We are Keen Software House, developers of Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers: Ask Us Anything

Have you guys figured out any of what you want to do with NPCs/AI? Will I ever be able to populate stations with minions?

Yes

Planets. Will they rotate?

Unfortunately no. We need to keep them as static geometry (but deformable). Otherwise the performance would just die.

Why do all of the objects in the source code have 'My' in front of it?

This is probably a derelict of my programming habit (I am Marek Rosa). I wanted to distinguish between my own classes and third-party libs and this way it seemed to be the most visual and intuitive. And then everyone kept following in this mode.

Do you plan on introducing vegetable gardens ? Grow crops, generate oxygen, use as food ? (there is no space movie without it)

We can't promise this yet, but it would be great!

Hello devs! first of all i love space engineers so thanks for that its really good!

any plans to add some life forms to the planets of any kind?

what vehicles can we use on the planned planets that we couldn't in space?

also why should i buy medieval engineers, what plans do you have for it that would excite me?

Thanks for being awesome

Yes, there will be deer :)

Vehicles = cars. We need to work on this a bit, make them more usable in gravity.

Medieval Engineers = at this moment we focus 70% of our ME programmers on survival elements

What is your plan on food and hunger system?

We want to work on this a little... one of our next dev directions is to add more survival elements, focus more on the "body"

We want to work on this a little... one of our next dev directions is to add more survival elements, focus more on the "body"

Hi there! Those planet screens look AWESOME. Can you tell is how you guys are going to handle gravity?

Like will you need big engines to not make your ship fall to death?

Yes, you need really stronger thrusters and engines to take off a planetary gravity. Just like in a real world.

Are there any plans to add your own mods to the Vanilla game?

This is something we are awaiting for... we need to see how this whole full source code thing plays out. But yeah, there's a good chance we will merge community mods with the vanilla game. At least parts of it. We also don't want to change the "vision" of SE.

What was a breakthrough you were most proud of when developing the game?

Deformable armor in SE; Structural integrity in ME; And then tens of other features :)

Hello devs, Real simple question:

when roughly will we see an update to the multiplayer code/network?

P.S. 1,613 Hours played, Think I am addicted to the game

It's a couple of months from now

Are you planning to add gas planet?

Sorry but no, just standard planets - with or without Earht-like atmosphere.

on se planets will be introduced structural integrity?

Yes... structural integrity should get to SE at some point.

Hey, Keen! Can you give us some rough status updates on the optimization improvements we're all anxiously waiting for? Namely, multi-core support, netcode and DX11?

DX11 will come in a couple of weeks. Netcode in a couple of months...

Do you plan to to have a similar business model to the Unreal Engine or the Unity engine and make it possible to everyone to use your engine for a fair price?

Yeah, definitely. That's one of the reasons why we opened the source code today. Except that we haven't thought much about the business model part of this initiative :)

Thanks for doing this, love the game and I look forward to every Thursday's patchmas.

What plans (if any) are in the pipeline for increasing the performance and stability of the game? Right now, some builds bring my somewhat-respectable rig down to a crawl. It gets worse in multiplayer as well, any plans to improve the netcode?

I've always wondered... how far ahead is the most recent 'dev' build compared to what is released? I figure it's gotta be at least a week or two for QA and such, or are you guys really on a week-by-week dev cycle? Of course, there is a running theory that the game is complete and being released a section at a time to give the impression that you are the best devs ever. Either way, it's working =)

Do you plan on expanding the "______ Engineers" franchise to other genres? Like... Aquatic Engineers, or Modern Engineers, or Army Engineers?

With the inclusion of planets, do you think it would be possible to have a Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers crossover? =D Say we own both games, we can land on 'primitive' planets and enslave enlighten the locals.

Thanks for making this awesome game!

Some features take only few days to develop and test, but most of them take weeks and months. These longer features are being developed in parallel, somehow overlapping each other, and since there's many of them... we have always something to release.

Thanks for the AMA, have been a fan of your game since the first trailer, currently at 222 hours and counting.

Now with planets, how will you deal with asteroid distribution? Will you create a solar system, like ours? So you have asteroid in a belt/trojans, and planets in (although not moveing) orbits? Or will Planets be randomly placed with no relation to each other or the sun?

Love the new image of the planets, great atmosphere effect. This said, can we see new images from the coming DX11 update? Just curious how SE will look in the future. After all are some models (construction scaffolding) just grey meshs right now.

Thanks for you time. :)

[Edit] added one missing word

Planetary generator will have some random seed distribution, it will be configurable, so people with less-performance computer will be able to play too. DX11 should come in a couple of weeks.

Are you planning to make any different styles of games?

Yes. A campaign/story based game would be awesome!

What are some plans to ensure planets hold interesting gameplay and aren't empty like space?

Also, are the surfaces of planets going to be smooth like in me or rough like roids in se?

Planetary surface should resemble real planets, this applies to terrain, flora, fauna, etc.

With planets, will we be able to get into orbit?

Yeah. Landing and taking of a planets is seamless, there's no loading screen. It's still just one big, big world.

I'm wondering about the timeline of the Xbox One release?

Well, it takes a lot of time, I must agree. But luckily some parts of the process are already done (plus we have now Xbox Controller and UI changes done). The sad part is that we need to finish the entire port to call this thing complete. There's no such thing as 95% finished port.