Star browser: generation of systems is moved to parallel threads. Now it uses all the CPU cores, filling the table is accelerated by multiple times (depending on the number of additional cores), and FPS is not affected. Maximum count of stars is increased to 10000....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj-VcZY_nwE...
I used the Wiki database to make translation of names of all named stars to Russian. Next step is making this for other languages....
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....
A small update: multiple clouds layers on terrestrial planets:...
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...
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...
Improved rings texture and color variety:...
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,...
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....