The most interesting dream I had about space was this: I was in the pivot center of two black holes which did orbit each other. Slowly moving away to a safe distance from the two black holes or something like that. It was an extremely great dream! Very trippy.

The temperature of any object in space is the equilibrium of incomming energy and outgoing energy. In the case of light it's the equilibrium between the energy which is absorbed and the energy which is radiated. One can assume a lambertian surface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambertian_reflectance ...

Granted, having the program running decently with most of the current hardware as of today, it's hard, very hard. I'm afraid those "invisible digits" are more relevant as you would think. There is a difference between (trying to) build a hard-scifi game / engine and building a soft-scifi game ...

Just point me to a game or engine or whatever which does all the stuff this engine is doing (no matter if it stays at the current version - it will still run in 15 years). I am not aware of any software which does so. After 10 years of existence of this software . I know you won't undertand it or be ...

You also forgot to take into account that Space Engine is doing a lot of pretty complicated things under the hood. For example procedural terrain generation and texture generation. Not even Unreal Engine 4/5 or Godot 4 etc. come with that by default. Not speaking of the countless code to generate ...

Also raytracing is still a thing for most power PCs, most players in the world are not able to use it. All good games try to support the old solutions keeping raytracing as an option only. I am not so sure that most computers can't do some light raytracing (ray vs sphere of celestial body) in ...

About the discussion about emergent effects (based on the rendering equation when the rendering is done with raytracing or pathtracing) like shadows and halos: Give the team time to implement it correctly without piling to many (graphic) hacks (such as faking halos with textures) on top of each ...

To give a more concrete answer in terms of expected visuals: Amazing rendering of celestial bodies was already done with a rasterization render path in a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ6ZzJeWgpY Anything related to reflections (which is also just global illumination) would look AMAZING ...