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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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
- VS 1.2 will be releasing in a few days, on Monday April 14
- In survival, players will build in projection mode (so first as a projection, and then weld it). We need a particle effect for it, so here's one prototype.
- The new IK is great, but when you walk up stairs or ramp, in first person mode, the camera goes up and down, and what you stop it continues in the movement for a tiny moment, and this is precisely what we wanted to clean up in first person mode (no secondary movements in first person mode, just clean abstract camera sliding through space). So we will look on this in the future in the polishing phase
- This week we had our regular playtest, and things I focused on where:
- Consumables - healing via medikit (automatic or manual)
- Death - from health damage or collision, and respawn
- Caves on the planets - we have a couple of caves but also a CSG merging algorithm, so we can merge (add or cut) many of them one through each other and create unlimited variations. They look good, realistic. What needs to get improved is the voxel material (stone) inside of the mountains (planet), it doesn't look pretty.
- Shooting from the debug gun has now correct recoil and camera shake. But I also realized that the way we portray the gun on the screen is not what I am used to in other FPS games - so we will move the hand a bit forward, and more to the center. Right now it's obscuring too much of the screen space and also the angle feels off to me. Here I used new ChatGPT image generation model to illustrate how it could look (the input was the screenshot from game + prompt to move it further from camera and more to the center)
- Nobody ever mentioned it but I think there's an audio lag in our GUI mouse over sound effect. Like, when you hover your mouse over buttons, it doesn't cling instantly, it feels laggy. We will be looking at it.
- You will be able to switch between the toolbars via ALT + CTRL + Mouse wheel. I hope in future we find some simpler shortcut.
- We also wanted to playtest ore detection mechanics, but that one got postponed to the next playtest.
- The deco prototyping is going better than I hoped for (these are the blocks that are not our usual big Deco blocks; they more like small things you can use to make your interiors look not so blocky and simple; they are not purely decorative like a painting or vase, because they have structural function). I expect players will use them to create rich looking blueprints!
- Equip and unequip animation is coming along nicely as well.
- More Flora!
- And as always, I'm amazed by the beautiful things our players are creating!
you mention “You will be able to switch between toolbars with ALT+CTRL+Mouse Wheel”, but why not just the left and right arrow keys? in SE1 i use Logitech G Hub to put keybinds on the buttons on my mouse and i’ve been using left and right arrow keys on the buttons near my Mouse 1 to cycle through my toolbars and it feels so effortless and smooth!
ReplyDeleteAs much as i love the deco blocks as stated in some of my prototype screenshots on discord, in terms of modularity within a 25cm grid some of them have their potential drastically reduced for instances the pipes segments are missing variants like a 25cm clean(no end caps) variant as well as t and cross segments similar to the elbow segment which would allow for so much more. Can't wait to be able to experience what's to come in terms of UI, hats off to the artists and the team in general so far, much love.
ReplyDeleteNitroCell
I'm not sure about that chatGPT center shift. I think it's too much to the center now. Ideally I'd say add a crosshair, but only when you have a tool / weapon you need to aim with.
ReplyDeleteI think on the chatGPT picture it was pushed too much to the center, that felt unnatural. Just to be sure I looked at recent FPS games that I thought were good, like Stalker2, and other games I don't play but very popular, like CoD, and it felt like they all come from the bottom right corner (later on you can think of the left handed ones too) The picture you were showing was way too much in the center.
I liked the volcanic foliage, but my first idea when I look at that is that where are the burnt trees? I looked at some images of burnt trees and forest fires and also got an idea of a sparse green sapling in a burnt biome after nature starts to grow back. To be frank, it was a bit hard to find reliable sources of pictured, as google searches are flooded with poor quality AI generated images.. Most pictures agreed on that the black of the volcanic ash and burnt trees are normally surrounded by some form of green, as the ash essentially revitalizing the soil and making space for new growth.
"burnt trees are normally surrounded by some form of green" - yeah, you are right. It's a funny coincidence but just this weekend we were hiking through an area that got burned 1 month ago, and there were already these small green things coming out.
DeleteAnyway, volcanic area on Verdure is a bit different and has different climate, so that's why it's different.
Will there be gas giants in the game? I would like to build a space station, similar to the Sevastopol station from the game Alien Isolation).
ReplyDeleteI'm not quite sure what it is about them, but I am absolutely in love with those deco floor blocks! They're gorgeous!
ReplyDeleteA Lattice deformer for the armor would be very nice for doing organic shapes on a larger scale and not just round corners. (the armor blocks, not the shader) If there already isn"t a lattice deformer? For doing the dents on the yellow starter ship in SE1 for example.
ReplyDeleteSE 2 is good, but what about SE 1? We've been waiting for an update for months now and all we've got is "coming soon" and a few frames. In this blog, too, not a single post, except one, has anything to do with SE 1.
ReplyDeleteAs you said, this blog series is mostly about SE 2. Sneak peeks for SE have been published at the normal rate, like they have always been: some short videos, some pictures, some information in streams. In the context of SE, "coming soon" is very revealing. There are infinite things to do in SE, if you care for my advice, you should forget about updates, just have fun, and have extra fun when the changes and new things come.
DeleteI subscribe to Keen news, and receive emails with sneak peeks. When I see the SAME sneak peeks on Steam two or three weeks later, it's disappointing, because there could have been some additions. When I saw this blog in SE 1 Steam news, where they promised news every Thursday, it was encouraging. Even more disappointing when there was nothing else about SE 1 for the whole time.
DeleteIt seems that I should unsubscribe from the mailing list and forget about this blog, because I am interested in SE 1, but not SE 2 (for now).
These dev diaries should be about SE1, SE2, AI People, and even our Groundstation project.
DeleteBut I focus on different things at different weeks, so sometimes I simply don't have much to say about one or the other.
Oh man, those decorative pieces are already looking so good. They're really going to ramp up the visual quality of builds.
ReplyDeleteYes! Also, I forgot to mention, these new deco blocks are possible only because of the 25-cm grid system. So it would be impossible in SE1. I think we are just scratching the surface of what is possible with our new grid system.
DeleteMaybe it's due to having been generated by AI, in which case nevermind, but guns and tools should point to the center of the screen, to what would be the vanishing point of perspective. From the screenshot I can feel myself looking at the left half of the screen. The particle cloud of the projection seems rather big, but the feeling of the particles is good.
ReplyDeleteAbout the shortcut for the taskbars, how about Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab, the ones used for movement between tabs in a browser?
The trees look very good. Even though it's still early and you are still working on the foundation of the game, would you say it may be possible at some point to use trees as a renewable source of wood, as a material? (cutting, planting, etc).
Thank you for writing these blogs, it's very interesting to see how things are evolving internally.
Great work so far. Respectfully, I believe you're wrong about the weapon/hand location. Draw an imaginary line where the barrel of the weapon is, goin from the weapon out into space. If you have the gun dead center like that, then the barrel, that imaginary line, points way off to the left instead of more center. Vanishing point! You're aiming ahead, not to the left. So the player character holds the gun with the right hand, which is why it needs to be more towards the right. Now, when you aim in first person, that's when the gun/hand should snap to center and pointing dead ahead.
ReplyDeleteI agree. The AI generated picture was just a quick concept and it's quite hard to instruct the AI where exactly to position the hand.
DeleteIs there any news on SE1?
ReplyDelete