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jjliang
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Celestia (vanilla) vs. Space Engine vs. Celestia Origin

03 Jul 2021 18:48

How do you think Celesta (vanilla), Space Engine, and Celestia Origin are similar, and how do you think they are different?
 
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Canleskis
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Celestia (vanilla) vs. Space Engine vs. Celestia Origin

03 Jul 2021 19:16

Hello, it seems to me that you are obsessed with Celestia and comparing it to SE. They are both two different software designed for different purposes, and posting so regularly about Celestia on this forum is never going to achieve anything.
There is a whole section on the forum dedicated to off-topic discussions, and there is no need to mention Celestia anywhere else then there.
However incredible you might thing this software is, I don't think it is in the interest of anyone that you keep posting so much about it.
 
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Celestia (vanilla) vs. Space Engine vs. Celestia Origin

04 Jul 2021 07:25

I agree with Canleskis here. You seem to not realise that filling the forum with comparisons of what SpaceEngine is and what it should be, and comparisons with Celestia is just starting to become boring. It almost seems like you are spaming now. Maybe you should understand first what aim does each project has.

Both Celestia and SpaceEngine are spectacular virtual planetariums with lots of educational potential and lots of features, but the main goal in SpaceEngine is to archive the highest standards of realism (and in that sense it has surpassed Celestia by quite a lot). Sometimes nature is not the way we want it to be, sometimes it is the way we want it to be, but that doesn't matter because nature is what it is. We try to learn what nature is with independence from our personal views using science. And the purpose of SE is to visualize and depict what science proposes, the most unbiased interpretation we have of what is out there. There's a long road ahead for SE because it is not easy to implement everything we know and science is always changeing. If a certain visualization is not pelasing to you it might be due to features not yet programmed but it can also originate from our missconceptions about how things should look. SE is not like movies, which make a lot of concious scientific mistakes to gain public attention. SE tries to show things as they are.

As I've told you before, this means that rings on Uranus and Neptune will look dark and so dim that sometimes they are even invisible. That is because those rings systems are actually like that (not like in Celestia). Another typical petition, arising from missconception, in the SE community is that red giant stars look weird and bumpy and should look more spherical (like in Celestia). But in reality astrophysics tell us that they really must be shaped like what you see in SE. So yeah.

The important thing here is that, before asking for a new feature (like you have done for a month across all topics in this forum):
1) Ask yourself (and perhaps do some research) if the feature you are asking for is actually a realistic representation of nature (many might not be) and thus it is in harmony with SE's goal
2) If it is, then search in the forum for other people asking the same. Many times you won't get an aswer just because many have become used to hear the same question coming from each new user. In the vast majority of cases you will have your question answered previosuly in some part of the forum.

Also, once you ask for a new feature you should keep in mind that it might be a difficult request. SE is mainly programmed by one person (Vladimir Romanyuk). Some features that have been proposed several times for years now, like continental drift, are possibly impossible to code with the current engine and we should expect them in larger timespans. Many times redoing the entire engine just for a single addition might not be worth for the moment. Eventually Vladimir wants to make each and every knwon feature of the universe available, but this might not happen tomorrow.
 
jjliang
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Celestia (vanilla) vs. Space Engine vs. Celestia Origin

04 Jul 2021 08:39

On the other hand, vanilla Celestia depicted Jupiter without rings, and Uranus and Neptune with barely visible rings, while Celestia Origin added rings to Jupiter, and additional rings to Uranus and Neptune. Space Engine, however, had Saturn's and Uranus' rings be lit up at night, with the former sporting an E ring that was not present in Celestia. One thing Celestia did get right, however, are the asteroid and comet models: many asteroids and comets in Space Engine that are inside the Solar System have very inaccurate models due to most of them being procedural models and only five of them being given unique models (Eros, Itokawa, Omamuamua, Arrokoth, and Comet 67P). And let's definitely not even get us started on how Haumea before the Steam edition was incorrectly shaped like a frisbee instead of the more iconic football shape, and Sedna not being colored red.
 
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Celestia (vanilla) vs. Space Engine vs. Celestia Origin

04 Jul 2021 11:42

Space Engine, however, had Saturn's and Uranus' rings be lit up at night, with the former sporting an E ring that was not present in Celestia
SE is by far much more accurate than Celestia.
Relevant quote:
Celestia Origin is nothing to do with Space Engine - why they decided to make rings look a certain way is up to them. They're done realistically in SE though.
Please reconsider pushing the notion that Celestia is automatically any more correct than SE.
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Celestia (vanilla) vs. Space Engine vs. Celestia Origin

05 Jul 2021 04:16

Like for Celestia, SpaceEngine relies also on user capabilities to make it better. Haumea shape couldn't be precise back then simply because the engine didn't support yet oblateness on two or more axes iirc, as for asteroids I agree, so I suggest to learn how to create spaceships from obj shapes and making surface textures from existing images from the manual. Oumuamua and 67p were added by the devs, the rest was submitted by users.
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