This thread is an attempt to catalog all(or most) suggestions for SE made on this forum. Most suggestions(
especially those in the "general suggestions thread") tend to get buried rapidly, and eventually are forgotten, lost to time. A global, easily-visible compilation of suggestions would help alleviate this problem, at least partially.
LIST
Very common suggestions
Volumetric clouds
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Threads:
(All are on the old forum currently, I might update this with some of the most popular threads from there)
Status: Planned. SpaceEngineer stated several times that this is planned, and it is on his list of planned features
Fully volumetric water
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Threads:
(All are on the old forum currently, I might update this with some of the most popular threads from there)
Status: Planned.
Stellar motion through the galaxy
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Threads:
(All are on the old forum currently, I might update this with some of the most popular threads from there)
Status: Unlikely. SpaceEngineer has stated that, due to the way that SE renders objects, he doesn't know how this could be feasibly implemented without a full-engine rewrite. It is planned for stars to have a velocity vector, but actually simulating motion is unlikely.
Non-visible light frequencies
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Threads:
http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=130
Status:
Unlikely, at least in the near future. While stars are relatively straightforward to adapt to non-visible frequencies, other objects would be far more problematic - especially planets. The full answer, from an old forum thread, is this:
Modelling the full spectrum of a star is possible, but what to do with the planets? They may be very complex. In infrared, hot and warm planets will shine brightly on both the day and night-side. On terras, oceans will be brighter and bluish (hotter) on the night-side than land, with some temperature distribution along meridians. Airless bodies will have heat patterns shifted to the evening side: at evening time the surface is hotter than in the morning. The galaxy in the far IR band will be "inverted": dust clouds will shine, but most stars will be invisible. In ultraviolet, an atmosphere with an ozone layer will be opaque, like Venus or Titan are in visible light. In the microwave band the entire sky will shine - this is the cosmic microwave background radiation, but stars and planets will be very faint. In radiowave-frequencies, galactic hydrogen clouds will shine at a 21 cm wavelength, neutron stars and gas giants will appear as strange comet-like structures - this is a synchrotron radiation of electrons accelerated in a powerful magnetic field. In the X-ray and gamma ray band, the only visible objects will be accretion disks around black holes and neutron stars. And the main problem is IR/UV/... textures for Earth, Moon, Mars and all the other real planets of our Solar system.
Plate tectonics
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Threads:
http://forum.spaceengine.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=155
Status:
Planned. SpaceEngineer's answer:
I am planning to implement plate tectonic simulation in the future. Obviously, the entire planet must be simulated, so resolution of that simulation must be limited. Then, the terrain engine must take the simulated map as a base level and generate procedural hi-resolution elevation maps, post-process them with an erosion argorithms, then generate a color texture based on elevation, surface material and local climate, taken from a global model. All of this is a fairly complex system, and implementation of this will take years (probably). But it is possible to keep all of this in real-time - at least planet loading time will not be much greater than in the current version of SE.
Simulated animal/plant life
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Threads:
(All are on the old forum currently)
Status: Possibly partially planned in the not-near future. I am unable to find the source(I think it was stated on Steam, but don't take my word for it), but I'm quite sure that it was stated some time ago that procedural vegetation might be a possibility once 3D objects on planet surfaces are implemented. Actual mobile animals are a completely different beast, however, and are fairly unlikely to ever get implemented fully into the game.
Other suggestions
Taking surface samples
Intergalactic stars
A new, recently discovered system to be added to the catalog
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Status: This is always planned, no need to suggest it