I think Tuskin's concern is that, rather than SpaceEngine, the Star Wars expanded canon contains a duplicate. Is Quarior's plan to include two of the same planet, or give preference to either the EU or the Disney Canon and exclude whichever version of the planet doesn't fit?

SE veterans will probably be unimpressed by the shader itself, but for a while now I've been working on a black hole and wormhole shader inspired by SE's for the Unity engine, and it just got approved on the Unity Asset Store!
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fullscreen-camera ...

Sounds like an opportunity to be FIRST!

Reading this thread.

jk I couldn't resist

I've had a similar visual problem in my own games, with particle sprites in my case rather than galaxies.
It seems to originate from the brightness / opacity having a linear as opposed to quadratic or exponential falloff. Picture if you will a graph of how dense the galaxy is at a given distance ...

Bookmarked. Thanks! ^^

As a vague rule of thumb, the size of the core black hole varies with the size of the galaxy, so look for big galaxies in the 50kpc radius range. It shouldn't be hard since they're also the most luminous and can thus be spotted at quite a long distance

The second part isn't entirely right.
The nebula may indeed appear dimmer, as the human eye has its own auto-exposure-like feature that makes point light sources look like white dots, but in terms of the absolute amount of light entering the eye, it would be much brighter.
This is because the amount ...

If I might tack on a bit, it'd also be totally sweet if we had a "Galaxy Browser" window with the same basic functionality for nearby galaxies.
As an example use case, I like the way some of the Sa galaxies look, with the white center and black dust lane, and I like small galaxies where it's easier ...

I use random ships I've thrown together in the Ship Editor thing.

It sounds like you're talking about a phenomenon called "z-fighting."

The way video games calculate what objects are in front of what other objects involves using a "frustum" (basically a pyramid) and floating-point number division to compare how far between the camera's "near clipping plane" (the ...

Drifters are your own probes turned rogue. Note that their total number (both alive and destroyed) is the same as your losses from value drift. I got them to zero early on, but it just shoots back up.
We were aware of this, but I found it comical how it ended up being an hours-long battle of ...

So if reflections are implemented now, how does SE's rendering method compare functionally to the new industry-standard PBR?

A friend of mine decided to take the stubborn route and continue fighting the Drifters in the hopes of exterminating them. He narrowly lost, 0 probes to a scant 127 remaining Drifters xD

Also you can roughly approximate naked-eye appearance for galaxies and nebulae by cranking down the "models lighting" or "GlowMagnLimit" (depending on your version) variable in your config file to 0 or 1. I currently have mine at 2 so I have a balance of realism and visibility.

P.S.: Neat post ...