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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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's work was mainly about survival gameplay - discussion with the designers and playtesting what already works.
Resource Gathering
Drilling and Ore Detection - The basics work! Now we need to polish it: better animations, particle effects, and voxel deformation (how terrain changes when you drill).
Building and Repairing
Projection Building - This is different from SE1. You place blocks as semi-transparent holograms first - just projections without physics that you can walk through. Then you weld them block by block to make them real.
Why we went this direction: You see what you're building before spending resources, you can place entire Workshop blueprints as projections, and we can bring creative mode features like undo/redo into survival - since you're just manipulating projections, not actual blocks!
Build Planner Queue - Every projection you place gets added to a build queue. This queue can be sent to production blocks to craft the components you need. It's all connected!
Repair HUD - A new concept we're working on. The game compares your current grid against the original blueprint (or a saved snapshot), shows missing blocks as projections, and displays them on your HUD (similar to GPS markers). Should make repairs much more intuitive.
Testing the Loop
I've been playtesting this myself. Placed cockpit projections around me - some on ground, some in air (supporting truss blocks are added to keep the block while welding it). Then I mined iron and silicon and welded them using backpack building. Very satisfying to see your build take shape!
Note: Backpack building (direct crafting) is only for early game basic blocks. Later stages require manufactured components and/or block wrappers (which I may talk about next time).
That's it for this week!
Wow
ReplyDeleteI love the projection building idea with undo/redo. Along with the build planner queue. A great solution to keep it immersive for survival but make life easier. Those polish images also look nice.
DeleteThe projection building idea is very good. If there is a procedural world generator, is it possible that at some point there will be new star systems beyond Almagest to which to travel? The voxels look nice.
ReplyDeleteAllow all comments here not only the ones you like the sound of. The realistic ones are negative.
ReplyDeleteUnless you got proof comments got removed, I'm just going to assume you're a silly billy who doesn't understand alpha development in the slightest and are mad that you came here to complain but didn't find anyone agreeing with your pov.
DeleteThat was super constructive, like a 5 years old who doesn't want to go to bed...
DeleteI have written many negative comments and all were allowed.
DeleteComments just take a minute to appear, chill out dude. I've seen plenty of positive and negative comments on these pages.
DeleteEnjoying looking at what's to come got se2 day one to try as things go forward will play more when survival is out but I'm happy with the weekly updates / content releases more games should take note of these things when they release an alpha ect
ReplyDeleteThe change to the fidelity of planets is wild man keep it up. You have so much potential keen to make this the best building game on the market keep pushing the limits of the engine implement all of the crazy ideas we have been talking about for years atmospheric physics reentry heating aerodynamics hydrodynamics, give us the most ridiculous weapons give us proper torpedo and missile parts give us thruster controls through rotors and hinges give us a crazy ai universe full of life. Give us better subterranean building and rendering. Give us better wheeled vehicle AND TRACKED vehicle physics
ReplyDeleteGive us proper fps gear like breaching charges different suits that have different bonuses and resistances, give us proper radar and scanning. GOVE US PROPER ARMOR MECHANICS WITH Ricochet angles in weapons and thickness penetration
ALL OF THE THINGS KEEN ALL OF EM YOU CAN DO IT
Glad to see you guys are working on water as well!
ReplyDeleteAt the planetary voxel materials showcase, inthe 3rd image I liked the before better. The after has a very harsh line between the sandy shore line and the mountain. I think the transition should be more randomized. The direct line makes it look unnatural.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, nice updates.
Maybe the line could be the result of a dam's reservoir being drained.
DeleteThe detailing in the after images seems to stand out more on the first couple than the second. The vibrancy of the green texture comes across as pretty muted in therafters, but the voxel detailing definitely shows. As I'm not sure what biome look you're going for I cant say if the green is an improvement or not, but the brighter in the before pops more against the stone.
ReplyDeleteI really hope this suggestion will be implemented : https://support.keenswh.com/spaceengineers2/pc/topic/45423-remove-the-60fps-game-engine-lock
ReplyDeleteI know this isn't a "easy" thing to do but your team - if I'm not mistaken - rewrote the engine, I don't get how this is not already a thing. Game now looks beautiful but the game doesn't feel smooth when moving the camera, this is really a dealbreaker for me, and many of us. We are in 2025, not 2010.
in SE1, with minimal graphics settings, I could never distinguish a regular block from a projection, if in SE2 the developers do not make them more visually different, I'm afraid my ship building will turn into hell((
ReplyDeleteThe projection building is a great concept. I see issues of targeting some blocks. Imagine if the projection surrounds some blocks. How are we able to weld those blocks which may be behind other projection blocks.
ReplyDeleteIn se1, if you used the projector, you could only weld those blocks which are attached to the grid. How does this work with projection building?
Yeah, this is a great question: The current idea (it's not fully implemented yet) is that there will be two types of blocks in the projection:
Delete- those that can be welded because they are attached to something physical (already welded blocks, or the ground; or also the first block is like this)
- those that can't be welded yet because if you weld them they would be in the air, unsupported
Visualization - we will try different levels of transparency, and then we will see. Maybe we will try some "holographic" shader. This is something we will have to tweak - so it's easy to see which blocks are projections and what type, and not confuse them with already built blocks.
Can you tell us if this new holographic system will also take in air tightness into account when building ship for space, and underwater? I remember in SE 1 building ship in creative mode only to take them into survival to find out I place a block in an area of the ship i thought was air tight, but it was not and had a hold in my ship which took time to track down.
DeleteWe haven't considered visualizing airtightness (or leaks) on the projections yet... that will come later.
DeleteProjector block will not be needed? Idea that comes to my mind is: projector creates an area in some distance from itself, where player can put projected blocks. This way it will look like projector actually creates projections of blocks player tells it to.
ReplyDeleteI am not 100% sure yet. Right now, the plan is to have Projector block in SE2, despite having projection building - because they both have slightly different use cases. But we will see later.
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