Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction and maintenance of space works. Players build space ships and space stations of various sizes and utilization (civil and military), pilot ships and perform asteroid mining. Space Engineers utilizes a realistic volumetric-based physics engine: all objects can be assembled, disassembled, damaged and destroyed.

Space Engineers offers a robust platform for creative gamers to build and maintain space stations and ships in a single or multi-player environment. Offering both Survival and Creative modes, as well as resource management, multiplayer, and even combat, the limits of what can be built and played are only bound by the player’s own creativity. 

With today’s major update, 1.186, we are releasing a massive overhaul of visuals, audio and wheels, together with a huge number of additional improvements to the core of Space Engineers.

SUMMARY:

• Motivation: playing Space Engineers should feel good
• What we did: Massive overhaul of visuals, audio, wheels, and tons of other improvements
• Replay & Offline rendering (our internal tool for recording ingame videos) used for the first-time
• Nvidia Ansel
• Render blog post - a guest post from Jan Hlousek, Keen Software House VRAGE Engine Lead
• Wheels blog post - a guest post from Martin Pavlicek, Keen Software House Physics programmer
• Better immersion => Happier Engineers
• Official Russian language translation

 

For more technical details continue to the blog post, that goes into great depth about the changes that were made to Space Engineers for this update.

Why is this important for us? Space Engineers was started with a very particular vision in mind and we want to keep it. It was authentic, unique at its time and made our game stand out. People loved it.

Space Engineers should feel good to play. Therefore, the major goal for this update is to enhance your experience by improving the way our game feels. Our new changes, including improved sound and visuals, make the game more realistic, more rewarding and ultimately more enjoyable. 

The last major update brought an overhaul of physics. The current one brings massive improvements to visuals, the rendering engine, animations, audio (arcade and realistic), wheeled simulation, and much more.

Visuals are important, they mediate the first impression. Audio is also important, it’s adding the emotions (feelings, depth) to all interactive works.

Space Engineers was inspired by reality and by the “need to create”. The best way to enable both, is to try to think about how all the components in our game would work in the real world. The answer is: get as close to realism as possible, but not too much, so you don’t jeopardize the intuitive gameplay.

We are aiming for not only realistic physics, but also realistic rendering and audio.

Why now? 

We are wrapping up things and the first-minute impression is important. Polishing visuals and audio are things that you shouldn’t keep for the finish line.

Moreover, there’s this “broken windows syndrome” where unfinished features signal that it’s OK that the remaining features will stay unfinished. This is not a feedback loop we want to encourage - not internally in our team, and not externally to our community.