I haven’t played anything like enough of sandbox building/exploration game Space Engineers [official site], but the recent addition of explorable planets looks like a solid gold reason to. They arrived back in November, but this new video makes a strong case for why they demand more attention.
Last month, Keen Software House added planets and moons to their Early Access intergalactic sandbox adventure Space Engineers [official site] as “a result of some early access player feedback”. In what Keen’s founder Marek Rosa labels a “game-changing feature”, players can now manipulate the landscape as they see fit – leaving behind a persistent footprint in their wake. In a new developer diary, Rosa explains how he and his team arrived at the decision to add the game’s most ambitious feature yet.
As well as trying to trap a brain inside a computer, Keen Software House want to squeeze the whole dang universe into one too. Their latest Early Access update to Space Engineers [official site] last night added diddy ‘planets’ and moons to its sandbox space, so you can now leap off your spaceship and plummet all the way down onto a planetoid, if that’s a thing you want to do. When their AI escapes, it’ll fire us at planets with a spacegun as revenge for trapping it, so we better get used to the idea. Or you could land to explore, build, fight, and all that, I guess. Whatever.
Of all the fanciful claims made of video game technology, my favourite has always been neural nets and artificial brains. Imagine if video game men were alive! Your soldiers would learn from battle! They’d write letters to their virtual families – which you can read! Gasp as the life leaves their little digital eyes, and wonder what they believe comes next! Oh, it’s always a load of tosh.
You’ll excuse me if my meatbrain smirks as I respond “Whaaat?” to Space Engineers developers Keen Software House announcing plans to make an AI brain “which operates at the level of a human brain and can adapt and learn any new task”. Bit late for an April Fool, isn’t it?
145,000 lines of code got the Apollo Mission to the Moon, or so The Internet tells me. It takes a fair few more than that to crash a spaceshark into Space Station Homer’s crotch. Don’t believe me? Fine, go count the lines yourself.
Space Engineers [official site] developers Keen Software House are giving people access to their sandbox space sim’s source code, letting folks tinker with the game way more than its mod tools allow. Keen also announced they plan to put up $100,000 (£63k) to support folks making total conversions. Crumbs!
It was only when Marsh prematurely evaluated all over Medieval Engineers [official site] that I realised its initial Steam Early Access launch lacked multiplayer. I’m inattentive, me. But developers Keen Software House (them lot also behind Space Engineers) had shown multiplayer in its trailers and screenshots and I’d blithely assumed… that doesn’t matter now.
Multiplayer arrived in the castle-building/smashing sandbox yesterday for both its creative and survival modes. You can now smash your pal’s castle to pieces.
RPS Feature Castle Doctorin'
Each week Marsh Davies punches a hole through the vertiginous walls of Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find and/or watches with grotesque, wet-lipped arousal as the entire structure disassembles in a shower of hot, hot physics. This week, he makes, then mounts, the battlements in Medieval Engineers, a castle construction sandbox. And then he unmakes them, too.
Once you’ve built a castle in Medieval Engineers, you can look at it, hit CTRL-C, then CTRL-V and paste a brick-for-brick duplicate of your entire complex anywhere else in the level. Including the sky – though they are not wont to stay there for very long. Castles, despite a plethora of idiomatic song titles suggesting otherwise, are very much a ground based medium, and when placed in the sky, they attempt to revert to form, with glorious physics-enabled results.
