For what it's worth please take your time with this software. Whatever it does become. I just wanted to offer some kind words to you all. I'm no programmer, or astronomer. Not even too heavy into video games. I don't know anything about Halo, or Star Wars, or Star Trek. I'm only casually interested in space.

It seems like people are coming to this and expecting some grand marketing and content strategy similar to EA or Microsoft. With feature-complete shiny new bells and whistles every few months constantly searching for new ways to get people hooked and playing as much as possible. Instead of a home-grown embryo of creativity and possibility that spawned from the devotion of a single person more than a decade ago. Videogame, software, simulation, engine. The simple fact of the matter is that we have purchased a virtual experience. A literal analog of the entire universe in the most realistic and faithful possible sense. If that's not something worth thirty dollars to you, so be it. That's perfectly fine. I feel you there. But art does not owe me or you any laurels, and creators are not blood-bound to satisfy every last demand from every last person.

Sometimes things are made with very specific economic or concrete goals in mind. Like addressing a problem, or lack of a solution. Sometimes people create things just for the joy of creating things, or they create without fully realizing why they're creating when they began. And sometimes yet, the purpose and intention of a work belongs to the creators, and the creators alone. All art will always have the right to simply exist; always. Regardless of whether or not it fulfils an objective purpose. Economic demand or not. The right to exist, to be expressed and- if things go well- maybe even to thrive.  

SpaceEngine is a fascinating view of reality. It's been amazing. Thank you all so much. 

Is there any updates yet? What happened with the 3d clouds? We will get some important update this year?

Just point me to a game or engine or whatever which does all the stuff this engine is doing (no matter if it stays at the current version - it will still run in 15 years). I am not aware of any software which does so. After 10 years of existence of this software. I know you won't undertand it or be able to point me to a similar software.

Mr. parampampam seems to know the program better than the developer, maybe he should be hired as a consultant. I'm sure he would know how to solve complex issues of any engine in no time.

The forum is empty.

And it's been like that since a while. New forum users nowadays are mainly bots wanting to leverage posts to hide links to their inane websites, for the most part scams.
But we already talked plenty about this in other threads. TLDR: the majority of users jumped to other communication platforms, and the majority of developers too, as Mr parampampam should know well, judging from their posts. But why not using it to justify some thesis, right?

Dev team is running left and right.

To go where? Last time I checked, the developers team has grown in the last years. And other members not directly working on the code have entered the stage.
So, second made-up point.

But he is completely incapable of working with people, he lives in a world of his own complexes and fears.

Oh, the personal attack card. A classic.
I could stop here, but...

meaningless feature made up of just invisible digits (like a funny update with temperatures that don’t have visual and don’t affect anything)

Despite the fact that many users see "major" features as purely visual upgrades, in an engine those "invisible digits" that "don't affect anything" (they do) are paramount to following upgrades. Of course, for Mr. parampampam it's all BS. He knows.
But again, we have already discussed this. I'm afraid at this stage, devs have some work to do here and there in order to add visual features.
Granted, having the program running decently with most of the current hardware as of today, it's hard, very hard. I'm afraid those "invisible digits" are more relevant as you would think.

For the unprovoked personal attack, minus 50 points to Slytherin, Mr. parampampam.

Granted, having the program running decently with most of the current hardware as of today, it's hard, very hard. I'm afraid those "invisible digits" are more relevant as you would think.

There is a difference between (trying to) build a hard-scifi game / engine and building a soft-scifi game / engine where formulas are made up and nothing would work this way in our real universe.
Hard scifi is more difficult to make than soft-scifi, because everything has to be accurate. This needs more work.
Doing it in real-time without (much if any) stuttering is even harder.

But people are trying to build and building hard scifi engine and games (as people did for the game "Children of a Dead Earth") where everything which is realizable in-game could also work in our universe and built physically.

Other people don't care about hard scifi-ness and are happy with made up numbers instead of accurrate numbers.

Sorry for off topic but I just had to vent this off here.

Suuuuup, any significant updates? Like landscape's shadows?

Suuuuup, any significant updates? Like landscape's shadows?

Conversion to Vulkan from the existing OpenGL implementation is ongoing, a necessary step towards visually significant updates.
As you may have noticed, catalog updates and fixes have been the focus of latest updates on Steam.
And other meaningful updates are in the works, thanks to added workforce.

Suuuuup, any significant updates? Like landscape's shadows?

Conversion to Vulkan from the existing OpenGL implementation is ongoing, a necessary step towards visually significant updates.
As you may have noticed, catalog updates and fixes have been the focus of latest updates on Steam.
And other meaningful updates are in the works, thanks to added workforce.

How much time do you think it will still take approximately? Switching to a different rendering api must be a nightmare, especially considering Space Engine has so many complex shaders... probably more than any other game out there.

How much time do you think it will still take approximately? Switching to a different rendering api must be a nightmare, especially considering Space Engine has so many complex shaders... probably more than any other game out there.

It is a difficult task, not merely because of rendering APIs. Consolidating existing code is also a concurrent task, the final goal being a better workflow for future versions of the engine. This means a lot for the future development of the engine, and consequently for future games based on the engine.

Sorry, I can't really say how much does it takes. It's actually weird to see sometimes people here or on Discord making predictions based on past development, other games, personal experiences... We have seen a very recent new addition in the coding team, I feel I can safely say that this will surely change timings for the better in the development process.

I often wonder what the end goal of this is, a "1.0" if you will. Though I don't even know if this game will ever be considered "finished" or receive updates past a 1.0 version. There's always so much new stuff regarding space to check out, rework or implement.

Have you guys ever potentially considered a possible collaboration with guys behind Universe Sandbox? Wouldn't have to be something massive, but it'd still be cool to see perhaps a nod here or there.

How is the conversion to vulcan going? 

I often wonder what the end goal of this is, a "1.0"

This project never had a plan, a roadmap or a production approach. This is a utopian project without specific goals and their implementation, so it cannot have a finishing point even in theory. It's like building communism - no one knew what it was or how to do it, but they did it all their lives. In generations.

This project never had a plan, a roadmap or a production approach. This is a utopian project without specific goals and their implementation, so it cannot have a finishing point even in theory. It's like building communism - no one knew what it was or how to do it, but they did it all their lives. In generations

Even though the developers of SpaceEngine refuse to believe this, unfortunately i have to support your idea as well now.

This program is dying out and very little progress has been made in the past 5 years of SpaceEngine being in Early Access on Steam, the only major thing added being volumetric black holes. SpaceEngine's developers are probably forgetting that attempting to design the whole, 1 to 1 scale observable universe with a ton of scientifically-accurate visual detail (forget the accurate, behind the scenes details such as accurately-projected planetary orbits, or temperatures on certain planets, no one will play a program a long time just to look at numbers and simple occurences) is an extremely hard project never made possible ever.

They most likely wont be able to achieve their project no matter how much they attempt to say that this is not true, it is simply not possible to design such a massive project, given how slow progress is, how big of a design they are attempting to make into reality, and given how small the team is financially and in terms of member size. 

Science fiction space exploration games like No Mans Sky are advancing and are attracting more players than ever, while SpaceEngine is slowly losing active users on Steam due to the lack of visual features/updates.

SpaceEngine not only is dying out, but is riddled with bugs that have never been fixed. There is the classic bug that has existed in a lot of versions of SpaceEngine for years now that affects the orders planets generate in in a planetary system, with an alleged fix (version 0.991) being announced years ago but never implemented, and later removed for public access. There are a lot of visual bugs at times, specific crashes, and another major bug with the recent climate model update screwing up a lot of things regarding the temperatures of procedurally-generated Earth-like planets and the realism of liquid water existing on certain worlds whose atmosphere might or might not allow it.

I expect this program to be fully dead within the next decade as progress continues to be extremely slow and space-themed fictional games advance.

How is the conversion to vulcan going? 

Still waiting some answer xd