FAQ
Q: Are the ships limited to any shape or size? i.e. can I shove a thruster on a city and pilot it through space?Are the ships limited to any shape or size? i.e. can I shove a thruster on a city and pilot it through space?
A: There are no size limits at this moment and we are lucky, it can stay there.[1]
Q: Are there plans for weaponry?
A: Weapons = yes, but the details will come later[1]
Q: So if small ships aren't affected by gravity, how would you go about making a hanger deck on a large ship without your small ships flying all over the place? Could the landing gear be made to be magnetic?
A: Yes, landing gear is something we should do at some point. Gravity wouldn't help here, because small ships in hanger would jump around during acceleration and deceleration anyway.[2]
Q: Will Space Engineers support mods and/or the modding community?
A: Likely - VRAGE 1.0 has been released with full source code, so it seems as though Keen Software house knows the benefit of mod support. One reason behind their decision to release VRAGE 1.0 was that "it increases the value of Miner Wars 2081 for existing and new customers." Only customers who purchased Miner Wars 2081 could have access to the engine.[3] Marek Rosa also mentions that he thinks it would be "easy to 'mod' our textures and paint your own"'[4] further suggesting that modding will be a strong possibilit for Space Engineers.
Q: What happens if you aren't aligned to the grav field when you enter it, like by jumping from one to another? Does your character fall on his head? Go ragdoll? Also do the magnitudes of the gravity fields aggregate, or only the directions?
A: When you fall, you always end up on your feet. The game will rotate your character while falling. It's like what cats do when you throw them to air (not that I tried this... ). In future this would preferably be done via rag-doll physics, right now it's just that rotation. Magnitudes aggregate as well - but this is something we may reevaluate. I mean, now the interesting effect is that if you install 5 gravity generators on bottom of your ship and point them downwards, and then fly over some station, you will pull up every person in that station (your gravity will be stronger than the station's gravity). On the other side, the disadvantage is that there's larger gravity when multiple fields overlap. [5]
Q: Do asteroids deform if they collide with other asteroids or objects?
A: Asteroids get deformed when high-velocity object hits them. Voxels at the collision point are crushed and vanish. [6]
Q: Why are the blocks 0.5 and 2.5 meter blocks?
A: 2.5 meter because the astronaut/engineer is 1.85m tall and if he wants to run and jump, he needs some space above his head. 2.5m ceiling seems reasonable. 3m would be too much. 0.5m - it still too early to say if this was the best shot, but we wanted "small enough" but "not too much to give rise to performance problems". Right now it looks ok, but only future will tell.[7]
Q: Are you planning on incorporating power systems into the game? As in, needing a power system of some sort for your ship to operate?
A: Yes, power grid is one of the core features. It's already in the game. Cool thing is that if your ship breaks in half, the part that has no reactors has no power. BTW, regarding breaking ships - we designed the blue ship (in video) to be easily breakable (long and narrow). In a real fight, it would take few more hits to break it :-) [8]
Q: Will there be more colours on textured objects?
A: Right now we have 7 distinct colors (white, grey, black, green, red, yellow, blue) and the thing is, I like it this way. It's so simple. I am not sure if we will introduce more colors - right now we are actually limited by memory, even these 7 color variations consume a lot of texture memory so without some sort of "texture masking" we can't even think of more colors. [9] Actually, it would be easy to "mod" our textures and paint your own.[4]
Q: How are ships controlled?
A: ... you can control all modules that are connected to a grid. In other words, if you have a mother ships and it's made of "blocks", they all are connected, so they carry electricity and "network" signal. When you connect to some block that has a terminal on it (e.g. reactor, cockpit, ...), you gain access to the whole network and can turn on/off any block in that grid, check its status, inventory, etc.[4] Different types of blocks can have terminal, e.g. doors, reactor, cargo container, etc. Terminal itself is not a block, it's just a "feature" on a block. Blocks in a grid are connected if they are next to each other, then they carry electricity and networking signal. If you split a ship in half, blocks in those two separated parts won't be able to "talk to each other"[4]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 http://blog.marekrosa.org/2013/09/space-engineers-announced-development.html?showComment=1378742873481#c4233307025550045976
- ↑ http://blog.marekrosa.org/2013/09/artificial-gravity-in-space-engineers.html?showComment=1379437573380#c5652998580839583485
- ↑ http://mirror1.minerwars.com/Downloads/PR-2013-03-14-open-source.pdf
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 http://forums.keenswh.com/post/show_single_post?pid=1279468295&postcount=4 Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; name "mod" defined multiple times with different content Cite error: Invalid<ref>tag; name "mod" defined multiple times with different content - ↑ http://forums.keenswh.com/post/show_single_post?pid=1279566910&postcount=2
- ↑ http://forums.keenswh.com/post/show_single_post?pid=1279541111&postcount=13
- ↑ http://forums.keenswh.com/post/show_single_post?pid=1279492006&postcount=7
- ↑ http://forums.keenswh.com/post/show_single_post?pid=1279468609&postcount=2
- ↑ http://forums.keenswh.com/post/show_single_post?pid=1279468266&postcount=3
