Space Engineers, 2.0e Release!

When I am focused... I am focused. Two days after the release of 2.0d I present to you 2.0e. E's goal was a solid atmospheric hover on an earth planet and every change to the ship for this release has revolved around that goal. The link:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=680662259

And now lets go over the changes.

Space Engineers, 2.0d Release!

Hey everyone, been awhile since I discussed Space Engineers... September of last year and well to be honest it was with good reason. Alot happened with the game shortly after the September post and here's a summary.

Space Engineers 2.0c Update

Greetings engineers and welcome to another progress report from my corner of the universe! Keen still has us (mostly) in a bug squash phase so no planets to speak of yet. They did however do something special, you see this week was the 100th update to the game and they didn't want 100 to just be some bug post. So they gave us something... special.

Space Engineers

Hey everyone, progress report in SE here! Woo! We've kinda taken a break from the dedicated server. The software keen has out right now for dedicated servers is quirky, buggy and hit or miss. Really long loading times, etc. Frustrating. The two folks on my server with me both have their own single player games running on the side so I decided to fire one up of my own.

Went with a easy start, survival with oxygen enabled.

Space Engineers, 3.0 progress

Amazing really how out of control my creative side gets when I let it run amok heheh. This ship has considerably changed design at least four times yesterday. Most of the plan is ironed out in my head though so thats... a plus. Assuming I don't think up some new idea again.

Here we go :

Why I need dx11 in my life!

Space Engineers has basic support for dx11 though its currently HIGHLY unoptimized. That said, there's nothing stopping a person from turning it on an drooling all over their space ships.

Space Engineers 2.0c Final

2.0b... I've different ideas in mind for that one. 2.0b will maintain the same build as 2.0, with separable sections of it. More to come on that.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=483022221

Introducing 2.0c, Light Carrier Exploration Cruiser. Capable of 2k meter jumps, power grid fully sufficient to recharge drives in between use. Fully self sufficient with refining and production abilities. The Neck was nearly doubled in size and strengthened with additional heavy armor arms. Engineers at Paigelore Industries took the body of a second 2.0 class and attached it to an existing 2.0, using the new front end as a hangar bay Additional vertical large thrusters have been added as well as two more breaking thrusters.

Lastly, the ring itself has been toned a bit for improved less blocky look.

Space Engineers 2.0b

Work in progress. With the upgrade to 1.0 complete I have found myself staring at 2.0, thinking about 2.0, dreaming up ideas about 2.0, you name it. The works. Now Original model both ships were essentially the same thing, with 2.0 just being bigger. 1.0b is still as originally intended, exploration class cruiser. With afew perks of course. 2.0b is actually taking on a role of its own, Carrier. Not the largest Carrier mind you, but definitely fits the bill while retaining all the production self sufficiency of the original 2.0.

Exterior is largely done though I am pondering weaponization.

Photos follow the break.

Space Engineers 1.0b Final

I'm comfortable in saying my light exploration cruiser is complete... assuming Keen doesn't spark an explosion of inspiration via future update heheh.

Photos follow.

Space Engineers, 1.0b

Long, long longggg overdue, yesterdays update added a feature that just gave me all the reason I could need to do some work on my oldest ship, 1.0 (still haven't named her, or 2.0 heh). Jump Drives are Keens way of handling faster flight in a game engine that simply isn't capable of letting us players go as fast as we would like. On the technical side, the game simply teleports our large (large only) class ship from point A to point B. Points A and B can be off GPS coordinates for precise flight or we can simply aim and fire. Its a very cool feature and well thought out. Other players can come so long as their sitting in a chair onboard, other ships cam come so long as they are landing gear of coupled. The ship will not hit anything when coming out of warp, infact the ship will stop about 5k shy. The more drives on a ship, the further you can go though also the more on your ship the longer your ships engines and gyro's will be offline (the drive recharges).

NOTE, jumping beyond the border of a non exploration save will result in the destruction of your ship and you (if in survival mode). Make sure you turn on exploration before using your jump drive!

Well, all that said, screenshots follow the break.

Space Engineers - Jump Drive

-glances at steam thursday update for Space Engineers-

Jump. Drive.

0.0

-starts a long long long overdue upgrade to 1.0-

Space Engineers

2.0 is done! -rings bells, confetti drops from the sky, fireworks light up the three day long cookout celebration!-

Honestly though, didn't think it would get finished. I was fussing over how the inside of the main body would work and because I couldn't decide what I was going to do with it I kept getting distracted by changing other areas of the damn ship. I mentioned that this ship was becoming the equivalent to my father's 15 year long project car when I was growing up and then I got some simple advice from a facebook friend who said "Finish the ship, then change it later. That's why car manufacturers have 'facelifts' all the time."

So, she's finished though really bone bare. No mods present on the ship as of yet but we have over 30 mods installed on the server so she'll flesh out, but whats important is that the ship is complete, space worthy and fully self sufficient.

Since taking those photo's I've also built in a medical room. And... since I'm ever restless and always changing things here is a preview of the vandalism I'm doing to the head of this ship...

Before...

After!

Randomness

Space Engineers

Finished 2.0... amazing being able to say that! Full crew quarters, dining, recreation, engineering, a second battlebridge built in deep in the main body, very very proud of her :) -pondering 3.0 already-

Viscera Cleanup Detail

-whistles while he carries a human chest to the furnace, mops up where the poor soul had been hiding in this sewer system and then empties the bloodied water bucket- This game, never ever gets old. Haven't played it in afew months and in that time they've doubled the available content so I'm highly entertained right now :)

Stages are very involving and a fantastic time passer by. Just finished the sewer stage, small stage at that and it took me about 3 hours heh. Cleaned up all human and alien blood, disposed of all body parts, patched bullet holes, organized all crates and barrels, cleaned up plenty of spilt water buckets and hazmat containers -whistles, looks other way at those messes-

After all that work, I'm returned to the janitors office to find out I... missed a bullet hole somewhere, missed a blood splot too but all in all I got a promotion for excellent service... and a threat from co-workers who are jealous :P

Angry Birds Transformers

Got a update last week that actually feels like a balanced iap system, finally! Unlocking new areas simply requires a level requirement, no more coin cost to open. The farmable spots seem to pay more frequently, stages are entertaining as always. You can now bomb stages you just can't get past. Noticed afew new mechanics randomly showing up on stages, pigs popping out of grass/water and shooting for example, entertaining heh! There still is no cloud save and last time I played I had uninstalled in anger over the iap hell, so now I have to start fresh. I'm already level 51 so making very very quick progress.

Space Engineers

Success from tragedy!

Monday morning around 3am I decided to change the skybox to this reallllly cool one I had stumbled across, especially since I was tired of the sand earth color of the current one. I changed that one line of code, hit restart server and... spent the next four hours trying to get the server to run. Took the files from the server on to my computer, tried launching it as a single player game, World File Corrupt. Finally fell asleep at about 9am.

I woke up at about 2pm, tried afew more things before tossing in the towel and declaring all loss. I loaded up a random save file and it happened to be the very most recent backup I had made on Dec 19th, right before exploration hit. 2.0, 1.0 were there, so was the Ark and both my and my sisters bases minus asteroids. Tried placing the asteroid around my base and got the same error as always but for some reason this time I pondered the "Can not place Asteroid In Ships..." part of it.

I spent the next 3 hours placing objects and noting if I could bury them in a small default asteroid or not. Anytime I found one I couldn't I would go over to my base and make sure there was none of that block present. In the end?

Had to remove 6 pistons
Had to remove 9 heavy armor blocks
Had to remove the blast doors that were now free floating due to piston removal

Success! The asteroid is cradling the base again, oh thank god and sweet baby Jesus! Little sister logged on to my game and we did the same process to her base, asteroid back. Emotional moment, for real. We have back our original bases from when we first started playing in august.

For now I'm hosting the game and we are making sure every things rap tight in both bases and making sure all asteroids are in good places, all ships, everything is ready. Game is in creative mode for easy of work and there definitely was a good bit of work needed on little sisters base. Reason? She did alot of custom tunnel work and then built in those tunnels. When I placed the asteroid, I tried to be as accurate as I could but its impossible to put the asteroid back EXACTLY where it was prior to the asteroid migration incident. And then there's all the custom tunnel and rooms. Good news? In creative mode its very easy to dig out those tunnels and rooms. Plus all the base blocks are behind the dirt so its actually kind of like archeology following and digging.

To be honest, from Dec 19 to this past Sunday we made very very little progress with ships, fiddled around with a small base, we were both still sorely missing our old bases so the loss of the server files wasn't very painful. And any pain present was completely forgotten about the moment we stepped back in to our real homes :)

Any who, my base is ready to return to server and switch back to survival. Sister is working hers which is a bit more involving so I decided to actually make progress on 2.0.

The existing neck looked too fragile and out of place so I removed it after adding four 'struts' that sit two squares further out on each side than the original neck. Second photo is of me building the 'catwalk and wrapping the conveyor line that connects head to body in armor.

Second step, built a complete glass tunnel the exact size of the original neck.

Reworked the front half of the hangar bay to the neck. Better flow, more room inside now.

The new outside view of the hangar bay.

Lots of photos of today's work from the inside of the ship. New neck, new hangar bay (complete hangar bay). No photos of the main stair well connecting this main level and top level bridge / bottom level rec area yet. The stair well is coming along nicely but I want to clean it up a bit more first.

The following photos are of the asteroid belt, our homes returned, good panoramic stuff. Enjoy :)

God it feels good to be home :)