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 This is my unfiltered dev journal, so please keep in mind that what I write here are my thoughts and will be outdated by the time you read this, as so many things change quickly.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.
Blog Site Upgrades
We made a small but important upgrade to this blog.
You can now subscribe by email and get notified every time I publish a new article. No spam, no sales pitches, no ads – just the article title and a link.
I know many of you follow along with Space Engineers, Space Engineers 2, GoodAI, or my other projects. Some of you told me you occasionally miss new posts unless you stumble upon them via social media. This should make it simpler.
It’s a small change, but I hope it makes it easier to stay connected.
PS: You can also subscribe via RSS if you like the old school route.
Space Engineers 1
I love the smell of burnin’ wreckage in the morning!
I am still amazed by the creativity of Space Engineers players. After more than ten years, I keep seeing new ships, stations, contraptions, and ideas that surprise me. It’s humbling and inspiring to see what you can do with the tools we built.
With Space Engineers 2, my goal is to give you even more freedom. I can’t wait to release the next set of features (after VS2 and planets) that will make building, engineering, and designing even better. I want SE2 to be the place where your imagination meets the most powerful tools we’ve ever created.
Space Engineers 2
Some of you are worried about our yellow submarine – thanks for thinking about her, she is fine. Here is the progress:
Improvements from our amazing Art Teams
I am also proud of our Art team. They are always searching for ways to innovate and speed up the workflow. Every improvement in our tools means more time for creativity and less time spent on repetitive tasks. We have already shown you MateriaLinker by Alice Vescio.
And now check out a preview of another tool, created by Asyraf Braza.
To speed up the workflow, he built a custom Blender add-on for faster block fracture processing:
- Quick presets for adding custom attributes
- One-click mesh separation, auto-renaming, and automatic attributes setup for construction stages
- More improvements that we plan to release to our modding community, so you can process block fractures for modded blocks just as fast as we can
Planets
Work on the Space Engineers 2 planets is at its high peak right now. Our team is fully focused on making planets, terrain, and biomes not just bigger and prettier – but also richer to explore and build on. Every detail matters: from voxel destruction and particle effects, to the look and feel of each biome.
And a funny thing – humans are actually pretty bad at judging the scale of virtual terrain without a clear reference point.
Let me help you – that tiny speck is actually a standing astronaut. Makes the cliff look a bit more impressive, doesn’t it?
We are also working on mining and voxel destruction particles, as well as terrain details. Here you can see particle testing on asteroid, sand, snow, and soil:
Both planets and all the planetary biomes also need its own unique style of rocks:
What planet – and what biome – will be the place for your very first base in Space Engineers 2?
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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