Space Engineers Thread
-
So, seeing as how other people here have started this game now, I thought I'd start a thread about it.
I'll probably post screenshots and things like you kerblings do, once I get home.
Anyway, things you can do to make the game fun:
- Do an unlimited asteroids start before trying anything else. If cargo ships are working again, it's really fun. My friends and I spent a bunch of time learning safe approaches for some of the simple ships, and splicing them onto our station while we prepared to convert it into a ship.
- In survival, unless you up the settings for welding and inventory size, your top priority needs to be building a small drill ship and a small welder ship. They made it so you can place blocks from cockpits if you pipe everything together properly.
- Once you know what you're doing, try planets. They're laggy and broken, but still incredibly cool. But the water is ice.
- Design ships in creative, with copy-paste on. You can mirror and place sheets of blocks, and even paste in sections that snap together. Then copy your ship, and use F10 to make a blueprint out of it. Now you can project it with a projector, and weld a new one in survival. You can make factories to do this.
- Jousting. Build ships with lances and joust. This was the only form of combat before weapons were added, and is more fun anyway.
Obviously, the game has no goal. It's like minecraft, you just build things. Except that it has Programmable Blocks, which let you write C# scripts that the game runs, and have fun with gravity.
-
Huh?
-
Its a good game. Play it.
-
It's a great game, I just haven't gotten around to playing it. But watching people play it in the background while I do other things has given me a pretty good idea of it, and one of the main things I like is how active the developers are in engaging with the community - you can subscribe to their YouTube channel for updates on the game:
https://www.youtube.com/user/SpaceEngineersGameAlso, Steam link for any lazy people:
Space Engineers on Steam
Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets. Players build space ships, space stations, planetary outposts of various sizes and uses, pilot ships and travel through space to explore planets and gather resources to survive.
-
One of the best things I ever saw was a lets play where some guys were building a massive ship and had just finished the frame, and tried repairing a place on it that had been damaged by a meteor, which pushed against the landing gear holding it in place, causing it to slowly drift away. They ferried resources over to it in small ships and built enough thrusters and a cockpit to get it back to the base. Watching people solve a difficult emergency like that is incredibly cool.
That was back when I started, before turrets existed. I built this cool ship back then that had four pods on the corners with turrets and cockpits on them, with rotors to aim their single rocket launchers, with a pair of connectors that could lock the cannons in place (which was the only way to restock ammo). It'd be fun in a team-based broadside fight, partly because its just so unwieldy. But now there are controllable turrets, so it isn't that hard anymore.
-
-
If by 'flawed' you mean 'buggy', unquestionably. Though far less so in space than on those new planets they added.
If you don't like that there isn't a goal, well, I even agree with that. I like goals. A lot of people seem to like aimless games, though, and as far as they go, this is about the only one I have time for, partly because I can design really nice ships and even have a chance of printing them in survival.
This is a ship I built a few months back:
And this is this weird sphere thing I made. It's hollow, because we were thinking of using spherical gravity and slowly building the inside as we flew it around, but we can't even print it in survival because it's all heavy armor. Too expensive. I think I lost it when I formatted.
-
If by 'flawed' you mean 'buggy', unquestionably.
Yes.
If you don't like that there isn't a goal, well, I even agree with that.
That doesn't bug me as much. I play Gamebryo games.
This is a ship I built a few months back:
Right, you build an awesome super-ship, then find out the game caps out the ship's speed at like 30 MPH. You can't even make something as fast as a WWII prop plane. Boooring.
-
Yeah, the max speed for ships is 104 km/h or something, and 112 for an astronaut. He'll run out of fuel, but needs the speed to catch ships that are floating away. However, the game has extremely good mod support and steam workshop integration for those, so it's easy to make a world with 4x the max speed.
-
the max speed for ships is 104 km/h or something
What? That makes no sense for a spaceship; it's off by two orders of magnitude. Earth geostationary orbital speed is 3.1 km/s (~11000 km/h), and low earth orbit is up to 8-ish km/s.
-
As far as actually maneuvering a first/third person character/ship in zero-g with mass and inertia goes, I'm fine with their numbers. I mean next you'll complain that 25 steel plates the size of your hand can't make a 1m solid steel cube!
Anyway, I find the deformation on collision really cool.
-
It's because of the aforementioned bugginess. Straaannnge things happen when flying at high speeds. Especially if you have landing gears or connectors or rotors...
But it's not too bad... Ships are basically ranked by acceleration rather than speed and if you really need to get somewhere fast, that's what warp drives are for.
I should post some pics of my ships. I tend to build KDY-esque combat ship designs (reminiscent of the ISD) with a Star Wars Republic (dark red, light gray, some gold or blue, like a Venator SD) paint scheme.
-
Anyway, I find the deformation on collision really cool.
Aye, that's one of the coolest parts. Crash a ship somewhere and it totally looks wrecked (planet crashes look soooo cool)
-
Although, I find I like using something like the energy shield mod on my ship because elgiu meteor storms... (and no, the turrets don't help. Especially not if you have a lot of ships/stations together, because they will happily shoot at your other ships to take out the meteors
)
-
Interior turrets are supposed to be really accurate, but yeah, I've played around with Armageddon mode and turrets can only do so much.
-
One of the best things I ever saw was a lets play where some guys were building a massive ship and had just finished the frame, and tried repairing a place on it that had been damaged by a meteor, which pushed against the landing gear holding it in place, causing it to slowly drift away. They ferried resources over to it in small ships and built enough thrusters and a cockpit to get it back to the base.
That sounds awfully similar to what happened in The Show (Coe, Guude, and Millbee) - was it them or someone else? Maybe this sort of thing just happens frequently.
-
I was going to point that out. It's exactly that show.
Also, IIRC, one of the first forms of combat in this game used thrusters to melt other ships, there's even belt ship designs to do that.
-
What? That makes no sense for a spaceship; it's off by two orders of magnitude.
Moreover, it's VERY BORING to fly ships that slow (especially on a planet where you can really feel the lack of speed), and if there is one thing video games should not be, that thing is "boring".
-
Coe
I was watching his perspective. I quite liked the bit where he rammed all their parts into an asteroid and they couldn't recover the container...
Moreover, it's VERY BORING to fly ships that slow (especially on a planet where you can really feel the lack of speed), and if there is one thing video games should not be, that thing is "boring".
I totally agree. Planets don't have anything interesting to do on them yet anyway, and are just harder to get resources on. An asteroids start is the only one worth bothering with. You generally just merge your spawn ship onto a station joined to an asteroid, then do a few suicide missions with just your jetpack, checking nearby asteroids for resources. Once you can afford a small mining ship (usually this just involves mining your station's asteroid and cannibalizing your spawn ship), you can start actually making things at a decent rate.
I hope planets end up being fun, but they just aren't yet.
-
@Magus said:
the max speed for ships is 104 km/h or something
What? That makes no sense for a spaceship; it's off by two orders of magnitude. Earth geostationary orbital speed is 3.1 km/s (~11000 km/h), and low earth orbit is up to 8-ish km/s.
It's an issue with their physics engine, really weird things can happen if the speed cap is raised. It really wasn't that big a deal until they added in the 120km diameter planets. The speed cap is way too slow for that size.
-
Thought about popping open Space Engineers again, but even in creative mode I simply do not get the point.
It's not like Kerbal where, even before they had the career or science modes, it was still a challenge to build ships to visit every planet and drop flags. And if you do spend a lot of effort building a huge ship, well, in that game they can be damaged so if you actually do anything with it it'll get smashed up and you'll have to repair it.
So I pop it open and click "blank planet, creative mode" and... then what?
Then I thought about maybe trying to give survival mode a try in an Asteroids map, since I've been told it doesn't work well on planets, and I pop open the new game screen and... then what?
Oh well.
-
I think it's very similar to Minecraft - creative mode is just for if you enjoy building cool looking stuff.
I can understand why someone wouldn't like it though.
-
A couple of my ships here...
This is the SDF Victory - my latest and greatest battleship - heavily inspired by Venator Class Star Destroyers
SDF Valor - my earlier battleship class. No real inspiration on this one - although it basically just looks like your standard battleship...
-
The game isn't done, sounds like the alpha version just isn't for you...
I hardly ever play it anymore, I either get bored designing useless corvettes in Creative or I spend a ton of time in Survival to build a ship that randomly explodes on its first flight. I'm hoping for additional goals and stuff. Personally I want them to add some interesting features for long-term objective PvP. Most importantly they need to make the game more stable because it's been pretty crash-tastic this past month or so.
-
One thing I really like is the objective system they used to make the tutorials. You can use it to design scenarios with various limits and goals. A lot of people hate it, because it isn't stuff you can build, but I really like the opportunity for gravity-bending puzzles, etc.
For survival, you're best off with about three people, so that they can divide tasks. You're also best off only using exactly what you need to build horribly ugly ships, in space. Otherwise you will lose many things you wanted to keep. We've lost a few really nice ships to asteroids, with full cargo containers of uranium and nickel even so...
-
My server typically had 3 - 4 players. The problem was what to do in the mid-game. We'd built up a base, built up some resources, got an excellent mining and production system going, maybe a few larger ships, and then what? Without anything to go to next, everyone gets bored and quits until I reset the server and we start from scratch again.
-
You can do a few things: Become capable of taking out military ships or the Argentavis, journey through the galaxy in search of the randomly occurring static ships and stations (very rare), or build yourselves jump-capable ships and design individual bases in your own sectors. Maybe build a ship-printer.
But yeah, there isn't a real end goal.
-
That's what I don't get. I mean I'm a complete neophyte, but it's not hard to "survive". (It's actually harder in planet mode because the lander ship disappears if you log out without cannibalizing it. In asteroids mode, you get to keep the ship!)
So what does "survival" consist of? Well. You get enough uranium to keep your oxygen generator going. And... uh... that's it.
Ok. I survived. I have enough to survive for like 6 years. Now what?
Like I said, with Kerbal, even when there wasn't anything you'd actually call a "game" about it, there were still objectives you could go after which were interesting and challenging and took a lot of skill. Before it was a game it was still a game.
Meanwhile, Space Engineers is a lot closer to being a "game" than those early versions of Kerbal, but there ain't nothing to it. I wonder if the developers of it even know how to build a game.
-
If you have meteors on (Up the environment hostility), they can definitely be a threat in space. They also create trace amounts of useful ore on collision with asteroids, so there's a benefit too.
Then too, there are the random drone raids and cargo ships (assuming the cargo ships can be enabled again, since that was disabled recently).
But the game takes a more Minecraft stance on survival. The dangerous things are mostly just an annoyance.
Though it's worth mentioning the spiders that attack your base on alien planets, and more recently the exploding dogs on earthlike planets. They definitely make survival a bit more serious.
-
Apparently I'd let this thread die.
The release will happen relatively soon most likely, after which they've stated that they won't really be adding much content, but the performance will be good and they intend to fix bugs. So that's fair. The improvements they've been quietly working on are honestly pretty exciting.
Meanwhile all I've been doing is trying to create a good sphere to be a flyable planetoid. I built one years ago, but it was kind of bad and I lost the file, so I want a new, good one. Got tired of trying to make it by hand, so I tried generating a blueprint, but that didn't turn out well at all, since those have size limits.
My first attempts were also seriously flawed: While x*x + y*y + z*z = r*r is the formula for points in a sphere, I have to do that with blocks, and those blocks need to connect. I think I can do it, though, by using two spheres that differ by the largest cross-section of a cube, which is the square root of 3.
-
@magus said in Space Engineers Thread:
The release will happen relatively soon most likely, after which they've stated that they won't really be adding much content, but the performance will be good and they intend to fix bugs. So that's fair. The improvements they've been quietly working on are honestly pretty exciting.
Hmm, that's disappointing. I haven't played it in quite a while because of poor performance and lack of content. I've since switched over to Empyrion. It has more survival aspects, giant planets that don't melt down your computer (despite running on Unity!!), and a bit more Minecraft-y.
-
@mott555 said in Space Engineers Thread:
It has more survival aspects, giant planets that don't melt down your computer (despite running on Unity!!)
Kerbal runs on Unity and it does math every frame that puts most games to shame.
-
@mott555 They basically intend to do anything major as a sequel. But the performance gains they've been showing off on their 32-player test servers have been nothing short of amazing.
-
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
Kerbal runs on Unity and it does math every frame that puts most games to shame.
Not really, Kerbal uses patched conics for orbits. It doesn't really require much computation once set up - just an algebraic formula you plug a time parameter in and get a position out. The heavy math occurs whenever your orbit changes due to acceleration, but once everything is stable the CPU is pretty much idle even at high time acceleration. There was once talk of switching to an actual N-body simulation (maybe as a mod), but that makes it so you can't have high time acceleration and is only a few percentage points more accurate.
Space Engineers/Empyrion have huge procedurally-generated voxel planets, and SE in particular has (or used to have) a hilariously-bad and poor-performance implementation of Havok Physics that made constructions very explodey and unpredictable and also tended to de-sync in multiplayer games which usually made everyone's computers explode, too. And I'm just used to 95% of Unity games being complete worthless junk so I was surprised when I found Empyrion (And KSP, too) uses it.
-
@mott555 Oh right I'm a stupid wrong idiot moron, I forgot for a second.
-
My friends and I have played quite a bit of planetary survival now over the years, and this is how we've come to think of the game:
You need to decide on a goal. Planets have dark patches, which is where ore is located, and depending on which one you start on, there are different things you have to deal with.
- Earth has oxygen, but it also has wolves. The wolves will eat your ships, so you have to take care of them, though they do quite a lot of damage. Jetpacking? Good luck.
- The moon has no atmosphere, so you need space capable thrusters. The ore patches are smaller, but super frequent and easy to find. Jetpacking is almost free.
- Mars is insanely huge, making ore really far apart and kind of deep. Mars survival would be painful.
- Alien planet is horrible. It's sized between earth and mars, with no oxygen but a thick atmosphere, so your jetpack doesn't work well. You will also be attacked by a constant flood of spiders that burrow through things. It's not even fun.
We normally generate a solar system map, start on earth, and try to get to the moon, where we collect the resources to build a jump drive or two, so we can head to the asteroids, after maybe visiting the other planets. But at this point, you're essentially done, unless you have a dream for how your ship will be. Asteroids have the best resource deposits, but are far apart, so honestly, the moon is just the best.
-
@magus Are planets usable now? It would be worth another look if they've been fixed. It's been, I don't know, a year since I last played. Back then, planets turned my PC into a space heater while running at 3 fps. Ground vehicles would explode at random, and people would fall through the ground and die while walking, and I had to keep an RDP session open to the server to restart the server process a few times per session. The old asteroids scenario with no planets still worked fairly well, but it got boring quickly.
-
@magus said in Space Engineers Thread:
Earth has oxygen, but it also has wolves. The wolves will eat your ships, so you have to take care of them, though they do quite a lot of damage. Jetpacking? Good luck.
I turned off the wolves because they're fucking stupid on like 86 levels, not least of which is they get stuck in the landscape and become unkillable.
As for jetpacking, you must be running a mod or something because if you carry around 5-6 hydrogen canisters you can LITERALLY jetpack for like 30+ km without running out of gas. The worst thing about it is their physics are janky and stupid and you're liable to kill yourself by hitting the ground too hard (aka. over 0.0001 m/s.)
@magus said in Space Engineers Thread:
We normally generate a solar system map, start on earth, and try to get to the moon,
That's about how far I got before I stopped playing due to goddamned tedium.
-
@magus said in Space Engineers Thread:
The wolves will eat your ships
This sounds bizarre to someone who's never played the game.
-
@heterodox said in Space Engineers Thread:
This sounds bizarre to someone who's never played the game.
It's bizarre IN the game.
The wolves spawn from nowhere for no reason. They constantly bark. They get stuck in the landscape and are able to eat your base while you can't kill them or do anything about them. Sometimes the bark stays around even after the wolf is dead.
-
@mott555 Wait a month. The performance stuff isn't released yet. Planets work okay, but not great.
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
As for jetpacking, you must be running a mod or something because if you carry around 5-6 hydrogen canisters you can LITERALLY jetpack for like 30+ km without running out of gas.
That's what the "good luck" was about. Jetpacks have reduced fuel usage based on the lack of atmosphere, so they last almost forever in space. Earth with them is awful. Especially since your inventory weight adds momentum.
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
That's about how far I got before I stopped playing due to goddamned tedium.
Fair.
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
The wolves spawn from nowhere for no reason. They constantly bark. They get stuck in the landscape and are able to eat your base while you can't kill them or do anything about them. Sometimes the bark stays around even after the wolf is dead.
As far as I'm concerned, the only good reason to have them is to motivate you to get off of earth. The moon is better anyway. One possible solution, though, is a moat. Then at the very least they can't eat your ship. Now, this means that you have to jetpack in and out of your ship, but...
-
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
Sometimes the bark stays around even after the wolf is dead.
Wow, that sounds even worse than their bite!
-
-
Space Engineers - Update 1.187 - Major Overhaul of Multiplayer – 04:38
— Space EngineersWell now would be a good time for people to try it out again, it looks like.
-
@magus But is it a game yet?
EDIT: also where can I get the patch notes in WRITTEN TEXT so I can read them at work.
EDIT EDIT: Oh: https://forum.keenswh.com/threads/update-1-187-major-overhaul-of-multiplayer.7401427/
They don't seem to realize that performance isn't the game's problem; not having a solid game design is the game's problem.
-
@blakeyrat I mean, if it isn't enough as it is, there are mods for adding multiple entire competing NPC ship factions and money.
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
They don't seem to realize that performance isn't the game's problem; not having a solid game design is the game's problem.
That's because they have a lot of actual players who like the game, but whose biggest problem with it is the performance. They like having competitions, or planetary wars, and they weren't really able to before.
Their goal was to build a physics-based space sim where you can build whatever you want. So, they may not get you playing it, but I doubt that matters too much to them.
They do intend to make a more gamelike sequel or something, though they've been incredibly vague about it.
-
Well fair enough, but I don't want "multiple entire competing NPC ship factions and money", I just want to be able to build a ship to go to the moon without requiring 57 hours of boring-ass mining which is boring.
At least they appear to be fixing the extremely-shit UI. (Although they refer to one of their dialogs as the "F3 screen" so I think they still just don't really get the concept.)
@magus said in Space Engineers Thread:
Their goal was to build a physics-based space sim where you can build whatever you want.
Kerbal did that and it's fun.
@magus said in Space Engineers Thread:
They do intend to make a more gamelike sequel or something, though they've been incredibly vague about it.
It's been this long and they haven't made a game, I have zero confidence that they are capable of making a game.
Also if your post is true, WHY ADD THE WOLVES?
-
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
Also if your post is true, WHY ADD THE WOLVES?
People actually asked them repeatedly for hostile NPCs, so they put them on planets.
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
I just want to be able to build a ship to go to the moon without requiring 57 hours of boring-ass mining which is boring.
This I do totally get. What I think is recommended is that you build a small ship to mine with, and then replace its drill with a small ship welder and build from inside that. Because this is a game where doing things by hand is pretty much always awful.
You could possibly also build some sort of drones that are wheeled and mine for you... somehow. I know support for that is built in.
-
@magus said in Space Engineers Thread:
People actually asked them repeatedly for hostile NPCs, so they put them on planets.
Did they ask for them to spawn from nowhere for no reason, to get stuck in the landscape, to have an annoying looping sound, and to sometimes get their annoying looping sound detached from their body?
These people are idiots.
@magus said in Space Engineers Thread:
What I think is recommended is that you build a small ship to mine with,
I tried that but since when you mine:
- Your ship gets heavier(*)
- It fills with 99.9% useless rock and not the material you actually want
You either end up with your ship crashed, or making like 8 times the number of round trips you should have to make. There's no way to tell your miners "keep the uranium, discard the rock, please". There's also no way to "eject" the minerals you don't want at a faster-than-glacial pace... in fact it's so slow that it's usually faster to deposit them back in your storage container even though you don't even want them in the first place!
Believe me I spent hours trying to have a good time with this game and it just didn't happen. Every aspect of it is unfun.
There was a mod that used magical "nanites" to auto-build stuff which seemed like it might make the game less tedious, but when you need mods to make a game fun, why the hell even bother?
(*) Mining from a wheeled vehicle might make the weight issue less of an issue, but I couldn't figure out how to build a wheeled vehicle that let you like lower a drill into position using the parts available. I'm sure someone cleverer than me has figured it out. But the weight issue means you have to over-build your mining ship by like 4-5x the number of engines it needs while empty, and if you get it wrong, it crashes and you have to spend an hour repairing the damned thing.
@magus said in Space Engineers Thread:
You could possibly also build some sort of drones that are wheeled and mine for you... somehow. I know support for that is built in.
News to me. The UI was probably so fucking awful I couldn't figure it out. Did I mention the UI was awful?
-
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
(*) Mining from a wheeled vehicle might make the weight issue less of an issue, but I couldn't figure out how to build a wheeled vehicle that let you like lower a drill into position using the parts available. I'm sure someone cleverer than me has figured it out.
They have a piston block that could probably do this well.
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
Your ship gets heavier(*)
Indeed, a huge problem on the default planet, causing you to need a really powerful ship to avoid it.
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
It fills with 99.9% useless rock and not the material you actually want
This is admittedly a bit annoying, but what helps is: If you left click, you collect materials with your drill. If you right click, you just destroy them. So you can destroy the stone around the edges on your way in, and then mine what you actually want.
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
There was a mod that used magical "nanites" to auto-build stuff which seemed like it might make the game less tedious, but when you need mods to make a game fun, why the hell even bother?
The game has support for some things that could help with this, since you can use a projector to project a ship you want to build, and then slowly drag a sheet of welders backwards through it with enough materials to automatically construct it, but it takes some getting used to.
@blakeyrat said in Space Engineers Thread:
News to me. The UI was probably so fucking awful I couldn't figure it out. Did I mention the UI was awful?
So, on a basic level, you can use Timer blocks to just do actions every certain amount of time, or a Remote control block to manually control something, or make it patrol. Beyond that there are programmable blocks, which give you a worthless textbox to put C# code into that will do things if you needed something the others can't do... But I've never tried automation much. I know people put C# programmable block scripts on the workshop, though.
