My short bio: Hello Reddit,

We are Keen Software House - developers of the video games Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers. Yesterday (Nov 12, 2015) we released the biggest feature yet for Space Engineers – Planets! We are here with a few members from our team and we will be answering your questions mostly about Planets, or anything else related to Space Engineers. The IAmA will be starting at 19:00 CET / 13:00 ET.

Answering your questions will be mostly Marek Rosa (CEO) – answering as KeenSWH - together with Petr Minarik (lead programmer) – answering as mikrogen, Daniel Ilha (programmer), Cestmir Houska (programmer), Joel Wilcox answering as -Xocliw-, Tomas_Psenicka.

We will be answering for approximately one hour after we start. We will do our best to reply to as many questions as possible, but please forgive us in case we miss some of them. This IAmA is about Planets and Space Engineers, so please try to stick your questions to these topics as much as possible.

Info about Space Engineers: http://www.spaceengineersgame.com/ Planetary trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FRu9p-3Ois Info about Keen Software House: http://www.keenswh.com/about.html

EDIT: We are starting to answer your questions. EDIT 2: Thank you for your questions guys, the IAmA is finished. You can go back now and continue playing Space Engineers :) See you next time!

Proof: This is the proof that it’s really us :-): http://mirror.keenswh.com/Pics/WP_20151112_22_59_23_Pro.jpg post on our Space Engineers Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SpaceEngineers/photos/a.193171660863137.1073741830.147545475425756/507451139435186/?type=3&theater, post on our Space Engineers Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceEngineersG/status/664928500898467840.

Comments: 291 • Responses: 16  • Date: 

Ghede15 karma

What are some of the long-term goals after planets are out and patched to near-perfection?

KeenSWH16 karma

We need to polish and fix things that are already in the game.

Just make it more playable.

Then we will work more on survival aspects.

Burdmahn12 karma

Are you planning to add cables, pullies, or winches to space engineers anytime? I could see them getting a lot more use now that we have planets.

KeenSWH7 karma

No actual plans for this yet, sorry

gareaura9 karma

Hey Keen! Nice work on SE. The new Planets release, awesome! Question: Is there any plans to implement ladders? With the release of Planets, its become difficult to erect any large structures.

KeenSWH5 karma

No ladder plans at this moment :)

XilentDude5 karma

Will you be adding in the near future completely procedural planets, like it was on the source code?

Also, will you make jetpacks behave like they were behaving on the source code back in August (it was extremely hard to stay in the air, you would constantly fall if you wouldn't manually control it)?

Also, (this is more of a suggestion) could you make it harder for us to get rid of sabiroids (example: if they get on your ship, they might lay some small eggs that will develop into adults later on which could go wrong if you don't find the eggs; you might also help them colonize another planet).

And also, please keep being Keen (Keen = awesome in this case). I also respect the guy that took the proof pic because he used a windows phone.

//edit: Marek, I don't know if you recall, but we talked about a texture displacement bug on Twitter. It appears that it has been not fixed yet, which makes a space elevator impossible to properly make (because the longer the structure gets, the worse it's going to look. BTW, I have created a bug report on the forums.

//edit 2: Will there be an implementation of ME's structural integrity? At least in SP?

If the semi-suggestion and this edit violate in some way the rules, any moderator can edit this post and/or PM me.

KeenSWH8 karma

We will fix the displacement bug (see another answer). Sorry for not fixing it earlier.

KeenSWH10 karma

Procedural planets = probably not; the reason is that we really need to focus on polishing core game play elements + work on the multiplayer;

We are yet to see what planets will our modders create. Actually this may be their biggest gift to us :-) Hehe.

David1845 karma

Hello keen software house! good job on making planets! i have 2 questions regarding planets tho. Will trees be destroyable? i tried destroying them and i can't break them. Will the game get optimization for planets.

KeenSWH7 karma

Trees should be destroyable even now... when you crash a ship to a ship, it should break.

KeenSWH9 karma

Optimizations - yes there are some more optimizations on the way

giobs1114 karma

HY, are you going to update github and start merging commits?

KeenSWH6 karma

Yeah... we haven't been doing this lately, but we need to resume our activity in this direction

Fenlig3 karma

Hey Keen, Do you have any plans to release a linux dedicated server?

Thanks!

KeenSWH5 karma

Not at this moment. It would be really a demanding task to port the game to Linux.

SynthGlow3 karma

There's been like the updates today with no changelogs, is there any patch notes anywhere ?

Ericius113 karma

What was the most challenging part of adding planets?

KeenSWH7 karma

Optimizations = to make it all render and be stored in memory while supporting destructible surfaces/volumes

JuDelCo3 karma

How is your organization methodology ? It must be hard to manage 40 people to make a game like Space Engineers

KeenSWH6 karma

Yeah, it's getting harder and harder to manage. But we can't lose this fight.

So what are we doing is to have some people overview other people, be strict in deadlines and what gets added and what doesn't get added.

We also need to do a very brutal prioritization in where we focus our attention.

Spisos3 karma

Hi there. Admin from Space Engineers CZ/SK facebook page here.

  1. Will the voxels (asteroids for example) be able to hold oxygen sometime in the future?
  2. What about decorative blocks? Were you thinking of adding some of the decorative mods to the vanila game in distant future?
  3. Is there a posibillity of functioning LCD displays in small cockpits somewhere in the future? (There are mods that do this by adding blocks without need of changing the cockpit model, but what about vanilla game?)
  4. Are you planning to add block-in-block building like in ME? Is it more complex because of different grids?

KeenSWH4 karma

Hello fellow citizen! :)

ad 1) no plans for this, although someone could mod this or perhaps alter the source code (once this latest version is out)

ad 2) we need to keep the vanilla in a vanilla state, unless we want to polish all modded blocks once the game gets in its final art style

ad 3) no plans for this yet

Smithybum2 karma

In the last teaser, we saw a ship lose half of its thrusters in a crash, then continue flying. In the future would ships need to be balanced to stay in the air? I mean, if you lose your thrusters on one side, would the ship tilt downwards on that side? Also, will there be a series of bug/optimization patches for the planets over the next few weeks? Planets seem to be chugging for a fair few people. Thanks for your time and I look forward to the future of SE! :D

KeenSWH6 karma

Space Engineers already does this - if you loose thrusters, it has direct impact on its maneuverability. The teaser ship probably had more backup thrusters, it's was just not visible in the video.

DaysOfFog2 karma

Hi Keen. What does your typical workday look like?

KeenSWH9 karma

My workday (I am Marek) is wake up at 8am, do some emails, get to the office, work on games or AI stuff, at 9-10pm go home, keep working, and then some sleep.

It's a beautiful life! :-)

rogerairgood2 karma

On a scale of 10 to 999 (10 being the best, 1 being the worst) how awesome are you guys?

CestmirHouska8 karma

666

KeenSWH5 karma

Cestmir!