Space Engineers

Space Engineers on Steam
Anybody else playing it?

It's in beta, but the weekly updates are always mindblowing (and I don't use that word loosely). Not only do they keep improving existing mechanics with more settings (for example, for rotors the axial displacement between stator and, well, rotor used to be a fixed value, now you can control it), but you get new mechanics every week (last one was blast doors [blocks that are slightly thinner than default cubes, allowing them to move between other blocks without damage] and pistons that can extend to a multiple of their base length. Now you can build airtight doors that rotate or slide into place :D).
I really need to stop putting all my thoughts into one sentence... Point is, there's an awesome plethora of stuff already in game, and so much more to come (they want to add ingame programming! :O).

Also, compared to KSP, stuff doesn't just break from being sneezed at (or, my favorite, randomly for no reason at all). If you smash things together you get dents (which you can fix) or, if you smash harder, broken blocks and ships (once your ship is split, it's hard to get it back... but possible!). But between wheels, landing gear and heavy armor, there's enough ways to make sure your moving parts don't demolish each other.

Anyway, I'm currently building an undulating space snake :D

PS: Multiplayer is included and as easy as opening your world to friends/everyone.

It's as much of "an actual game" as minecraft, if you will. Yes, it's pure sandbox atm, but in survival mode you get to actually build stuff with tools and resources in order to mine more resources from asteroids. Or build whatever else you want.

Tell me if I'm wrong, but DF also has no real story or goal, does it? Just hoardes of enemies/dangers that you can overcome. In that regard, space engineers probably lacks dangers (well, you can have meteorites rain at you... or other players assault you, but that's probably it. For the moment.), but other than that I couldn't point you at the difference.

Speaking of it though, a recent update made multiplayer actually quite intriguing. I won't bore you with the details, but assassinating an enemy faction leader while all their medbays are down will cripple that faction, so you have an interesting dynamic for fights.
And yes, there's also turrets, warheads and all that good stuff to use.

I didn't mean story or the like, but "gameplay" other than the simulation part - maybe victory conditions or something different. I'm not saying simulation games are bad either, I've only been curious on the game concept because I've seen this game mentioned a couple times now.

I liked Clonk and this looks a bit like a blocky 3d version in space. This might even be a viable platform for SS13-esque role playing. Might give it a try.

Soo this game just got a free-to-play and 40% off weekend thing on Steam. Gotta say it's pretty heavy on hardware for being SS13-esque.

I just tried doing random stuff in the default nub-start-world and after some fiddling succeeded to mine some ore with a ship. When I failed to turn around to fly out the hole I dug I just kept drilling until I came out on the other side of the asteroid, so there's that. Later I managed to find out where to drop the ore I just acquired. Then I started feeling sick from all the low-fps, being stuck in a tunnel, no-gravity-funny-controls-space-stuff and had to quit. :P

Its free on Steam for this weekend. And if you want to play it later after the free weekend you could buy it 40% off on Steam.

quote: Not only do they keep improving existing mechanics with more settings (for example, for rotors the axial displacement between stator and, well, rotor used to be a fixed value, now you can control it)

Wait, pause. I have no idea what this game is, but it sounds like there are actual engineering things happening here.

Edit: now I'm interested to see if they are actually running a crude CFD simulation through it, assuming this is referring to an axial compressor/turbine.

quote: but it sounds like there are actual engineering things happening here.

That's definitely the case.

quote: now I'm interested to see if they are actually running a crude CFD simulation through it

That's not the case. There's no fluids, rotors are just, well, motors.

I tried to play it but it seems that my ancient CPU is not up to par :\ as i heard from my friends you need a quite a rig to play comfortably.

Edit: So I managed to run it after many tries but the game had really low framerate and because of that it was barely playable despite my specs being still up there above games' minumum specs. However to my surprise this framerate is not really justified by anything since i dont really see any fireworks going on my screen and the texture quality is not that briliant either :|. Its kinda a shame because the game looks promising and I would have liked to see if it has some interesting engeneering stuff in it but the framerate. THE FRAMERATE! D:

Evil Steam demons ended the f2p weekend at least four hours too soon so I couldn't try my tiny WIP construction ship yet. :<

Orfi, I managed to up my framerate by starting in the empty world and forcing off all sort of shiny graphic stuff for the .exe in my gpu driver (ingame options lack tons of settings). I agree that framerate is an issue, it's low even with no shiny effects, collisions, etc. I'll just assume it's because of lack of optimization due to alpha.

Autowar, I fully agree. It's actually the same reason why I couldn't stand minecraft mods.

Just changing around a few block stats would've been fine (like, say, armor thrusters), but the modding depth provided makes any given challenge as hard as it is to code it.