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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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?
He said in modding stream this year so some time between now and December
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.
I think it’s great to have different suits for different environments: some casual or armored suit for surface, space suit for space with may be different level of radiation protection, and another suit for underwater exploring.
Oh and one more suit with exoskeleton to be able to move part or whole ship from place to place by hand.
Under water backups exist in real-life. $30,000 USD will get you one. Over 100 sold already besides the top of the line. Google it.
What about just being able to swim? maybe in a bulky hefty space suit it’s not that easy but intuitively I feel it would be nicer, like being able to swim but also being able to boost speed like in No Mans Sky.
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.
To keep a waterfall or a stream running it will require a source of water, lakes are one option. Have you any thoughts on other water sources like springs or marsh bogs?
There better be a toggle to become the bald man with the popped-out eyes!
Testing my luck here, but how large is the largest Automated Turret expected or planned to be? Will they stop at small sizes like the Artillery Turret or will they be more akin to a Battleship’s main battery? I personally wouldn’t want anything larger than maybe 7×7 SE1 Large Grid spaces (not including gun barrels).
Hy Marek, have you thought about adding orbital mechanics? I enjoyed playing Martin Schweiger’s Orbiter Space Flight Simulator, before I started playing SE1. And I love playing SE1, but feel that it lacks more realistic physics like Orbiter had. Either way thanks for a great game.
It will be a lot more difficult game if there will be orbital mechanics, especially if planets will be moving too. You probably need a lot of complicated calculations before you be able to reach another planet. And even if this part will be automated, is it still a game people want to play?
As I suppose, developers goal is to make game playable for wider kind of people.
For me personally orbital mechanics are great, but it would be better as optional or modded stuff
Will the trees be a resource this time around or just decoration?
crazy work you guys are doing there, about safe zones there is a “bug” i found awhile back where if you ram yourself inside a safezone with enough speed ~200m/s you were able to enter it briefly and if the grinding was enabled you could grind down the safe zone block i’ve raided a base one time like that and grtinded down the wind turbines of another, keen pls fix
Can you pretty-super-please make the eyes popping out an emote?
The atmospheric and light effects are impressive!
These are one of the highlights to my week too. As sad as it feels, a safe zone in creative mode sounds helpful when I’m working on getting though thrusters onto a grid to keep it from drifting at the wrong time lol
Hi Marek! Will the Campaign be linear?
Marek, in the old version of the blog, we were able to click on the images to bring up the higher resolution image. Now the option is gone, and the screenshots etc. are really low quality! Can you pls fix
Yes, we will add that feature in – thanks!
you can right click the image and open in new tab, they are big pictures
or click on image and drag it to title bar
Wow those clouds are looking fantastic!! I love that sense of being high in the mountains and the fogginess below. atmosphere is EVERYTHING. Imagine an evil pirate mega fortress lol on a planet with stormy seas and constant torrential downpour. You are flying in a small nimble space ship flying through the clouds and listen the rain hit the cockpit, then the sky gets dark, there is thunder and lightning, you land on a small rock with an overhang carved by the rough seas. and plan a way to infiltrate. The fortress is very alive with activity and there is incoming shipments and all the sorts of pirate activity air and sea. even underwater there is fish and a haze of lights leading miles down into the abyss. (or maybe you have a massive mothership and bombard the fortress from above the clouds)
The new voxels are looking awesome! I can’t wait to start modding them for an industrial mod I’m designing. Is there gonna be a higher voxel definition limit than SE1? If it’s the same, my industrial mod will be incredibly limited in scope. If it’s 2-4x larger of a limit, I can do very cool things with my mod and it won’t compete with beautiful modded planets for voxel definition limits like Industrial Overhaul has to deal with in SE1.
Another voxel request: add more modding parameters to asteroids. I would love to make at least 4 types of asteroids that match the IRL classifications of type C, S, M, or comets, and have their stone variants yield different ores. I would also love more control over ore deposit sizes and scarcity for asteroids, such as declaring that certain types of asteroids can have between 0-6 different deposits on them.
Again, without those parameters, modders will be very limited as to what they can do for modifying mining in space. With my mod and others like it having a bit more freedom with how players get resources, SE2 can attract players who love a deeper industrial gameplay loop.
I like the optional survival mission but just don’t like that it gives you flight and specifically flight to space so soon with little effort. In survival I want to work hard to earn flight and specifically getting to space and not just have a free spaceship handed to me. Perhaps instead of going to space, the task is to build/repair a rover and drive to some location on the starting planet?
Or alternatively once we get to space the game controls the experience to force completion of the mission and doesn’t open up sandbox mode until we crash land back to the planet or something which destroys the ship so we don’t have it anymore and then we can decide to go back to space or not but have to earn it and build our own ship from scratch. This gives us a taste of space and ship design but then have to earn it ourselves.
I agree completely, but the problem is that the setting is that we come from space already and it’s not the most conductive to the journey of going to space from zero.
I always enjoy reading your Dev Diaries. They are something I look forward to in the week. Something I have been thinking about for balancing combat is messing with the armor. A system I really like is how armor works is helldivers. If a caliber is to small it simply doesn’t deal any damage. I think making heavy armor the counter against machine guns, missiles the counter to armor and then machine gun turrets the counter to missiles would work well. Then on to of that you could add middle ground things. Artillery could hurt armor a little and rail guns would hurt armor but their counter would be agility. This could also make it so small arms fire can’t destroy light armor but it can damage components like engines. What do you think?
I think those are some good ideas. However, within the design of SE, since we have so much freedom to slap as many automated guns onto our ships as we want, combat is incredibly difficult to balance. Most game devs don’t have nearly as many variables to consider when balancing their combat.
One thing I’ve thought of to balance automated turret spam with a mod is to drastically increase the idle power, but I also want to increase the power when firing as well. There’s a justification for all that power expenditure: AI targeting systems require a lot of power IRL. Hence, if you want to spam your build with turrets, you’re gonna have to back them up with massive power reserves.
The water looks good but the propeller doesn’t. Putting a flat face in front of the propeller is not a good idea. It should at least be a cone. The character’s bug is funny. Have you considered making detailed death models, like after being crushed by a ship, asphyxiating after decompression, or being shot? No comment on the ability to drag out items from the item bar. It’s alright. Can we have ten slots instead of nine? I like the mist. Creative mode probably doesn’t need any objectives, it would be better to leave it as a true sandbox. Instead of removing the IK you should make it so the articulation chain progressively dampens the small adjustments of the feet so the head doesn’t feel anything. If you simply remove it, it’s just cutting corners and not 10x. I’m still sad that you removed eye-head parallax, it’s going to be extremely annoying if we ever get VR. The zone looks fine.
Still planning for the 2025 for survival?
THE PROPHECY OF THE CABLE AWAITS
If its at all possible I think adding MSAA would be awesome, I hate the trend of modern games to look progressively worse and only having blurry TSAA and FSR as an option kind of adds to that
Ah… if only i had a cryochamber and set it for SE2’s multiplayer release.
Everything looking good so far… i can’t wait 🙂
Are you planning to add interactions with trees, their harvesting, processing, etc.?
How about spending a little time and add Key Rebinding, rather than spending the effort designing decorative toilets. Pretty silly when you have released an early access game to help fund / test your product only to potentially alienate a portion of your potential supporters.