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

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

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.

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.

No actual plans for this yet, sorry

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.

No ladder plans at this moment :)

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Optimizations - yes there are some more optimizations on the way

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

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

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?

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

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

Here: http://forum.keenswh.com/threads/update-01-108-planets.7372785/

What was the most challenging part of adding planets?

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

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

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.

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

Thanks!

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

Hi Keen. What does your typical workday look like?

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! :-)

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

666

Cestmir!

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

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.