News

SpaceEngine – Free Space Simulation With Procedurally Generated Planets – Version 0.9.7.2 Released

11 Comments

Vladimir Romanyuk has released a new version of his free space simulation and 3D astronomy program, SpaceEngine. This new version of SpaceEngine comes with support for Oculus Rift, an upgraded memory manager, more precise LOD setting for planets, as well as many optimizations in the engine core.

Those interested can download SpaceEngine V0.9.7.2 from here.

And here is the changelog for this latest version of SpaceEngine:

Major updates:
    • Oculus Rift support
    • 3D monitor and 3D TV support (anamorphic stereo pair mode, shutter glasses mode)
    • 3D anaglyph glasses support
    • Full joystick and gamepads support, multiple devices allowed
    • Animated procedural stellar corona
    • New star rendering
    • Night textures on planets: city lights, lava
    • Thermal lighting of a planet and its clouds based on: tidal heating, solar heating, young age
    • Volcano with lava flows
    • Melted lava planets and moons
    • Updated soundtracks
    • Ability to change some measurement units: parsec to light year, kilometer to mile, Kelvin to Celsius and Fahrenheit
    • Hapke BDRF: opposition effect and zero-phase glare on dusty planets, planet script parameters to control the effect
    • Planetary system chart mode: compare size of planets, moons and stars in the system
Space ships:
    • Added option for multiple preset cameras for spacecraft
    • Enabled retro engines
    • New ship models
Astronomy:
    • ESI value now uses average planet surface temperature and doesn’t change with time
    • Improved solar spots
    • Updated textures for many Solar system objects
    • Added accurate rings to the asteroid/centaur Chariklo
    • New procedural clouds texture
    • Updated brown dwarf appearance
    • New pink atmosphere model for brown dwarves and some planets
    • New physical model of planetary atmospheres (2-layered: adiabatic troposphere and isothermal stratosphere)
    • Elevations on gas giants are counted from the atmosphere level with pressure of 1 atmosphere (~1 bar)
    • Procedural generation of orbital ascending node in the catalog system for planets with unknown ascending node, based on planets with known ascending node
    • Improved planet temperature calculation: it now takes into account the internal and tidal heating
    • Glowing hot planets illuminates neighbouring objects
    • More accurate probabilities for generation of white dwarves, neutron stars, and black holes
    • Red giants now have 100% probability of hot planets
    • Icy moons smaller than 400 km and rocky moons smaller than 600 km are classified as asteroids and dwarf moons
    • Improved ice specular on terras and deserts
    • Large scale albedo variations on planet surface
    • Computing snow altitude based on atmosphere model
    • Increased level of detail of asteroids
    • New planet script parameter “Panspermia”, for specifying that life did not originate on that world
    • “Life origin” field in the Wiki describes how life originated on that world
    • Dwarf moon names are changed to a form like “3.D4”
    • More realistic generation of planets density
Interface:
    • Improved quality of black hole and warp field distortion effect
    • Animated Selection pointer
    • Simple GUI editor (debug feature)
    • Atmospheric pressure and air temperature at the user’s location is displayed in the object’s info panel and in the Wiki
    • Wiki pages update automatically after changing the selected object
    • Wiki pages don’t switch after changing the selected object or Wiki opened/closed
    • Wiki window is now more compact
    • Ability to select the screenshot image format in the Player settings menu
    • Main menu scales to any screen resolution
    • Filter by planet and star parameters in the Star browser
    • Updated interface texture
    • Updated toolbars appearance
    • Lock button on bottom toolbars now have 3 states: lock, half-hide, and hide
    • Added Display settings and Main Menu buttons to the left toolbar
    • Updated ship control panel
    • View direction altitude in the Fish Eye mode can be configured
    • Selection now work in the Fish Eye mode
    • New texture-based mouse cursors
    • Many visual improvements to the Map Mode
    • Expanded Display settings menu with controls for projection and 3D mode
    • Expanded Controls settings menu, with ability to customize all mouse and joysticks axes and all joysticks buttons
    • Brown dwarves size in a Solar system browser is in a planets size scale, not a stars one
Engine:
    • Many optimizations in the engine core
    • Upgraded memory manager
    • Some shaders are rewritten to the GLSL 3.3 core profile
    • Reduced number of planet shaders
    • Forced HDR mode and Bloom effect
    • Optimized lens flare code
    • More precise LOD setting for planets
    • Implemented the pak file system (zip archives)
    • Default texture packs and addons are now in pak files
    • New catalog update/addon system
    • Significantly improved catalog loading performance
    • Implemented separate texture sets for RGB and Alpha or higher and lower byte of elevation map for planets
    • Time stamps printed in the log
    • Settings for minimum distance for procedural stars and brown dwarves added to the config
    • Ability to edit a barycenter parameter in the Planet editor
    • Console variables to control the mouse cursor: “HardwareCursor” and “HideCursor”
    • Surface color parameters for gas giants and brown dwarves are renamed to colorLayer0 … colorLayer7
    • Palettes for gas giants and ice giants are split into 7 ranges according to their temperature class
    • Palettes for brown dwarves are split into 3 ranges according to their spectral type (L, T, Y)
    • Swapped neg_z and pos_z faces in the Export Skybox function
    • Added the entire ship model rotation parameter in the config and in the editor
    • Improved life panspermia code, new probability parameters in the universe.cfg
    • GUI windows don’t change their positions when SE window resized
    • Added “ModulateColor” parameter for planet scripts; can modify the color of planet textures and also modify opacity for cloud textures
    • Script “Exposure” parameters for surface, clouds and ocean are replaced with one global “Brightness” parameter
    • Script “Exposure” parameter for rings is replaced with the “Brightness” parameter
    • Added “stable” motion blur (blur length independent of framerate), can be adjusted in config/user.cfg or in the console
    • Solitary black holes particles are now invisible
    • Accelerated rendering of star-like particles of planets and ships
    • Updated SolarSys3000.sc
    • Removed error message if the local database file did not found
    • Added console variables for collision detection clamp and near plane clamp, log stamps, motion blur length, and many others (read docs/console.txt for reference)
Bug fixes:
  • Fixed bug with “islands” on oceanias
  • Fixed spacecraft and lens flare textures not loading in Immediate loading mode
  • Fixed a bug where catalog neutron stars could have very low temperatures
  • Fixed Roche limit calculations
  • Hacked fix of screen edge artifact of gravity lens effect
  • Fixed rounding errors in GUI sliders (sticking at certain points when using arrow buttons)
  • Fixed not saving of mouse axis settings
  • Fixed a bug with too high speed of clouds on tidally locked planets and moons
  • Fixed bug with clouds on catalog planets with low atmospheric pressure
  • Fixed problems with fullscreen if display resolution changed
  • Fixed a bug with procedural stars with infinite luminosity generated
  • Fixed mistake in FXAA implementation
  • Fixed some bugs in the planet editor
  • Fixed some bugs in the lens flares code
  • Fixed automatic binding to a planet after controlling a spacecraft
  • Fixed resetting of the mouse-controlled ailerons/elevator angles after using keyboard controls
  • Fixed atmosphere scattering models precomputing code
  • Fixed orbital paths cutting in the Map mode
  • Fixed “micro debris ring” and asteroids sharing the same orbits with moons
  • Fixed “square star” bug
  • Fixed “pink rings” bug
  • Fixed some bugs with eclipse shadows
  • Fixed mipmaps generation on planets and ships
  • Fixed bug with closing the Universe Map
  • Fixed sun lens flare rendering mode when ship is warping with autopilot
  • Fixed “negative lens flare” effect when close to a star
  • Fixed wrong orientation of the star’s equator relative to the planetary system plane
  • Fixed some bugs in the planetary system generator
  • Fixed hole in red giant stars
  • Fixed a crash at first-time nebula model generation
  • Fixed a mistake in the procedural white dwarf class generation
  • Fixed smoothing of the font
  • Fixed “Interstellar” mode of ships in some star cluster’s planetary systems
  • Fixed lags caused by ships physics updating
  • Fixed the “barycenter star in binary system” artifact
  • Fixed rendering of the Wiki preview for star clusters, galaxies, and nebulae
  • Fixed Wiki preview disappearing after selecting the barycenter
  • Fixed rotation parameters for moons
  • Fixed density of small planets
  • Fixed dwarf moons density and Roche limit check
  • Fixed bug with the number of aurora particles sliders in the Planet editor
  • Fixed bug with DXT1 textures loading and wrong rendering of the modular ships’ trusses