Current work

During past 2 month I continue work on preparing for release on Steam. I passed one iteration with Steam, and now, after fixing all issues, is ready to send them the new update. After they accept it as "ready for release", I will be ready...

HarbingerDawn’s stream #15

Next stream is scheduled on Thursday, December 20, at 18:00 UTC. Post in this thread what you'd like to see in the stream!...

Preparing for 0.990 release

I preparing the first build to be sent to the Steam for revision. I completed the most wanted feature - tutorials - and will switch to content updating. This includes integration of new nebulae and galaxies models, planet palettes and textures, and updating catalogs. Probably...

Current work

Preparing for release is a challenging time. It is full of work: complete the development of many new systems, pass a large number of tests, and fix a huge number of emerging bugs, most of which are quite small. Some of the work listed below...

Animated scene in the main menu

One of the "must have" items before the release is the replacement of a simple background picture in the main menu by a 3D animated scene with planets. As it is done in almost every space game. In SE, with its specialization on rendering of...

The Map mode upgrade

HarbingerDawn gave an idea of ​​how to make the Map mode more interesting. If you disable labels, lines and grid on the level of galaxies, and increase the magnitude limit, you will be able to see the large-scale structure of the Universe: [bs_image_comparison id='2634'] Slide the handle...

OVERVIEW release for Oculus Rift!

Over the past month I have been on vacation, exploring the USA. Now I am back to work, and first I would like to mention that OVERVIEW was released on the Oculus platform on July 12. It is now available for purchase on the Oculus...

Current work

After implementing constellations, I continued various work on the engine, and support/development of Overview. Most work is technical: finalizing previous work, optimizations, bugfixes. But some may be considered as user-noticeable features: Added more error checks for the catalogs loading Script command to switch the audio output device...

Constellations

Introducing a new feature, which SpaceEngine needed for a long time - constellations! They were implemented with collaboration with ESO ePOD - European Southern Observatory's Education and Public Outreach department. Special thanks to Nico Bartman. Features: Displaying of lines, boundaries and labels (names) for all 88 +...

Texture compression

As I have mentioned in my previous blog post, I want to use texture compression for the terrain engine, in order to reduce its memory requirements. All graphics cards support S3TC - a lossy texture compression algorithm, which reduces the memory footprint of the texture...