preview

Essay

Decent Essays

In late october 2013 I was sitting in the customer lounge of the dealership I was working at on lunch. After 11 months of coming to terms and having gone through rehab for the spectical of Star Citizen, me and a friend were looking at new releases across steam when we came to Space Engineers. A space sand box, minecraft esce game in early access being built by a company called Keen Software house, which had one other release called Miner Wars. On Febuary 4th i bought the game after a demo of the build system and was hooked to it. That was 4 years ago now and over 1000 hours across 3 accounts, 538 on my main, I feel the need to finally talk about this game. At the time of buying Space Engineers there was nothing else like it that I had …show more content…

While the devs push a weekly update many in the community feel that it is not a good way go go about things. Fixes are good but a lack of testing every week leads to updates that feel rushed or push us one step forward and 1 and a half steps back. This cycle has lead to quite a few in the community to shelve the game until it is more stable and many in that camp feel that this may never happen. The net code for the game is another hot topic. The games is constantly trying to figure out world position, player position and grid to subgrid position. This makes some builds summon what the community call clang, the noise the block system makes when it breaks or goes haywire. Clang normally rears its head when the games rotors, pistons or wheels are used in a way that bogs down the games simulation speed which causes some calculations the go nuts and a grid will not agree with the position of these objects and the subgrinds that they use causing either a physics freak out or destruction of the vehicle. The reason this is a major problem in the netcode is all of the above problems are amplified when 2 or more people are present in a server. Rubber banding of positions for craft and people cause destruction, and while sometimes funny, can destroy a hour or so of work in a few short seconds. Another issue with the develpment is what the community would like and what the devs are implementing. While it is the Devs game to make how they want

Get Access