Thanks, LOD only affects planetary landscapes, while antialiasing affects everything?  Is 4x the most common antialiasing setting?  And do you do anything special to make your stars look more colorful, even from large distances?

And do you do anything special to make your stars look more colorful, even from large distances?

I do not know.
You can play around in the graphics settings. For example with 'Scale' and 'Overbright'.
Here I have set 'Scale' and 'Overbright' to maximum values.

Oh I like those!  Can I download the shaders from here?

Thanks, LOD only affects planetary landscapes, while antialiasing affects everything?  Is 4x the most common antialiasing setting?  And do you do anything special to make your stars look more colorful, even from large distances?

LOD is the the tertain mesh detail, the higher the more VRAM and processing power it needs. It is a VRAM hog.

AA is just a post process for removing jaggys from the image. It has little effect on performance I found so I run 32X for max image quality. it should have no to little effect on VRAM. 

VRAM is basically entirely terrain (polygon) and texture data.   I have also found if you have more available SE will tend to use up more as it sees there is more so it doesn't dump unneeded textures etc.. as quick.  Well at least that what I think happens from my testing. 

How do you get past LOD 1 that is the highest option I have in settings.

You can enter in the console:

Code: Select all

Set LandLod 2

(For example.)

there is also setu landlod x.x

You can get past the LOD2 limit.   Highest for a static scene I got was lod 4.5 I think.  1.8 is the highest for moving around without crashing.

Thanks I will try that!  I found the same thing testing graphics memory, it doesn't unload textures when not using them.  There should be a way to clear the cache, that would do it.

It performs better if it keeps the data as you move around.  If its clears it too quick then it's constantly reloading which is a big performance hit.  The same thing happens when you run out on a card with little vram. It is forced to dump data all the time and therefore is always loading when looking around, especially when looking at something you just looked at as it need to load it again.

When testing on an 8GB card I found it used 6-8GB but the textures and terrain stayed loaded and made it much smoother and faster.

Also looked better as everything remained loaded in the area I was looking around in unlike my 4gb card where the terrain looks like *** if I turn around as it just deleted the stuff behind me to make room for stuff in front.

It performs better if it keeps the data as you move around.  If its clears it too quick then it's constantly reloading which is a big performance hit.  The same thing happens when you run out on a card with little vram. It is forced to dump data all the time and therefore is always loading when looking around, especially when looking at something you just looked at as it need to load it again.

When testing on an 8GB card I found it used 6-8GB but the textures and terrain stayed loaded and made it much smoother and faster.

Also looked better as everything remained loaded in the area I was looking around in unlike my 4gb card where the terrain looks like *** if I turn around as it just deleted the stuff behind me to make room for stuff in front.

Thanks, I noticed the delays when I was running my old 640 MB card the little circle thing was always rotating.
I never noticed any lag with the new one, just the high usage of video memory.
What resolution do you run the simulation at?

900p, limited by the monitor.

I would go 1440p when I upgrade my monitor.

It's interesting that as a 32 bit program, SE is limited to 4 GB of RAM, but there is no such limitation for VRAM.

WHen you say "ray marched nebulas", what does it mean ? Any significant difference in the way they look ?

I've seen people explore this program with the HTC Vive.  How do I set that up?  There's only an Oculus option and I haven't found ANYTHING about the Vive for Space Engine.

WHen you say "ray marched nebulas", what does it mean ? Any significant difference in the way they look ?

It's volumetric ray tracing basically.  And yes, huge difference in visual quality. Very much improved.

Hello! I'm new here. I discover Space Engine in summer and i love the simulator very much. I wanna ask you guys if you know what are the best settings for a realistic view... I'm guessing the default settings aren't the "real" ones... Thank you.

Hello! I'm new here. I discover Space Engine in summer and i love the simulator very much. I wanna ask you guys if you know what are the best settings for a realistic view... I'm guessing the default settings aren't the "real" ones... Thank you.

First of, welcome to the forum Vis Mortix.

Realism is largely dependent on what your idea of real is and how much scientific accuracy you want. If you want total realism, I would turn off all the procedural exoplanets, stars, nebulae and galaxies. But SE is very realistic in it's generations, and since I hardly think that's what you want here, I'll start by saying you should turn Auto-Exposure ON. That way, in a high albedo environment (like near or on a planet) you won't see the relatively low-magnitude stars around the planet. This is extremely realistic, since you don't see stars in any of the pictures taken by astronauts on the moon, or on the ISS during it's daytime orbit. The stars disappear against the intensity of the sun and the reflectivity of the planet (or albedo). For this reason the stars also disappear if you are near a sun in SE, or facing a star that is close by. The Auto-exposure setting can be found under the in-game settings menu (and all the settings below as well).

Next, in the same menu, you can turn up the landscape level of detail (LOD) setting for terrain generation on exoplanets - if your system can handle it. Anything above LOD 1-1.5 can be very taxing on weaker systems and may result in freezes, long load times or just CTD's. The maximum LOD setting on SE v0980 is LOD 2 and with that you can get some nice mountains and ridges on lots of exoplanets. SE v0990 will have LOD 3, making  the maximum settings much more taxing, but has texture compression and other neat optimization tools like that, so it should balance out for those of us who don't have super-computers.  While we are on the topic of graphics, you may as well set all Aurora, Black-hole and Ship Warp Effects to High quality, Again, only if your system can handle the load.

Next set Planets to 'points'. The default setting as an unrealistic glinting effect. 'Points' disables that and makes the distant planets more solid, which would be the case in deep space, since twinkle effects are caused by an atmosphere. While we are on that topic, set star magnitude to about +12. That way you'll see pretty much all the stars except for the very dimmest when you are in interstellar space and away from any other light sources. Scale is a slider that allows you to adjust the apparent size of distant stars. The default appearance of distant SE stars are orbs with visible radii when viewed from afar. I would set this setting to the lowest value to make distant stars look more sharp and point-like.

Lastly, check the boxes 'Ring Shadows on Sky', 'Planet Shine', and slide the Planet Shine slider to 'super'. 'Real sun brightness' and 'Real planet brightness' should also be checked to compliment the above settings. Aside from that, stuff like lens flare is really a matter of personal taste.