Space Engineers – full source code access, total modifications, 100,000 USD fund and planets preview

THANK YOU!!!

 

Planets!! So Beauuutiful!!!



Also yay! Source code. Time to study...

 

"Today we have a very important announcement for our modders and our community. We decided to give you 100% complete access to Space Engineers’ source code. This comes as a continuation of our decision to give more freedom to modders and community."

There goes the neighborhood. Wish I had know this was a possibility before I bought the game. It would have saved me a little money and a lot of time.

 

While i share your distaste for this - the source code may be free, but neither Space Engineers nor Vrage are. In order to play, say, a Full Conversion of Space Engineers built using this, you would still need to own Space Engineers, which continues to cost money.

(bolded part allows me to express myself without making a self contained post, it's the ultimate crime!)

 

Don't forget each purchase support the devs, allows you to play on Steam and MP, keeps you up to date, etc.

 

I wouldn't have purchased the game had I known the source code was going to be made available. This isn't good news for those of us that have already had issues with hackers in multiplayer, not does it do anything for those of us that prefer not to play with mods, it is a total and complete letdown.

 

About hackers :

About not wanting to play with mods :
Noone forces you to play with any mod, but noone stops you from doing one or wanting to get something you always wanted to see implemented in SE becoming true. I'm also pretty sure you gonna change that statement later on.

 

Keep in mind we will also have people who write things to stop hackers. With this we'll get changes and upgrades we want much faster. I foresee lots of positive changes now.

 

Yeah...I can feel the misunderstandings incoming...
Brace yourselfs Keen

This is no different then people having access to Unreal Engine or Unity

 

Obviously i can't speak for him, but i can tell you quite honestly: the more development time that gets sunk into making this ALPHA moddable the less i want to use them later on. I want the game to be complete, i don't want to have to download two dozen third party mods just to to play a game that feels complete. As a customer the current developments worry me greatly in this regard.

 

@DarkGhost, I get what you are saying, but I am not as optimistic as others appear to be. And as for mods, I know that nobody is forcing anyone to play with them, but it seems rather unfortunate that the new module "mods" uploaded by Keen to the Workshop weren't added to vanilla. There are a bunch of people feeling a fair bit left out as a result. This just isn't the direction I would prefer to have seen things go.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

 

They're still working as hard as before to release new content and fixes. What's wrong if the moddable part is finally out ? You can't know if it was done over months by a single guy or over a week by the whole team.

 

Yes. New Content. Today's new content was released as mods on the workshop so modders can develop 3rd party mods. That doesn't do a damned thing for players that prefer not to lag their servers and introduce 3rd party bugs to their gaming experience.

 

I don't know and frankly i don't think Alpha is the time to think about it in the first place.

It's a double edged sword. On the one hand mods have already given Keen good ideas (like the Catwalk or Ramp blocks) to implement into Vanilla. That looks like a proper Pro for Mods. And it somewhat is, but still - all of those ideas arose as Suggestions; we didn't need Mods to bring them up, the suggestions existed before.
On the other hand, though, i have problems with Keen's (at least by me perceived-as-such) approach to "let the modders do it". Keen seems to be taking the view that whatever is lacking in SE should be supplied by modders down the line. I do not agree with this; the game should focus on being complete first and modders should fill in the blanks after that. I get the impression that Keen looks at the high amount of mods as something that they don't need to do, and while the definition of "need" is probably a different one between Keen and myself there are things i don't want to see in a mod but in Vanilla. I firmly believe that mods distract Keen from that; i don't know if my believe is true but actions like this don't particularly help...

Compound Blocks? (may i ninja this post to ask if we will see support for really big ships, like superpowerful-non-mod-Gyros to save on Polygons, more powerful non-mod-thrusters and low-polygon-non-mod-models? (And no i'm not trying to be cute in a topical way, the mod-thing is a deep concern of mine...)



edit: i want to stress that, in theory, i have NOTHING against mods. I ENJOY mods.
In finished games. When the game in question is feature complete and when i don't need to fear that the inclusion of mods will have negative impact on the feature list.

 

I was looking forward to all of these things until about 20 minutes ago when I read that blog post. None of which will matter to me if multiplayer is ruined due to the availability of source code to any griefer with coding skills.

 

In one way, I think this is great, KSH seems to like innovation and this is new for sure.

On the other hand, I'm really concerned for the continuation of the development. I look more on the actions than some blog post, words are words, actions tell more.

We have less content in every update in the past 2 months. They open the code, with a good part of the blog post saying that people can edit, make total conversions, fix bugs for them, "help" and so on... deep down this talk worries me, even more after what happened to Miners Wars. They have Medieval Engineers now, remember that. What stop them from releasing less and less content from Space Engineers and let the community take over without ever finishing it?

I hope my intuition is wrong about this... really. KSH is one of the best EA developers to date, I would be sad to see they doing that.

 

Actually, I hope they don't stick with gyroscopes as we know them. We already have mods that increase gyro strength, but doing so is a broken system.
I feel Keen should look into the possibility of proper thruster mechanics for controlling ship pitch/yaw/roll and have the gyro changed into a system for assisting stability in a situation such as what direction "up" is when a ship is caught inside the gravity-well of a planet.
Gyro's in their current form are game-breaking when it comes to ship on ship combat.

 

D:

I stressed out a bit before i realized this stands for Early Access...

 

This is a concern of mine as well. Modding support before the game was out of "alpha" has always bothered me due to this very concern.

 

Stupid question time! I assume this is tracking the released version of the game?

Oh and for anyone concerned that hackers will now have free reign, open source stuff is MORE secure than closed source because it is far more responsive when it comes to finding and closing security holes. (One of the many reasons open-source software is the backbone of the internet.)

 

hahahahahha

I even said in the end "I hope my intuition is wrong". Se ya next week then...

 

Open source is only more secure than closed source when the people using the open sourced code are actually patching exploits and squashing bugs. It takes a large, active open source community to manage a large code base. And looking back over some of the open-sourced software that is the backbone of the internet... Heartbleed, Venom, etc.

 

As I suspect many are feeling: "Mods? Meh..."

On the other hand, I am perfectly happy with waiting with the game in its current state for a while (I don't play multiplayer, can you tell?) and seeing what happens.

And those planet shots o_O

 

One very positive aspect about the available sourcecode:
Some of our awesome moddersmight take the chance and hunt down a couple of nasty bugs, supporting the development - and when a developers gets a bugreport including precise reference to their own sourcecode and the fix for it, its a good chance it will be solved fast.

 

Well, there is a large active community, us. Marek's blog post said that Keen will merge some mods into the base game, so if a modder finds a way to fix a bug, the fix could be implemented into vanilla. With the entire community searching through the source code instead of keen alone, we'll be able to find bugs much faster. Keen has effectively just hired millions of part time developers

 

As someone from the Open Source "community" I'm very secure to say that you're wrong in this.

Those zero-day breaches were related to code developed by NSA and that sort of "collaboration".

People also forget the absurd failures that Microsoft let happen on Windows, but when a problem happens on Open Source Software, people like to beat it to death.

 

Some fixes and optimizations will likely be discovered through open sourcing the code. So will new bugs and exploits. This must be the new multiplayer revamp we keep hearing about. (sorry, breaking my own rules here, but I couldn't resist)

I see what you are saying and I agree that bug fixing could get a boost from so many eyes on the code. But so will exploiting and hacking. The more access to the code you give people, the more sophisticated the hacks and exploits will be, the harder they will be to find.

Personally I feel this is a HUGE mistake for a game this early in development. Keen should have waited til gold.