Updated Transmissions: Voxel Hands, Weapon Actions and Exporting Models

Once again it's Thursday, and the good people of Keen Software House have brought us another interesting update to Space Engineers, bringing the game up to version 01.067. A full list of the new features and fixes that make up this update can be found here.

Sculpting asteroids with the Voxel Hands tools.

The biggest feature added by today's update is something I had seen talked about on both the Steam forums and the Space Engineers Reddit. Previously, players had found something called "voxel hands" listed amongst the tool and object tab in the toolbar configuration menu. Although nobody was really sure as to what it meant, theories abound that it had something to do with a feature showcased in the gameplay video of Keen's up-coming sister game, Medieval Engineers. As you can see from the image above, today's update confirmed those assumptions.

Voxel Hands can currently only be accessed while playing in creative mode, and with good reason. A range of five different tools is available, and what they do is allow a player to sculpt with the varying materials that the game's asteroids are made out of. The first four tools are simply different shapes: box, capsule, ramp and sphere; the fifth is used to smooth out a flat plane of material. Their orientation is changed via the same controls used for changing the facing of blocks placed by hand, but each comes with its own special menu, accessed by default through the same key that enables or disables the heads-up display. This menu allows you to change the distance of the voxel hands icon, as well as change its size. Alternately, you can enable the "project to voxel" option to keep the cursor connected to the base asteroid being pointed at. Currently the voxel hands can only generate or carve portions based around a bounding box that surrounds each asteroid; thankfully, there's an option to enable a visual representation of that boundary.

Also added in this update is the ability of sensors and timer blocks to trigger certain commands for weapons such as the gatling gun and missile launcher. For instance, this means that weapons can be set to fire upon the detection of enemy ships or players. This also means that players who enjoy scripting with the programmable blocks will be able to control their weaponry from those scripts, opening up the possibilities of things such as automated combat drones. Speaking of programming, code editor performance has been boosted while the number of characters per script was set to a maximum of 100,000.

Being able to export ship models was a feature that had been part of the game since previous updates, though it was perhaps overshadowed by the addition of blueprinting your creations for use with projectors, sharing with friends or even uploading to the Steam Workshop. As part of this update, simply pointing your cursor at a ship and hitting CTRL+ALT+E allows you to export one of your creations as an .OBJ file type, useful for players who want to make 3D prints of their ships.

And, as usual, this update - and any following hotfix within the next few days - has done what it could to help deal with some of the bugs and issues that had been plaguing players recently. For a full list of such fixes, see the link to the thread for today's update on Keen Software House's official forums at the top of this page.

See you next Thursday, fellow engineers!