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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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 1
- The Fieldwork Update release is around the corner!
Space Engineers 2
- VS 1.2 was released on Monday and it seems players are happy with our choices: target based grid control, off-center camera, and more!
- Dampener curves - A month ago (after we reworked the target based grid control and also the thrusters), I felt that the deceleration/dampening of the gyro and thrusters didn't feel good, the follow (slowing down) was too long and slow, and I wanted something steeper, with stronger end - but at the same time not instant cut and not linear feel. So I scheduled a call with Logan (one of our gameplay programmers), to configure those curves and playtest it, but after a few minutes we realized the curves actually feel quite good (both thrusters and gyros), so we left it as it is (what you have in VS 1.2). I think that they got fixed by designers in the meantime, after configuring gyro and thruster parameters a bit. I was quite relieved because this could have turned into a never-ending battle.
- Mike (our concept artist) is finishing the concept of one of the main characters. What do you say? He belongs to the Legion of Engineers faction.
- Had a discussion with Mikko (our level designer) and the designers, and we will try to add simple objectives to the Creative Mode, like repair this ship and transfer it to that cave station, or fly through an obstacle course, shoot the target figurines, etc. The reason is to give players some goals, something to do beyond open-ended creation. The plan now is roughly 1 hour of objective-based gameplay, and we will evaluate it later. Most likely in VS 1.6 (PS: everything is subject to change) I am looking forward to this. We already have a prototype of our Mission Scripting Framework done, and it worked on some missions, but now the focus is VS 2, so there wasn't time to develop it further. However, it seems that the objectives for Creative mode can be done with what we currently have.
- We want SE2 to be much more goal oriented, with specific measures and progression players will want to strive for. SE1 is more open ended, players make their own goals. SE2 will have a meta loop and progression, with some measures that players can understand and strive for. This week we were finishing discussions on this topic with the designers, and I feel very good about the current direction of it. Will let you know later.
- We finished the design of safe speed. Safe speed is already in the game, collisions under 20 m/s don't cause damage. But we need to go further: we need to communicate it well on the HUD, plus there will be an "adaptive cruise control" system for setting up the max speed (so you don't go beyond safe speed), or you match your speed with some other grid, etc.
- We set the main principles of the new build planner, block packages, and area welding. It's a huge topic, and it still has to be written as a design doc, but in general:
- Players can use assembler to output "block packages" (which is basically a block inside the inventory, so we will rename it to blocks). This will reduce the complexity of thinking, because you will see you have 3 gyros in your inventory, so you know you can weld three gyros. You don't have to go to the lower level of components. Of course, the component system from SE1 will stay as it is. Block packages are here just as another layer on how to simplify things.
- We will also keep "backpack building" we already prototyped in SE2: building from raw ore, where the backpack automatically turns the ore into components and you weld the block without worrying what kind of components you need.
- Build planner will automatically add blocks you are projecting to the planner queue, and then you can with one click retrieve those queued items from some inventory or order their production. We really want to streamline this process, make it as intuitive as possible, so players can just use it without thinking. This is one of the things that bothered me in SE1.
- Area welding: different welders will offer the ability to weld an area (more blocks at the same time) instead of point welding, where only one block at a time is welded and only where you point at.
I really hope, the new progression and objective system won't restrict me too much. I like accepting optional missions and having to work to unlock blocks and stuff like that, but I would hate it, if I couldn't do what I want and would be forced to do some missions instead of building a ship that I like.
ReplyDeleteSo all I want to say: Please don't restrict our creativity.
Yeah, the creative mode objectives won't be mandatory, you will be able to just ignore them, and build your thing.
DeleteI agree, the moment i see a quest pop up like it’s No Man’s Sky, im turning the game off
DeleteWill there be an option added to make the controls the same as in SE1?
ReplyDeletePersonally, I didn't feel comfortable with the new controls, especially with the roll control on large ships. These changes make the game almost unplayable for me.
You mean, the ship controls we had before? We considered it but for now don't plan to have them, because it would mean to rebalance the gyro also for the old controls and then things get very complicated. So for now we want to keep it simple, easy to maintain, and I really hope you get use to them. They really are better. Or maybe there's some other issues I am not aware of?
DeleteYes, I believe it's possible to get used to the Target-based Grid Control system. However, the main issue is with the roll controls (Q and E), which feel extremely sensitive and have noticeable delay when responding to inputs—both when starting and especially when stopping the rotation. This problem is much worse with large ships.
DeleteThere's an ongoing discussion about this issue here:
https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers2/pc/topic/47371-ship-roll-control-input-over-sensitivity
There were a lot of players who thought the roll controls specifically were a bug. Because you can't control how much you roll exactly, makes it very clunky in precise situations. The target based grid control is great though.
DeleteI have a similar issue with the roll controls (Q,E) being way too sensitive making precise roll control impossible.
DeleteYea the new roll controls for me are the annoying part, generally the new controls are great but I feel I can’t roll precisely anymore
DeleteAs they said, the biggest problem is the roll control (Q and E), which is slow to respond to inputs and is very sensitive.
DeleteYeah, the Q/E roll is something we still have to polish. Thanks for the feedback, very helpful!
DeleteGood afternoon. Question for AI developers: how realistic is it to implement this mathematical model and what additions (changes) need to be made to the model to adapt it to current software and hardware
DeleteLink( model AI):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LXeYTuBHZcC90t_EhwwKjwaPlCNZ-nfSqbD5iJaab7k/edit?usp=drivesdk
The build planner from projection is huge. I am excited to see what the future has in store!
ReplyDelete1/2
ReplyDeleteI have some thoughts about the super dampeners. My personal opinion is that they are an inconsistent and frustrating experience for several reasons.
Specific instances come to mind:
Flying and manoeuvring with dampeners off is a pretty common situation in SE when exploring and navigating in zero g. You're flying around an asteroid, feathering your thrust to check for ore. You're flying quite close to the surface to detect as far into the asteroid as possible and you round a corner to see a stone protuberance. Lets say that you are actually new to the game, you've been flying around with this ship, you're confident it is manoeuvrable and can stop on a dime, you're not worried. You try to avoid the spike, you're holding the 'A' key to go around it but you aren't moving as fast of you normally would. Panicking, you hold 'S' to break but you aren't stopping fast enough, what happened to your breaking speed? Why can't you manoeuvre as well as you could earlier? Later you're flying with dampeners on, the crash still fresh in your mind. You swoop around a grid and overcorrect because you were ***sure*** you couldn't turn that fast and now you're floundering and off course. It takes you half an hour of game time to realise that it's your dampeners. They are up to 6 times stronger than if you manually input! Why?!
The performance of the thrusters is ***inconsistent*** in these use cases and that is a problem.
The gravity field problem is also a blocker. If your ship doesn't have enough thrust to counter gravity but the super dampeners can, if you try to go up, you will plummet to the planets surface. For a system that is supposed to make flying more comfortable for new players, this would be confounding and very frustrating for a new player.
Thirdly, though this is a game and is not beholden to realism, it is a game about engineering. That means decisions about designs and trade offs for performance, behaviour and characteristics. I don't want a system that arbitrarily defines the manoeuvrability and performance of the ships I craft, those are things about my craft, that ***I*** control and want to be in control of.
I would also like to point out that when a similar but weaker version of the super dampener system was in SE1 (back in 2016ish if I'm recalling correctly) the vote was put to the community on what to do with the system and the majority voted to scrap it in favour of more powerful thrusters overall.
2/2
ReplyDeleteThose are my points against and now I would like to make an alterative suggestion.
The issue isn't that ships do not break fast enough or manoeuvre tightly enough.
The issue is that the UI does not give the player the feedback from the movement of the craft to make better judgements.
Just like the thump of the engineers boots on steel, we need the same feedback from our ships.
We do not need particles showing how fast we are travelling and in what direction, we need a HUD element/icon that shows the vector or direction of travel of the grid being piloted. We need to be able to see the icon move as we activate thrusters and as we turn our craft so that we can assess the flight characteristics of the ship in a ***consistent*** and ***repeatable*** way that enables us to predictably control the craft we are piloting and to be able to refine our designs. If you want to go full hand hold for a new player, include a HUD warning or flash the vector icon red when the current trajectory, speed and acceleration/deceleration will result in an impact with voxel or another grid.
From my knowledge of space and flight games, SE1 & 2 are the only games that deal with ship piloting that does not include the incredibly useful (and in my opinion necessary) tool of a vector indicator.
Star citizen has a very good example of this in a minimal low impact way.
Also worth noting many modern aircraft have a flight path display on their HUD's. Sometimes called a Velocity Vector Indicator or Flight Path Vector. Look these up on current commercial airliners to see what I mean.
In my opinion, this is as important and necessary and functionally similar to the horizon indicator in a gravity field that is currently implemented in SE1.
To end, if big game play decisions are made to cater to a new player, that new player may have a slightly easier time at the start but being handheld only works when you're new. If the game tries to hand hold you when you know what you're doing it is frustrating and limiting. Not to be melodramatic but the games industry is littered with game sequels that failed because they tried to broaden their appeal at the expense of core identity.
The issue with SE has never been that it is too complicated, it isn't, I can list a lot more complicated games that are more successful. The issue has always been that there isn't enough guidance.
Lets build tools to make understanding a complex game easier rather than making decisions to dumb down the game.
Hi Marek, I know you didn't necessarily ask for feedback on this and I may not be representative of all players, but I wanted to let you know where my focus is personally, on the presence of certain "necessary" blocks to create designs that will carry on into later builds of SE2. For me, those are the missing production blocks ("Gear forge" as far as I know, though there may be others), and missing propulsion or travel systems (E.G. Jump drive and hydrogen thrusters.) I only need placeholders -- but until those blocks are released in some form or another, it seems pointless to play for me. I am very goal-oriented, and I get depressed without goals. Until there is survival, building blueprints to use later is the only thing that motivates me. The QOL improvements are nice, and I love the new control scheme. It took some getting used to, but I find it superior to that of SE1. But, I could use almost any control scheme as long as I had all the blocks to build blueprints with. I think you are already addressing this with the weekly updates, for which I am very grateful. In any case, I wanted to pass it along, because I'm not sure I'd seen this feedback elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteI love management games, watching materials by tapes, getting stuck because the production doesn't work well. Satisfactory or the Create mod by minecraft are good examples, could we see things like that? Factories, more elavorated progression.
ReplyDeleteAnd another question: Did you propose a pvp or base creation system similar to Rust? Some blocks can only be broken with X weapon or explosive. A PVP with different armors. Raids to monuments.
seeing the new character's suit design and how unique it looks makes me excited for the suit peices we could get in SE2. if the helmet/boots/torso/legs customization system from SE1 ever returns, would you consider more exotic armors that deviate from the base SE engineer design, allowing players to more effectively create distinct suits? my one complaint about SE1's system was how all of the suits felt like retextures of the default one.
ReplyDeletealso, as a second question, would you ever consider adding suits designed by players to the game? Similar to how skins in Counter Strike are designed by users and then Valve adds them if enough players vote for them, or how many early Cargo Ships in SE1 were just blueprints on the workshop that Keen really liked iirc.
it would be incredible and open a lot of cool possibilities if you added this! imagine a group of players designing a custom pilot suit for their faction on a server, they upload it to the workshop as a mod expecting only that server to use the suit, but that suit gets added to the game, their faction's now represented in the game's universe!
Yes, customizable suits are in consideration for SE2, even suit upgrades, with added functionality.
DeleteHello Marek, a Brazilian engineer here!
ReplyDeleteI just came to thank you for your great work, and the dedication of the whole team.
Tks.
o7
>Dampener curves - A month ago, I felt that the deceleration/dampening of the gyro and thrusters didn't feel good, the follow was too long and slow, and I wanted something steeper, with stronger end - but at the same time not instant cut and not linear feel.
ReplyDeleteSo I see you are going for a more arcade-y feel as opposed to Space Engineers 1, but then if you are doing that, I wonder if you would add another feature - a temporary boost (that has the same curve as dampeners) - I feel like it can be a cool feature.
Yeah, I was considering this. I think we may add it some day. Shift+W to boost your ship sounds great.
DeleteThe same streamlining that removes problems could also remove the need to find solutions. It looks like there won't be a point in designing event controller-driven speed safeguards, for example. I think that players who don't want to bother with this should purchase prepared systems or designs from players who want to, or join them.
ReplyDeleteThis is a bit of a joke, but wouldn't it be convenient if there were no components at all and all blocks were fed ore? Maybe guns could receive powdered materials and forge ammo with the exact weight, explosive power, and energy to reach the target precisely and with minimum waste. Maybe nanomachines could be involved in this somehow. There could be three types of resorcium powder, electronium (electron soup), protonium (proton soup), and neutronium (neutron soup). The player could fill the backpack with dirt and it would be transmutated into high grade uranium by recombining the atoms. The benefit of this would be not having to spend hours or tens of hours looking for ores, a problem all players hate.
I like the idea of optional goals for progression. Right now, limits didn't make sense in a sandbox as you can't predict what someone will be doing next. Other than assembler and refinery there was no tiers in SE1 which meant you kind of needed everything right away.
ReplyDeleteArea welding may be a big thing that brings me back in. One frustrating aspect of SE 1 was spending many many hours building a ship meticulously only to have it mostly or completely destroy destroyed within a few seconds and having to start all over hand welding every single part again. I had always hope for some kind of end game system that would partially automate ship construction.
ReplyDeleteNo one welds by hand in survival SE1, people use automated printers, its a very simple system.
DeleteWill safe speed only work at 20m/s and below or if grids are withing 20m/s of each other? It would be interesting for the sake of matching dampener speed and maneuvering around a moving grid without risking damage to each other. Although I think it's fine with just the former.
ReplyDeleteObjectives are great in Sandboxes btw.. just thinking back to Raft, Subnautica and even C&C:TA.. really focused the teamwork and team building. It's definitely worth having a few brainstorming sessions with your team to see how SP and MP could focus the players. For example, we enjoyed starting on a planet with nothing and trying to get to space to build a space station. Then a refinary farm. Then an assembler farm.
ReplyDeleteOn the stargate server they block tiers. Then trying to upgrade.
Another thing btw I have wondered about.. water seems very cpu/gpu taxing and not a core part of gameplay (maybe I'm wrong on here) why focused there before Survival or most important MP? I know the fluid motion is pretty cool and all but done it make such a difference to the game?
Hey Marek! We have messaged a few times on X before. I find all your work very interesting, most recently I love the stuff you're doing with drones and I have enjoyed your opensource releases with long term memory from AI people. I am reaching out for advice and would love to message here or preferably on X. Specifically, Im working on an open source AI project around developing new techniques for playable 3D worlds all in the latent space: https://github.com/Francesco215/autoregressive_diffusion . If you are interested please reach out! If not, dont worry, I'll be following all your work regardless.
ReplyDeleteMany thanks,
Matteo
Thanks Matteo, I will reach out to you.
DeleteDo you know if in the campaign you'll be able to choose if you're male or female? I know the default is set to be two brothers, but it would be awesome if we were able to choose if we were playing as brother-brother or sister-brother.
ReplyDeleteFor now, the plan is to keep it simple: two brothers. This has impact on many things, from cut scenes, to voice over, etc.
DeleteSome missions and objectives are okay, but I would rather see some more complex core game mechanics.
ReplyDeleteFor example
- make it more difficult to gather resources (interesting mining mechanics, special tools, environmental peculiarities, etc.)
- logistic challenges (gather the materials from different biomes, planets, asteroids, etc. and take them together where you need them)
- comprehensive possibilities to automate things
- Interesting research mechanics and tech tree
Just some ideas :)
I don't see my post so it may have gotten swallowed by my browser refresh or some sort of network gremlin. Can we make the 20m/s safe zone a slider in world settings? As a veteran SE1 player, slamming into something at 20m/s seems harsh and unrealistic. These feel like a good training wheels for people to get into the game. I'd love to have a slider from 3-20 m/s based on the world. I want my grids to be made well enough to ease into a dock gently and efficiently. I love the "safe speed" for walkers so their feet aren't always dissolving themselves and for landing my capital ships so the landing gear doesn't immediately explode. I just find 20m/s WAY too fast. Some may like it. Others like myself feel like it takes the fun out of the precision if I can just slam grids into each other at <20m/s. Just a slider for settings. Not to get rid of it at all. Thanks Marek!
ReplyDelete