About This Dev Diary
Every Thursday, I share some of what we’ve been working on – the challenges, solutions, and ideas that caught my attention. This is my unfiltered dev journal, so my thoughts and plans may change quickly, and nothing here is set in stone. And if you don’t like spoilers, don’t read further!
Space Engineers 1
Meet Wrenchie – a platform that helps non-programmers create SE1 in-game scripts! Built as a personal project by one of our Space Engineers programmers, Wrenchie also gives seasoned scripters a place to share their best practices with the community.
- Have a script in mind but not sure how to code it? Wrenchie is here to help
- Want to learn some scripting, but all tutorials look too hard? Let Wrenchie walk you through it step by step
- Skilled coder that just needs a platform to write and test scripts quickly? Absolutely!
Keep in mind that Wrenchie is still an engineer in training, and new features will be added based on community feedback.
Space Engineers 2
Smoother, Stable & Faster
Smoother, Stable & Faster is out, and I’m proud of what the team achieved with this update. We focused heavily on performance, stability, and all the smaller things that make Space Engineers 2 feel better to play.
I also noticed something encouraging after the update – over the last few days, Steam reviews have been stronger than before – 80% of Steam Reviews are positive now! It is still early, but it looks like you – the players – are noticing and appreciating the changes we made.
For me, this is a good signal that focusing on performance, stability, and the overall quality of the experience was the right direction. Our long term goal is above 95% positive Steam Reviews.
Of course, this is not the end of our performance and stability work. For me, this is only the beginning. We already have more work in progress, and we will keep pushing these areas with every update.
This racing league immediately caught my eye. I love canyon runs, so seeing players turn that into an organized competition is right up my alley.
What I enjoy most is the combination of speed, risk, and engineering. You build something fast, throw it into a canyon, and then find out very quickly whether your design was actually a good idea. Can’t wait for multiplayer!
NPCs
I’ve been watching our NPCs navigate increasingly complicated spaces, and this test was a fun one. The NPC has to find its way through the Red Ship, deal with corridors and closed doors, and keep working toward the player instead of getting stuck.
It is a good example of the kind of navigation problems we need to solve for combat NPCs. Ships and stations can have strange layouts, multiple rooms, narrow passages, and doors that change the available route.
Bushes, Boulders & Overhangs
We keep improving our planets step by step. From one update to the next, individual changes can be easy to miss, but when I compare the planets today with how they looked when first released, the difference is huge.
We are adding new bushes:
And improving boulders and overhangs, and continuing to refine the environments around you!
Question to you: What would you like Wrenchie to help you build first?
Share your thoughts in the comments below – I read them all, and they’re one of my favorite parts of making our games.
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Finally some alien flora! 😀 Navigation looks good. big boulders too.
That NPC test is fantastic! I haven’t been playing as much recently, but NPCs would honestly keep me playing this game in the long-term.
Okay, I don’t know how much work went into this, but these Renegades are true killing machines. I love them, and the suit designs are gorgeous. I hope you’ll add plenty of variants and customization options in the future so that every player, and even every NPC, can stand out. Just like with the concept suits, I absolutely love these designs!
I REALLY REALLY REALLY hope that we will get friendly NPCs that we can give jobs to to help us run our factories some day. I’ve wished for that since I first played SE1 when the first build released to the public.
I just had a thought come to mind yesterday about water. Will the mass of water be accounted for on board ships in SE2? Suppose you scoop some water up with a basket attached to your ship, is that added mass now calculated and added to your ship? If so, in what ways could that mass interact with the ship’s center of mass?
Since water is a physical object, and has been demonstrated to fill a space and be moved that way, I personally wouldn’t be surprised if it’ll have mass. I love the idea of building a ship that’s essentially a giant water tank and opening the bomb bay doors to flood a friend’s base with a dozen pools’ worth of water.
Awesome work guys keep it up! PS. Could we get functionslity for the conveyor sorter please, Can’t wait to mess with that system! Thank You!
I love NPC concept, but I think you need to rethink character combat a bit. For me the biggest issue with combat in SE1 was character speed. If you think about it, 10m/s is quite alot and 6 m/s is also quite fast, not even talking about jetpack speed. So while such speeds are convenient for building, for combat they make shooting each other really hard. In good FPS games character speeds are usually small, so that aiming at moving character would not require godlike reflex. If this NPC scenario was some combat one, imo that NPC moves a bit too fast. Perhaps a some solution would be to add ‘weight’ to guns, which by having them in your inventory, would slow down character.
Yes, I agree. NPC speed is the main thing we are solving right now – most likely will end up with a separate animation controller for the NPCs, with variables speeds, and animators will redesign the animations, to feel more grounded, heavy, realistic. The same for gun animations, or death animation.
Love the inclusion of the speed limit feature in blocks and the associated hotkeys , mirroring an area i was worried about when first releasing the drive blocks. I’d love to see optional slider bars for the speed limit in the settings, and a future button and ship action bar option to turn on/off, increase, or decrease the speed.
Alternatively, consider adding a cruise key to maintain the current forward speed limit for a ship/Rover while keeping inertial trhsuters acrive in every other direction. would be very nice to be able to let go of W and stay at a consistent speed.
Thanks for the race league shoutout! Can’t wait for the day we can get a full pack of a dozen or so racers on one track. It will be a thrilling journey growing with the game! 🏁
– Diggrok
Thank YOU!
melhorou um pouco esta ficando jogavel mas ainda sim tenho que deixar os gráficos no mínimo para rodar e estou comparando com o primeiro com muito mais recursos mas bem mais leve e para muitos jogadores o jogo ficaria parado porque não tem nada que estimula a contruir mesmo o primeiro os npcs sao escassos nesse poderia aparecer mais npcs e contrucoes ate sistemas de defesa inimigos para tipo colonizar mesmo mas com resistência nos dois jogos
Does that mean AI (Move, offensive, defensive, task, recorder task or similar) blocks are coming as well?
Me as well as many others are hoping for some sort of crew system with the NPCs, some friendly helpful ones to bring alive our builds. This would be a really neat feature I think!
Looks amazing! Are we going to end up being able to have an AI crew if we want to? That would seem amazing as an option but maybe difficult. Thank you!