many other new things) and it's the foundation of what will come now.

Steam Reviews are currently at 80%, which isn't bad, but I believe long-term we will get above 90%. SE2 is selling very well, so I don't have worries about our long-term stability. In the last few years, we invested heavily in building a great team. With our strong team and clear vision, now it's just a matter of hard work.

Thank you for all the honest Steam reviews so far. If you haven't left your thoughts yet, consider leaving your Steam Review here.

I am really happy to see SE2 players satisfied with the performance across different hardware setups! While we still have more optimization planned - especially for upcoming features like planets and volumetric water - it's wonderful to see our VRAGE3 engine delivering smooth gameplay even on older GPUs. Your excited feedback fuels our commitment to performance! Here's a great community perspective on this.

Players are noticing the illumination potential of VRAGE3 Render.

I we've shared some comparisons between SE1 and SE2, showing the 11-year technological leap in areas like ship collisions.

Development Updates

VS 1.1 - UGC/Workshop

Work is ongoing, and I'm waiting for another round of playtesting.

VS 1.2

Work is continuing, with my main focus on animations. We had a review meeting for IK (Inverse Kinematics) for character feet - this feature helps ground characters' feet to the surface, preventing them from floating above it (which happens with just animation data).

I realized how tricky this is if you want to polish it to AAA quality. There are so many edge cases to consider. We're just starting to add features that will make it more anatomical. See the attached gifs for failure cases that we're working to fix.

VS 2

Work is progressing well. We had a kick-off meeting for the asteroid generator for VS2. We want the Almagest system to be populated with asteroid rings and fields, with proper ore distribution.

VS3 Water

Development is going well. The water will be a big change to SE - not just destruction and fractures, but a whole new substrate for physics simulation.