The latest update has finished public beta testing and is now being released to everyone.

Why we've been quiet

You may be wondering why we didn't post about any public beta updates even though we released some. In short, it's because things have been very chaotic lately. Vladimir and his family have been directly impacted by both the events in Ukraine and the consequences thereof, which forced us to spend almost all of our time and attention on securing the future of SpaceEngine and making sure that friends and family remain safe. This resulted in development being put on hold for a couple of weeks. While development is now ongoing, it remains possible that future circumstances may cause additional interruptions due to the unstable situation. The crisis also briefly impacted our efforts to expand the development team, and progress has resumed there as well.

Update 0.990.43.1875

With that out of the way, we can talk about the update itself. This update - version 0.990.43.1875 - mainly focuses on bug fixes and minor improvements. Highlights include:

Updated exoplanet catalog

MP3 music file support

Indonesian localization

Tooltips are now displayed in the Wiki and other tables (viewable by mousing over the cell)

Switching from OpenAL to SDL Mixer X (should prevent startup failures many users have had)

Fix for the crash when visiting the galaxy Centaurus A

New tonemap option (ACES Fitted)

Significantly improved appearance of ray craters

We also want to share some of the other cool stuff we've been working on lately, which deserves a whole news post unto itself, so be on the lookout for that to be posted in the near future 🙂

Changelog

Updated exoplanets catalog (March 15, 2022)

Updated localizations, added Indonesian

Optimized performance of the Star browser

Fixed various bugs in the Star browser

SDL library upgraded to 2.0.14

Sound system changed from OpenAL to SDL_mixer_X

Added mp3 support for music files

Tooltips in Wiki and other tables (view by holding mouse over the cell)

Tooltips are rendered on top of the cell, except for some special cases

Tooltips in Wiki displays decimal values for cells with degrees and time

Added BB-codes for date and time (YYYY, MM, DD etc)

Updated credits

New tonemap option (ACES Fitted)

Fixed crash near Centaurus A and (other galaxies created with CubeMap method)

Fixed body axial tilt display

Wiki shows body axial tilt (second column) and obliquity in relation to star (third column)

Fixed incorrect velocity vector of minor moons of Solar System gas giants

Fixed bug with displaying of the system barycenter in the Chart mode in some catalog binary star systems

Fixed/updated craters

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