i'm trying to make things flow smoothly in realtime navigation or something. here's a clip of what i am trying to get right.


i dont have a joystick but i'm using a haandheld wireless keyboard to try to modulate my speed and turning to orbit planets, skim the surface and give a compacted tour de force of the simulator while i navigate, and keep the good recordings. i also ended up messing up and pressing an orbit or follow button and made a part of a clip (below) which i liked, but i couldn't get out of the rotating and all my controls were malfunctioning but i'll post it anyway beause i like what it was before the malfunction and is what i want to be able to do without losing controls. it is a black hole flyby with overbright at 100 and the gravitational lensing shown,

Is it planned to be able to record executable scripts at a fixed frame rate? I think this would be a nice way to make videos of space engine with every frame 100% loaded and high quality.

Yes, this is already works.

-Possibility of moons having moons since it's theoretically possible if the object is in the Hill Sphere of the moon and far enough from the planet they are orbiting. I know Elite Dangerous has this type of configuration and it looks very cool and still is realistic.

You're wrong, moons of moons are not theoretically possible. Even for lightweight planet and very far moon, like our Earth's Moon, its satellite could exist just few years.

-A simple thing which has always been something a bit bothering; prograde/retrograde etc. manoeuvres are always rotating the ship in a certain position BEFORE orienting the ship in the right direction which makes the manoeuvre slower and can disorient when not looking at the ship (in orbit camera f.e.). This simple change would certainly make a difference for people using ships because it becomes quite boring after a while.

I really don't understand that you are asking.

-Lastly, the biggest suggestion I have: a fuel unit (in gallons/liters) telling you how much fuel you have consumed since your ship has spawned. This could give a primitive gameplay element leading to some roleplay travels during which a certain amount must not be exceeded. To go even further, maybe being able to set this limit in-game making, as a consequence, when exceeded, engines useless.

Fuel system is a large work, not has been started yet.

How about a life type called Intelligent Life, if the planet had this kind of life, it would have randomly generated city lights, some ships in orbit, and even boosts the chance of other planets in the system to have life.

This arises a very complex problem of how to procedurally generate realistic alien sctructures. Everything you could suggest certainly will be antropocentric. Even cities are human's thing. Design of ships, structures on planet, lifeforms? AI for all of this? It is too complex problem on this stage.

I have a suggestion, something that might have been suggested before but I couldn't find it no matter how deep I searched:

Could you add some sort of a molly-guard to "Set Current Time" UI option? I don't know, a confirmation dialog or something? Or just move it somewhere else, so that it can't be clicked accidentally while resetting time compression? Because my mouse might not survive another murder atempt when I slam it against the desk after I click that button (again) in the middle of a randezvous, or worse - a 5g burn. It might sound stupid at first, but if you're simulating a few hundred years into the future/past this button has a power equivalent to a vacuum metastability event.

LOL do you mean removing "reset time" control from spaceships gameplay? This is exactly why I split SE into "planetarium" and "single player" recently. In Single player, where you can pilot ships, no "reset time" option exist (and no "reverse time", because it is a cheat). You only able to adjust time flow speed in a limited range (0.01 - 10,000) and pause/resume time.

I have a suggestion, something that might have been suggested before but I couldn't find it no matter how deep I searched:

Could you add some sort of a molly-guard to "Set Current Time" UI option? I don't know, a confirmation dialog or something? Or just move it somewhere else, so that it can't be clicked accidentally while resetting time compression? Because my mouse might not survive another murder atempt when I slam it against the desk after I click that button (again) in the middle of a randezvous, or worse - a 5g burn. It might sound stupid at first, but if you're simulating a few hundred years into the future/past this button has a power equivalent to a vacuum metastability event.

LOL do you mean removing "reset time" control from spaceships gameplay? This is exactly why I split SE into "planetarium" and "single player" recently. In Single player, where you can pilot ships, no "reset time" option exist (and no "reverse time", because it is a cheat). You only able to adjust time flow speed in a limited range (0.01 - 10,000) and pause/resume time.

So what is the amount the funding goal has to reach for Vlad to hire another developer?

It's not a funding goal, but funding rate. Today I have a rate of $600-$800 per month, obviously this is not enough to hire even one person.

In the in-game editor, is there a way for automatically calculating length of orbit (like 1-year) based on semimajor-axis and radius of black hole given its mass? Like you could click a button that says 'Calculate' and it sets the expected parameters. Also hide luminosity for non-stars, etc.

You may add a planet to the catalog, describing on;y it's SMA there. SE will calculate orbital period automatically. But yes, this is not a direct method...

Another way - spawn a ship and make it a circular orbit. Orbital period will be displayed in the orbit's info block.

Why automatic calculation is not implemented in the editor - well, because there are a lot of parameters which depend on each other in a complex way. For example, planet radius depends on a planet mass, atmosphere pressure depends on temperature and chemical composition, etc. It's hard to keep control over everything, it also will be annoying to the modder if game will change unwanted parameters itself. So editor completely relies on modder.

realmezzzz wrote:
Gaia catalogue has distance data for only 2 million stars which is essential.

The Gaia catalogue "per se" has not been released with the parallax measurements yet. But the first release, Gaia's DR1, has been integrated with the Hipparcos catalogue (the one that has 2 million stars) to make the parallaxes of Hipparcos more accurate.

In reality the GAIA catalogue would have parallaxes for more than 1.400.000.000 of stars indeed. You just have to wait a few years. Integrating all of that in SE would be trully awesome indeed, I don't think the engine is prepared for this amount of data but Vladimir (A.K.A the creator of the SE universe) said a few times in the old forum that the changes in the core of the engine that he has made will probably allow for this some time soon.

Yes, GAIA catalog will be added, but engine indeed needs some changes to achieve this. You can't simply load 1 billion stars into RAM and render them. Something similar to tiled planet textures needed (ie start will be loaded by a cubic blocks on-demand).

It appears that the accretion disks around supermassive black holes rotate much faster than the speed of light. Maybe this is just the result of scaling up from normal sized black holes?

This is possible, rotation of the disk is fake, because there is no way to control "speed appearance" of a procedural noise. Real rotation period is calculated for some radius (3 Rg if I recall correctly), but rest of the disk rotates by it's own "noise" pattern.

The problem is that the current implementation of accretion disks is limited to rigid rotation (and a shrinking), so all parts of it rotate with the same angular velocity.

No, they are not "rigid". Accretion disks uses a procedural animated texture which is more "shrinked" at outer sides and "stretched" in the inner side. But it's hard to make it follow a real angular speed curve.
Anyway, accretion disks will be changed to volumetric ones in the future.

In the in-engine ship editor (Shift-F2), it might be nice to have a button to duplicate an engine effect or docking port/corridor with the same parameters as the currently selected item (adjust the name with a suffix). And perhaps offset the location slightly so you can easily see it compared to the original. And of course be able to adjust the exhaust colour.

Already implemented.

The ability to drag the selected item into approximate position with the mouse would be nice. I know dragging an object in 3-D space on a 2-D screen can be somewhat problematic, but then that's where having buttons to instantly call up a plan, or profile view of the ship. Then dragging will be done in the xy, xz, or yz plane.

In plans - embed the online ship editor into the game itself.

 3D animations of star surfaces of Red/Blue giants and beyond, and for stars like our sun or Red Dwarfs, a noise function could be added to make tesselation ,appearance of spots, and so on.
http://dunnalex.com/ViewProject.php?id=%276%27 
(Example of procedural 3D function that resembles a star surface in motion).

Stars will be changed to a raymarching rendering technique, like a new nebulae. Example of what could be achieved:
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XlSSzK

Also the planets could have a ver simple climate system, where polar caps varie in size, cloud formation or/and temperature could differ depending on the local terrain using a logic system, and humitidy (Wich interfers on cloud formation) could be a variable that varies on the presence of lakes, seas, desert areas, and etc...

SE does not support dynamic changes of the terrain. So those things are simply impossible to implement. Maybe one day in future...
And modelling of weather is too complex thing even with supercomputers. In SE it could be only faked somehow. Anyway, this is a task for a far future.

 Dunes (not moving ones) would be heavily appreciated. Remembering that due to different pressures and atmospheric conditions, the dunes would look different on various planets, but only few variables would need to be added.

Dunes are already implemented, just search for them.

Space Engine needs to have a Sandbox mode feature that gives players the ability to create their own simulations and also the ability to create their own planets, stars and galaxies.

Planet formation is something that I always wanted to do but it is currently not possible to do in Space Engine. This feature must be created because a Sandbox mode is greatly needed for simulations and planetary body creation as well as star and galaxy formation.

Speaking of N-body simulation, it would be not hard to add those. But keep in mind that you will be limited to 10-20 thousand particles, and even less if introducing complex interaction like merging to form planets. Even more complex task - how to render those realistically. SE does not support dynamic changes on planets, so this should be implemented first. Otherwise you will see just coloured balls or balls with a simple texture, like in Universe Sandbox. So this will have nothing in common with SpaceEngine, completely different program with it own purpose. What's the point of this?

Gravity simulations such as dust particles to combine to later on form comets and then form asteroids to become planets is something that I consider to be added to Space Engine. It is very important that Space Engine grows into something that not only gives players the ability to travel in space, but also gives players the ability to create objects such as comets, asteroids, moons, planets, stars and galaxies.

Simulation on such level is simply impossible. PC with very descent GPU (GTX1080) could simulate maybe 100k particles in real time. But you are asking about something like 10^40 particles (mass of the Solar system divided by mass of a dust grain).

Space Engine must have the ultra texture pack included in the .exe download of the Engine.

No. Only maybe 1% of users are interested in 40+ GB of those textures.
Wise versa, it's better to have ability to stream textures online, like Google Earth. Then SE distribution could shrink down to 300 MB.

If you're standing on the surface of a planet, but you click on the sky so that the planet is no longer selected, you currently can't reselect the planet just by clicking anywhere on the landscape -- you have to point the camera straight down in order to select the center of the planet. And this doesn't even work at night when the landscape is dark. I know SpaceEngineer mentioned making the mouse cursor work more like a "laser pointer" as part of VR development, but can we also have a keyboard shortcut for "select the object you are currently following"?

This is already has been changed, now clicking anywhere on a planet sphere selects it. This is not a terrain-precise, but better anyway.