Wow, nice work, and congratulations with a new discovery! I am still far from implementing of a whole GAIA catalog support. Athough I think that SE will not use all 2 billion stars, because it can render only stars with a good parallax, luminocity and color data. What I need to implement (aside from...

Messier wrote:

Qr Bbpost How's progress going on the 3D clouds?

No progress since Summer, we are focused on 3D rings now. As you can see, atmospheric scattering does not affects clouds, this is why new scattering code is needed.

Some side work with atmospheric acattering. I tried to implement alternative code, which performs scattering integration on-the-fly in the planet/sky shader, rather than use precomputed scattering tables (textures). It solves a lot of issues with artifacts and inability to change such paramters as a...

Yes, performance is almost halved by using emulated FP64.

Rings shader doesn't uses doubles, it uses emulation through two floats.

Bunch of a new screenshots. Rock size and ring thickness varies across planets, but is at order of 10 meters in diameter and 100 meters thick. Smaller rocks still have some precision issues. Performance is in 40-60 fps at 1440p and rings rendering resolution 70% on RTX 2080 (and no, RTX is OFF, SE d...

Brett001 wrote:

Qr Bbpost Can this programming technique be used to procedurally generate rocks and stones of different sizes on the surface of planets?

Yes, but they will have lower resolution than the terrain. So it's a bad idea.

35850 Amazing work! However, I have a question: why you decided to go for ray-marching? Would it be possible to implement a similar effect in OpenGL via instanced rendering? This sounds like an obvious solution, and you must have thought about it, so what's the limitation? Yes, it can be do by inst...

Programing this is a truly amazing feat. Thank you, as always, for such an incredible job. I'm concerned with the mutual shadowing of the different objects in the rings. That might be a fundamental feature of such scenes in real life, but possibly a CPU killer and an imposible programing goal. I Ho...

I'm sorry for so long timw without updates. I lost a habit to post dev screenshots. And too lazy to write blog posts :) So, 3D rings. Working on it since August together with Duke. Completeness is 90%. This is raymarching, so rocks are not spawned/deleted, they are "generated" on the fly a...

Relax. There are many reasons why development is slow. 1) Having money does not mean having a good team. We hired some programmers, and they worked for a while, but leave. Managing team is not easy. 2) We don't have that much money. Only for 2-3 programmers. We have 2 now, including myself. 3) I hav...

New update is in the beta branch on Steam. Description is in the blog post:
http://spaceengine.org/news/blog201113/

Great work! This addon should be uploaded to the Workshop. How to do this is briefly described here:
http://spaceengine.org/news/blog191206/

Some criticizm here. 1) 120 tons is extremely small payload even for robotic mission. ISS has a mass of 400 tons, and it is not a very convenient habitat for 4 astronauts. Relativistic starship must have extreme radiatin protection shield, rotational gravity hab, closed ecosystem for 20-years flight...

"Preset#vi" means "Preset", your localization is simply not updated with a new text added to this update. What is your language? General rule to acheive the best quality is selecting "Very slow" preset and "Highest" bitrate. Although such extreme combinations...