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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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
We will be sending our May newsletter soon – make sure you are subscribed. You do not want to miss this one 😉
Space Engineers 2
VS 2.3 – Wheels
You already know that for VS2.3, we are working on wheels as one of the main features.
This is not just “add wheel block and done.” The physics team is implementing a custom friction estimator instead of using the default Havok one. We are also testing new wheel colliders that can behave either like cylinders or spheres – depending on the situation.
The reason is terrain. Ramps, slopes, and uneven surfaces can make wheels behave badly if the collider is too simple. So we are testing a hybrid approach and iterating/refining in Havok demos before we will release the wheels in-game.
Wheels are a tricky physics feature in a sandbox game where gravity and terrain can vary a lot, so we are taking the time to build a solid foundation.
Hangar Doors
Andre Lopes, Art Team: “The first main idea for the Hangar door was to avoid weird gaps and make the interior more detailed, in case the player placed the door sideways. So all parts should look properly connected and, when closing, they all should fit correctly like a puzzle. With this in mind, I tried to nail the puzzle part first, and then worked the interior details around that, by creating some mechanics and a logical structured frame.”
“After that, the second idea was that players could have a bit of liberty with their door design, since for now it is just 1 block. So now you can play around with these simple “vertical lines” patterns, by just rotating each block 90 degrees, when stacked.”
“The last idea was inventing a sort of visual locking mechanism between each door and the base, so that it looked even more industrial and realistic.”
LCD Screens
LCDs in our internal builds already include the formatting options from Space Engineers 1, plus a simplified markdown subset for headers, bold, and italics. They also support localized strings, so text can be displayed in the player’s language. You will be able to customize background colors, fonts, and choose from a catalog of project-defined images. Blocks can also support one or more customizable screens, and these screens can be signaled as on or off through the terminal UI.
Each screen can have its own aspect ratio and texture resolution, for example 512×512 for square panels or 1024×512 for wide panels. This helps prevent content distortion. SE2 Control Seat currently has eight individual screen slots, and our artists have created several LCD panel configurations.
Players can also access a block’s inventory directly through its LCD screen terminal dummy!
Grass Clustering
The grass in SE2 will look so good, I can’t even believe this is our game 🙂 If you’re wondering why grass visuals matter in a space engineering game – honestly, I don’t know. It just feels important, and if you can make something more beautiful, it’s your duty to make it more beautiful. Also: “need to create,” all the way.
Mirko Bartolini, Art Team: “This is our new grass clustering tech, which allows us to scatter grass in a more natural and realistic way. It lets us combine many more grass types in the same biome and distribute them using splat masks that control both spawn probability and scale. It also gives us better control over sparse tufts, especially in more arid biomes.”
Other
- We started detailed planning for VS4 NPCs and Coop multiplayer. This is fun, because we are finally working on NPC user stories for our game! NPCs will make Almagest so much more alive, challenging, and surprising!
- Hinges for VS2.3 are something special… I can’t wait to share something with you soon!
- Event Controller for VS2.3 is starting to look like an amazing addition to the game.
- On today’s playtest we checked exploding warheads — the balancing and visuals are coming together nicely.
- With sound designers we reviewed some of the new SFX. This time I actually said the opposite of what I usually say – for the warhead arm/disarm event, I asked them to make it less aggressive and tune the volume down. (Usually I push the other direction.)
- A few weeks ago we had a nice review with Karel Antonin about the music updates. Some small things will come in VS2.3, but most of the music updates are coming in VS3 and VS4 – especially the “water music,” both for the OST and as ambient tracks that change based on depth.
Question to you: What will your first SE2 rover be?
Share your thoughts in the comments below – I read them all, and they’re one of my favorite parts of making our games.
Subscribe and get an email whenever I publish a new post!
Hopefully we can have a action for event controllers, timers, sensors and other blocks that fire action to change the text on a LCD panel.
When programming blocks?
In SE1, rovers often become obsolete as soon as you are able to build flying ships.
Is there a plan to make ground vehicles a viable alternative to flying vehicles?
^ this. Personally I hope to see planets that have conditions that make sustained flight very difficult, therefore encouraging the use of rovers, such as extreme gravity or wind!
I agree, Marek if you see this we’d love to hear from you. I understand it may be hard to make rovers more useful without changing some fundamentals about ships. but i hope there are some good ideas to make them viable.
There should be good incentive to want to make a dropship that carries a rover. But in SE 1 the rover inside said ship couldn’t do anything the ship itself couldn’t do
Hey Marek,
thanks for your insights. I’m really looking forward to the new wheels! 😀
Can you please share some details about the future of the survival mode?
I mean, NPCs and contracts are a nice addition to the game, but what about the core game mechanics like resource distribution, resource processing, unlocking blocks, and so on?
Many people are asking for the return of ingots; what are your thoughts on that?
Thanks!
If you go back and look at all of last years dev blogs he has spoken about all these things and in the live streams.
Awesome sneak peaks. These updates are looking more and more impressive each week. The new LCD panels have especially drawn my attention.
What we really need is for LCD panels to have the ability to livestream live feeds from the camera blocks to be able to create real time CCTV circuits and even remote control dash camera feeds that players can use to control grids remotely in a 3rd Person interactive display.
When it comes to wheels, I hope to see additional suspension settings like damping making a return. I really missed that one in SE1 since the wheels overhaul.
Curious as to how the localised strings will work on the LCDs, would those be limited to a preset list of words, or could someone define their own associated with the grid or the LCD?
Custom signs showing english/french/chinese/german/etc text depending on the player could be good.
If string substitution is a thing could we also get things like variables like {velocity} {gravity} etc for custom displays for ship cockpits?
It’s so good seeing grass beeing improved. The current look really is the biggest immersion breaker on Verdune.
Regarding LCDs, I can’t wait for programming blocks and hopefully Camera livestream. But please, give us a proper image selection instead of a number slider.
Wheels look great so far and I hope to see improved suspension logic in the future diaries too. Ideally, having a “smart” feature.
Rovers in SE1 are frustrating not only because they have no advantage incomparison to flying vehicles but also because of tedious suspensionconfigurator, especially if it’s a mining rover with dynamicallychanging mass and center of mass.
I believe traction and suspension are key gameplay features that if implemented correctly could elevate rover gameplay and reduce player frustration
Marek, I have a question. I was wondering about this in SE1 too. Why do you always only make the hangar doors 2 high?
You can’t really make large doors for big ships that way in vanilla. I don’t understand it. Why not at least offer some that are up to 4 or 5 high? But always only 2?