SpaceEngine

Title pretty much explains it all. Why are all the catalog clusters so much bigger than the procedural ones? Catalog ones will have 10s or 100s of thousands of stars, while the largest procedural globular I've ever found only had around 7000 stars. Is this intentional or planned to be changed?

It might be due to the limitations of the engine. SpaceEngine cannot generate procedural galaxies with a diameter of more than 326.16 kly (100 kilo-parsecs), even though there are catalog galaxies with diameters exceeding that, such as NGC 4889 and IC 1101.

SpaceHopper, I think you are confusing galaxies with globular clusters.  Globular clusters are much smaller, on the order of a hundred parsecs.  They're essentially spherical clusters of stars and there tend to be many of them within a single galaxy.

wvfish, I confirm your observation.  The procedural globulars do appear to have much fewer stars, though they are of approximately the correct size.  I'm not sure of the reason for this (could be several possible reasons), but it does not appear to be a known bug or limitation and I don't see mention of it in a quick search on the new or old forum.  So perhaps it can be added to list.

Watsisname, I know that they are different. I just thought that what wvfish mentioned might have had the same causes as the galaxy thing.

The size and density of procedural star clusters is controlled by config\main-user.cfg. The default mean radius of globular clusters is 30 parsecs. You can try to edit these values in the config file, but you would run the risk of going to stars whose catalog numbers don't appear in any other users' instances of Space Engine.

I'm more interested in the NebulaGenerator settings in the next section of the config file. If the mean radius of procedural diffuse nebulae is 3 parsecs, this makes the Carina Nebula, which is 50 parsecs in radius, the biggest nebula in the entire Space Engine universe. Sure, the config file provides mean values, but maybe the distribution of procedural objects needs to be tweaked so there that there can be very rare outliers.

Julian, i think NGC 640, at around 1300 ly in diameter is larger than the Carina Nebula. Try going to Triangulum and you should be able to see it if you look for it.

Also Wvfish, try going inside the star clusters, which will maybe make your pc will load the dim stars.