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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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 Highlights
Today’s playtest was one of the most exciting in recent weeks. A few breakthroughs and surprises I want to share:
- Safe Zone working in-game
We now have the safe zone system running. Once enabled, nothing inside can take damage. Simple and effective.
Safe Zone is still a work in progress – artists have to finalize the shader graphics, and it will come to play with future multiplayer release.
- Camera glitch fixed (again)
A few weeks ago, I noticed a familiar annoyance: in first-person view, the camera had a subtle secondary motion – like it kept drifting a bit after stopping or turning. I personally dislike this in any game.
We had already solved this in VS1 and VS1.2, so it was strange to see it return. After some debugging, we found the culprit: inverse kinematics (IK) on the character’s feet, which caused slight camera movements.
Quick fix: we disabled IK in first-person mode – and it worked perfectly. Since nobody really checks their feet in first person, and the lack of IK isn’t noticeable, this was a win. Camera now feels solid again. - Creative Mode FTUE prototype
We’re prototyping a simple FTUE (First Time User Experience) in Creative Mode. It gives you a basic objective flow: expand a cave, add a thruster to a ship, fly it to a location, ram another ship, continue to a station, and so on.
While many players may ignore or disable this (we might add that option), I find it surprisingly helpful. Before, Creative mode felt aimless – should I build, destroy, explore? Now I don’t need to wonder. Even light guidance gives a sense of direction, and that feels good. - Survival Mode FTUE update
Work continues here too. We simplified the structure: objectives now guide you where to go and roughly what to do, but how you get there is up to you.
In my playthrough, I repaired the ship in the cave, flew to a station, fixed connectors, and then took a flying ship to the Orbital Station. It’s still early, but the core loop already works and is fun. We’ll keep expanding it. - Verdure Planet visual update
Verdure got another upgrade – and it looks 5x better than before. The new terrain, terraces, voxel materials, boulders, overhangs, trees, and flora bring it to life. It’s starting to feel like a real planet. Stunning work by the team.
We can now quickly drag the toolbar items away in our internal build – a small change, but one that makes further testing and iterations so much user friendly.
Water development is speeding ahead – here’s a look at our tests of water behavior on sloped terrain. We’re making steady incremental improvements, and it’s exciting to see how the system is starting to interact more naturally with the environment.
We have really beautiful and useful concept art – but we’re always pushing for more and better. That means sometimes we literally go back to the drawing board with certain blocks and characters, refining them until they truly match our vision.
In the development process, we run into plenty of bugs every day – and they get fixed long before players ever see them. But every now and then, one comes along that’s just too funny not to share. 🙂
Let me know what you think about any of this.
I read all your comments – it’s one of the best parts of my life.
He’ll yeah, can’t wait for planets!! When do you think we can expect vs2?
The bulging eyes engineer is already meme-able material! When multiplayer is released, will you still be able to see inverse kinematics on other players while in first person?
Is it a bug or a feature?
Cant sleep its 1 am so i am on here looking at the blog post. Looks insane graphics are nuts.
Looking good can’t wait for survival and planets
The bulging eyes thing should definately be in game when you open your visor in unpressurized areas (Total Recall style!)
I really like the slight changes for survival FTUE, I think this is a better balance between giving the players an objective and first time guidance and giving the players room to achive this goal on their own and truely make the world feel like their own world.
A quick thing I noticed about the new blog website: Images are no longer maximizeable when clicking on them. I really liked that feature on the old website and would enjoy it, if it would come back.
“Images are no longer maximizeable when clicking on them.”
Noted and working on it!
An underwater thruster that pushes from a backpack on your back doesn’t seem as realistic as thrusters that push straight down through the legs.
Water resistance is much higher than wind resistance.
Motion standing upright in water would have to be so much slower than if the vector is from the feet through the head.
IMO
Two tubes that strapped on the outside of your legs and provided thrust in that direction would seem more like swimming, I think.
The clouds look very cool compared to the first part of Engineers, but they still remind me of the clouds in Minecraft (i.e., pre-made clouds that don’t change and just move according to a script). I would like to see realistic cloud movement, multi-layered clouds, and different cloud densities, as well as non-scripted cloud movement, such as cloud movement caused by wind. I also want to see the long-term consequences of my actions, for example: As a player, I enjoy destroying planets, and I would like to see the clouds gradually disappear as I drain all the water from the planet.