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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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).
i like how the development is going. now, i must say i never were a fan of the backpack detach upon death. would it affect the performance that much to leave the body with the pack at the place we die? it always felt weird how the backpack just detaches upon death, more when we see all the dead engineers with the backpacks on
ReplyDeleteThese blog updates, along with the monthly newsletter and routine streams, have been great. For a lot of SE1's Early Access development, what was going on behind the scenes was a mystery (and sometimes a frustration) to the player base... so this level of communication is very welcome.
ReplyDeleteCannot wait to see the new blocks every week, purely because they look awesome, even if they aren’t functional. I do wonder what the turrets will look like, if they aren’t just replaced by custom turrets altogether like some (including me) have been theorising about.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by "First person mode and camera position and rotation without unwanted offset"?
ReplyDeleteThis is hard to explain but I will try:
Delete- you control the player character
- which is a physical object, not a point
- camera is positioned where the character's eyes are
- but this means that when you rotate (using mouse), the camera doesn't rotate around your eyes, but around the center of the character body
- and this creates a weird feeling. It's realistic... but weird, because in real life your brains subtracts all these differences.
What we did now is that the eye/camera position, and the center of character (at least horizontally) are the same points.
I only use a gamepad so I understand I have to wait. To prepare myself mentally I would like to know when you planning to add that, would that be with one of slice updates or after full release? Got the game on the first day anyway:)
ReplyDeleteHello! Did you plane to make a more complex damage system in SE2, compared to SE1?
ReplyDeleteBy that I mean explosions losing power if it has to go through blocks, instead of being a simple sphere of damage. And maybe multiple types of ammunition; like shrapnel munitions (like a shotgun), Armor Piercing High Explosive (penetrates less than pure AP but explodes after) and other types like smoke to block AI? (Or even incendiary if that's something that'll be implemented)
Just throwing ideas here, any info you give would still be very interesting!!
"explosions losing power if it has to go through blocks" -- we already have this in SE1, and so it will be also in SE2. I think there are even videos on youtube where people were testing it.
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