I really like the game Space Engineers developed by Keen Software House. I recently picked it up again and was a little bit disappointed that there were a bunch of new features added to the game, but the underlying network engine did not seem to have changed in over a year. Since I am a Software Engineer and personally like to do a bit of game development on the side, I got interested in the code-base for Space Engineers which was released a year or so ago on github. I wanted to see how the game was coded and how the code base of the project looks.

First of all, I discovered that my initial concerns regarding the immediate usability of the code base were true: even when following the official README-instructions, it took me about 8 hours to get everything compiled. This morning, I got it working for the first time in a Release build and with a little bit of extra effort also in the Debug build. So far so good. To my surprise, running the actual game worked out of the box! One needs to own an original version of Space Engineers on Steam from where extra libraries and assets are pulled, but the default run configuration in Visual Studio worked fine, immedately.

While trying to get the code base to compiler, I got to see lot of code already, and without a deep understanding of the code base, it seems to me that Space Engineers suffers from typical issues of large projects: feature creep, ad-hoc coding, and half-completed refactoring steps which make things worse rather than better – oh well, business as usual. However, after spending eight hours of my free time on a code base, analyzing what the hell is happening where and why, basically the same stuff that I also do at work, this led to an interesting “mod” of the main menu:

Making this mod also let me work more closely with the code base of Space Engineers. As it turns out, Keen Software House did not open up much of the underlying engine VRage together with Space Engineers. Only some parts of it (modules? parts?) are included in the code base. The remaining use of VRage consists of API calls into some compiled VRage-DLLs published via Steam. It would not matter too much but the complete lack of documentation makes browsing and understanding the code base a lot harder, especially for calls to the binary libraries. Also the resource configuration files that the VRage processes, for example music and sounds configurations files, are undocumented. And finally I discovered that audio files cannot be typical sound formats, but are required to be a Wave file or some undocumented flavor of Windows Media Audio 2-file which I do not know how to generate.

Multiplayer synchronisation

Since I was so disappointed about the lack of improvements to the netcode in the past year, I also had a short look at that. From my initial sweep looking at the Space Engineers netcode it seems to me that the multiplayer entirely relies on synchronized values. I could not quickly find a footprint for any type of specialized prediction algorithms that, for example, make a difference between which player has control over a ship – everything is handled the same. This would explain the “bounciness” that one experiences when trying to play Space Engineers in multiplayer: Different clients are fighting and synchronizing the same values based on their local simulations which cannot run perfectly synchronously. In this context, a lower ping would actually increase the issue since there would be more updates and bounces per second, and the oscillation of ships would be quicker. With a lower ping, the sudden jumps would be larger, but less frequent. This is contrary to popular believe, where the glitches are (sometimes) contributed to “lag”. I say, given my very superficial research, that these issues would still be there with any amount of “lag” and always appear there until the prediction code is made smarter. I have a few small ideas on how this could, perhaps, be improved, but I first have to see if this is indeed the problem… more research needed.

Regarding the “rewrite of the netcode” with Raknet that many people want: I do not think that there is a good reason, to “want” it. Regardless of the used network-layer the glitchfest will remain. The only fix for the multiplayer glitches is to change the way the game world is synchronized with other players.