Update News
Space Engineers Receives Major Update
February 2, in the year of our Lord 2018 -- 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
We are encouraging all Space Engineers content creators (youtubers, streamers, modders) to start using these new visuals and to follow our original art style when creating new content, or even consider redoing past creations with these new capabilities.
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.
No word on a physical copy version of this game on this system at this time. Families are required to pay for Internet usage fees to download this game. For more information click here.
Do you appreciate stories like this one? Have you ever considered helping Family Friendly Gaming? For more information click here.