It is a very good approximation based on general relativity solution :) More specifically, it is approximation of Schwarzschild black hole potential by Paczynski and Wiita (1980):

F = -G * M / (R - Rg) 2

It is not a Kerr metric approximation, so spin is ignored. We still didn't find easy to ...

You don't need them, those are debug variables.

3D rings public beta!

http://spaceengine.org/news/blog210611/

- Added volumetric 3D planetary rings
- Updated exoplanet catalog (June 03, 2021)
- Support for blackbody thermal glow and temperature maps for spaceships (accurate radiator glow appearance)
- FXAA smooths alpha channel in screenshots ...

SE textures (HD addon) is anyway better, has higher resolution, and supports 3D terrain.

36610 The SE blog post from May 2018 (http://spaceengine.org/news/blog180521/) told, that it would be possible to turn on/off individual (!) constellations via scripting. Even lines, boundaries and labels could be controlled individually per constellation.
I made a lot of tries with script commands ...

Ongoing work on migrating to SSL (https://). Some glitches are possible, don't panic

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...