Апр 16 2013

Localized names of stars

I used the Wiki database to make translation of names of all named stars to Russian. Next step is making this for other languages....

Апр 07 2013

Animated model of Jupiter

User brainstorm made the dynamic model of Jupiter. It will be included in the next release.Technically, it is a 10 clouds layers, moving with different speeds. A speed is computed from actual observational data. On these animations, clouds speed is artificially increased by 100,000 times....

Мар 19 2013

Real asteroids catalog

I made a small program that processes the asteroids database from the Minor Planets Center. It have 600,000+ asteroids, Kuiper belt objects and other small bodies. Currently SE can't handle such great amount of objects, so program makes a selection of Main belt asteroids larger...

Мар 05 2013

Comet passes Mars

This is an example of using SpaceEngine for sceintific visualization. On October 19, 2014 the comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) will pass extremely close to Mars, up to 52,000 km from its center (distance is calculated based on 148-days observational data). This video shows how...

Мар 02 2013

Star browser

I implemented the "Star browser": it gets a list of stars in a certain radius from the camera (your current location). Some properties like distance, spectral class and luminosity are returned by engine immediately. But most interesting properties - number of stars in a system,...

Мар 01 2013

Export textures menu update

Above is an updated export textures menu. It now exports the diffuse texture and normal map as an RGB image, and specular texture and bump map as a grayscale image. No more RGBA images with alpha channel, which are too complex to understand for someone....

Дек 25 2012

Oblate stars and planets and binary shader cache

Today's updates:Automatic clearing of the cache when hardware is changed Saving compiled shaders binaries to the cache and fast loading Preloading all shaders at startup (optional) Oblate planets and stars, automatic calculation of oblateness Gravity darkening of oblate starsThe OpenGL 4.1 has a long-awaited function implemented - getting binary...

Дек 05 2012

Ship model cache and other updates

Latest updates:The [End] button rotates camera horizontally in respect to planet surface Importing ship models in OBJ fromat with materials and multiple textures Cache for textures and modelsSo I finished the cache for (ships) textures and models. Now it is possible to use models that share the...