I'd only found about this project a month ago when an author gave a presentation and mentioned how she was using Space Engine to generate fictional universes to test how realistic her story settings could be- things like multi-sun (3+) solar systems, establishing what a habitable zone could be, and planets with permanently dark spots to name a few. Great that it's made accessible for people to customize it far enough to be limited only by their imagination.
While we're at it, just for the absurdity: Google Earth is also open source (albeit without planetary or maps data so it doesn't really fit here): https://github.com/google/earthenterprise
A place I worked from 1999 to about 2002 had what they called a "Keyhole machine." I'm not sure if it was supplied by Keyhole, or it was just the company's machine with Keyhole's software on it, but part of my job was to produce three to ten maps each day for use on a broadcast television station, and it was an incredibly cumbersome process to get the maps from the computer onto videotape (Betacam, IIRC).
Yes, it's great. Unfortunately it doesn't have an abstracted-out renderer, there are deprecated immediate mode OpenGL calls all over the place, and moving the rendering code to more modern OpenGL is hard. It's being done, though.
It's mostly focused on modeling orbits rather than beautiful free-camera renderings, but the visuals aren't terrible and it can model our solar system, exoplanets, render shapes and textures of asteroids, planets, etc.
It's based on the engine I used to build this meteor showers simulation, which has appeared on HN before: https://www.meteorshowers.org/
If you're looking for something that's less of a sandbox and more of a sim, Orbiter is splendidly enjoyable, and as realistic or as fanciful as you care to have it be.
And if you're looking for something slightly less a sim and more of a game, but still spiritually in the genre of "serious play" (especially with enough realism mods), I raise you... Kerbal Space Program.
I don't know. I had a 2+ year break from it until couple months ago; when first launching after the break, it showed me a consent popup... which I happily declined. Thank you, GDPR.
When KSP got bought by Take2 they put their privacy policy they use for all the games they publish on it. As far as I know KSP never did the tracking/analytics and considering how bad the reaction to the new privacy policy was I doubt that they'll start now.
There really is no comparison to this program and it's a shame that it doesn't get more attention and support. I used to use it all the time when I worked at a planetarium giving free form tours of the universe with just a joystick and a microphone. It is the closest I will ever get to exploring the universe, and I've found no better tool for showing others the cosmic perspective.
Have you tried Elite Dangerous? It leans more towards the Sci-Fi aspect but those elements can be ignored and you could just spend your time exploring the milky way like a lot of others do (even more so if you use VR), if I recall they sourced real data to build the universe and extrapolate to fill in the blanks. Sure it isn't the universe but it's still a pretty good way to explore our galaxy
SpaceEngine let's you zoom through _galaxies_ like that old windows screensaver was for stars. I've always sorta understood that the universe was "big", but it never clicked how infinite it really is until I zipped through SpaceEngine for an hour.
That said, Elite: Dangerous is pretty awesome. It helps ground how far away everything is. Even with the game's FTL travel, the fact that it takes actual weeks to reach Sagattarius A* boggles the mind.
I believe the scale isn't correct in many places to enhance gameplay. That said, it is pretty great in VR and the universe replica they created is unmatched in any game.
An extremely cool program for showing interplanetary and star size perspective is Titans of Space Plus in virtual reality.
It takes you on a tour of our solar system showing various bodies at different scales compared with each other. I don't want to spoil the ending sequence, but it nearly floored me.
It's been several years since I've had access to a planetarium to test, but back around 2015 it had support for full-dome projection, though it wasn't bug-free. It may have improved, but planetariums have never made it very high on Vladimir's priority list for the program, at least back then. I think he could easily dominate that market if he went for it, with his only real competition being Uniview (http://www.scalingtheuniverse.com/)
If I remember correctly, I mapped many keyboard shortcuts to navigate quickly and without obstructing the view significantly. That said, it definitely took a lot of flying practice to not get me and the audience sick while shooting around the galaxy.
You need to earn money, sure. But it's really sad that things like this are not OpenSource for people to play around with. I am sure the possibilities would be endless. This seems to make a great foundation for a new MMORPG in space.
P.S. I highly recommend reading Liu Cixin's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy for another creative perspective on why the maximum speed in the universe might be limited.
Time dilation would not really be workable. Otherwise--consider this. Alice travels to proxima centauri at very close to the speed of light, and then immediately returns at the same speed. From alice's perspective, she's spent a leisurely couple of hours, while from bob's perspective she left and returned ~9 years later. Bob spends those 9 years building a monument. The problem is, alice comes back 2 irl hours later, while the monument still takes 9 more irl years to build.
With real time dilation, she could come back to a finished monument; in this case, she can't.
Well, it would be perfectly workable... in singleplayer.
(In multiplayer, I can imagine "time warp credits" that need to be spent before two players can interact. This would allow Alice and Bob to sync up, but I suspect it might break with more than 2 players.)
It all depends on what is your reference point. With a warp engine that pushes all of the atoms in the ship at the same acceleration your biggest problem will be abrasion.
I don't see how this belittles their work. OP's reverence is evident to me. The more valuable the work, the greater the shame in its absence from the collective canon.
Of course we can't blame the creator for their moat; under our current economic system, it's basic self-defense.
It used to be free (not sure it was OSS back then). Then, it seems the author believed monetization was the best option (not saying that's bad or anything, people need to eat).
> You need to earn money, sure. But it's really sad that things like this are not OpenSource
I find myself saying this about basically all unfree software. So much in our economy is redundant, and obfuscated. I understand the place for competition and new ways of doing things, but it's a shame that artificially limiting the proliferation of good ideas is our default survival strategy.
Many thanks! Although it looks like it still needs the Freelancer game data, so, I'm either gonna go digging for the disk or see if I can find the ISO floating around online, I guess.
I do miss freelancer.. From time to time I still think back to how enjoyable an experience it was. Found some solace in Elite Dangerous. It's not the same, but it scratches the itch, and offers something different as well
I think I've missed the moment when it went from free to paid version; still, it's a great piece of software - a good Celestia alternative, which I was using for years and customized with tons of addons
>Will there be a version for Android and iOS?
>A: No, because there would be no point: very few – if any – mobile devices are powerful enough to even theoretically run SpaceEngine.
>very few – if any – mobile devices are powerful enough to even theoretically run SpaceEngine
Am I crazy or are you literally agreeing with what you just cited? "Top-range ipad" = "Very few if any", and even that ipad is probably not enough to handle the software (as per the official minimum specs).
Yep, this is just a bad excuse for not spending the effort to port it. I'm not saying they have to port it, but a simple "it isn't worth the money" would be better.
I love this thing, but I would really like for it work on an iPad. I am not much of a GPU person, so I will ask; is the iPad not powerful enough or is this just a choice of the author?
"Q: Will there be a version for Android and iOS?
A: No, because there would be no point: very few – if any – mobile devices are powerful enough to even theoretically run SpaceEngine."
The A1980 should meet the minimum requirements but I wouldn't expect to be fast or high quality by any means.
Space simulators have come a long way from 1985 when I first played "The Halley Project" on my Commodore 64. It was just as cool as this though (to 15yo me), even though the graphics were limited and it was only our solar system if I remember correctly.
Thanks, definitely keen on a macOS version, looks interesting I've played with Universe Sandbox which is great, but I'd love this level of detail on planetary bodies and procedural generation.
However, one can embed Python for scripting - it’s not rare, but I know game developers tend to prefer lighter languages like Lua.
As far as developing games in Python only, it’s certainly doable - there are raw SDL/OpenGL/etc bindings, and some dedicated libraries like PyGame. It’s not a super common choice though.
> Is it becoming a thing to develop games in Python, or is it mostly just hobbyists?
To what was said previously I can only add that huge piece of Civilization 4 was implemented in Python scripting. It's not the whole game, but huge part of gameplay code.
The MMO EVE Online has a substantial, if not the vast majority (I never looked at the non-Python code so don't actually know how much of it there is), of its code written in Python. Most of that Python code is gameplay code. The graphics, networking, and audio layers for example are NOT written in Python.
“The graphics, networking, and audio layers for example are NOT written in Python.” - so...the game’s code is not written in Python at all, except some gameplay scripting.
I would like to design planets : like earth, but 1.2 times the mass... And see what the atmosphere and oceans are like. Are there any engines that would let me do that?
When I tried it VR support was pretty rough control-wise. Some UI stuff looked like it was trying to work but was borked, and also it looked like custom control binding was necessary to get it more useful.
Coming eventually, it's been promised, and Space Engine is a long term project, the first public release was in 2009 and it's been continually improving since, and launched 1.0 just recently. It's a one-man project.
In the meantime it works great in wine. You don't even need dxvk or anything.
Developer was mid making a No Mans sky clone then got bored. "Screw it, I'll just publish the world generator I have for a few bucks and call it a day"
Newest release requires payment. You can only use an older release if you take a survey.
Having used an older release, I am unimpressed. Half controls don’t work and the universe itself is not as explorable as you’d think. I have yet to figure out how to find a planet without going to one of the bookmarked ones.
