I have a baby, so can't work 24/7 like before:)
Congratulations Vladimir! Such good news.
Also thanks for all the hard work as always. Having a team is a complicated thing indeed; teams are good to make things quicker and to allow for improvements in the workflow, but first, the team has to learn to work together and you end up having to explain everything (since you started the whole project). I guess it is years before a team on something like this can gain enough traction to compensate having it. I'm happy for you, for SpaceEngine and we will wait what is necessary to have those awesome features.
Maybe I must restore a habit to post screenshots is the dev thread on this forum
I think this is usually good for calming people that might not be accustomed to SE's times and might think the project is dead. But this is more work so I think we all have to really understand this.
By the way, just to add something to this thread; there's
a recent paper on the topic of characterizing 3D dust distribution in the Milky Way (in the Solar Neighborhood really).
The 3D dust visualizations are amazing! and the best part of it is that the data is accessible with
a Python library created for that purpose. Each voxel can be retrieved from there. Maybe in a few years (thanks to Gaia DR4) this might be hugely improved so that SE gets enriched in the Galactic Structure side of things.
Video 1:
Video 2: