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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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
- Destruction improved a lot. Not just the fracturing system on blocks, but now you can use debug gun to destroy voxels (coming in VS 1.2)
The level of polish we're doing for SE2 is really amazing, and already it feels so good to do things in the game and get satisfaction from environment feedback (visual, audio, physics).Lukas did amazing work on new and reworked sounds, for example: absolutely amazing idle sounds for blocks (assembler, radio antenna (with a little something in it - go and check it once we release VS 1.2), gravity gen, reactor, etc), jetpack charge up and boost, destruction of solar panels, walking via crouching and sounds of clothes, new GUI and HUD sounds, destruction sounds (there are now so many variants - based on the block type (thin, thick, heavy, solar panel, etc) and also based on the distance to listener).Target based gyro is done and will be available in VS 1.2. It's a new way of controlling rotation of your ships where you point the cursor and the ship rotates there. It's much more pleasant than the old way. There may be some edge cases (especially when ALT-rotating the camera angle) that we will be testing over time.
We balanced the health and damage thresholds for armor and functional blocks (non-armor blocks), made it more balanced (armor should be stronger than functional blocks) but at the same time you also want to see some damage on armor when you shoot it. Now it feels more balanced.Acceleration-Based Camera Shakes - basically, camera should shake a little when you are accelerating (increasing speed). It's still not fully done, we will have to do another iteration.Medbay, Death & Respawning - these are the first parts of Survival that already works. I mean, it has been in the game for at least 12 months, but now as we are preparing for VS2 (Planets and Survival), we need to finalize it all and polish. So now when I enable survival mode in game, I can manually respawn to my medbay (or medbay I selected as my home base), I can change suit color, recharge my health and other stats, and when I die, my backpack floats away.First person mode and camera position and rotation without unwanted offset - it's done! Now when you look around in character mode in first person, it's just the camera rotating around, no more parallax effect. This is so correct!Next Thursday we are starting with Weekly Updates. This is a new thing but it's basically similar to what we were doing with weekly patchmasses that some of you will remember. There's one difference: we will be focusing only on adding new blocks, with limited or no functionality (temporary). It's a way to keep new content flowing to the game between our bigger updates (vertical slices).
