Space Engine – Free Universe Simulator

I just downloaded this and was amazed by how beautiful everything is. Of course we have no idea what planets out of our solar system look like, but it is fun to imagine. Most of it seems plausible.

I love taking screenshots to use for my desktop background. Beats the boring Windows logo that I had on there before. :thumbup:

Now if only we can implement these graphics into the Orbiter world and incorporate interstellar travel, that would be icing on the cake for our already superb space simulator.
 
I just downloaded this and was amazed by how beautiful everything is. Of course we have no idea what planets out of our solar system look like, but it is fun to imagine. Most of it seems plausible.

You mean other star systems? I'm pretty sure we have a good idea of what Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are like...:lol:
 
We don't have that a good an idea of what Ceres or Pluto are like. Our knowledge of them is far better than our knowledge of exoplanets, but we don't have as good an understanding of their surfaces as we do of say, the moons of Uranus or Neptune (which have been imaged from relatively close distances).
 
We don't have that a good an idea of what Ceres or Pluto are like. Our knowledge of them is far better than our knowledge of exoplanets, but we don't have as good an understanding of their surfaces as we do of say, the moons of Uranus or Neptune (which have been imaged from relatively close distances).

Well, we'll soon have a better understanding of them when Dawn arrives at Ceres, and New Horizons arrives at Pluto.
 
A whole three years isn't soon! I want to see 'proper' pictures of these objects now! :rant:

:P
 
Space Engine is a free OpenGL based program witch allow you to explore the universe in 3D, in a Celestia style. With it you can choose to see the known world or you can go inside various real or generated galaxies to see procedural stars, planets and moons. Space Engine can generate from galaxies to lands. It has a newton-based (but reallyyy simple) physics engine allowing you to travel like a ship. The 0.96 update adds real spacecraft (by "real" I mean that you can see them, not that they are or were really launched). So, this is a picture from Space Engine:
scr00000.png

(you can see what type of "spacecraft" are in this game, and how procedural planets renders)

A new feature came with 0.96 is black hole gravitational lensing, like that:
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Space Engine can renders eclipses:
scr00001.png

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Generated galaxy viewed from the side:
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And Milky Way seen from inside the LMC (orbiting a procedural planet) :
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And a screen showing the capacity of SpaceEngine to generate terrains:
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Quickly, I've started to find some nice planets, and one day ... I found "Temperate Terra with Life" ! :cheers:
scr00005.png


This one is a cool oceania, with only land on the night side of the planet:
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Returning to the known world, space sunset from the Earth:
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Here is the official Space Engine site: http://en.spaceengine.org/
If you want even more pictures, come here: http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/10-432-1
And I'll leave you with a skybox picture and some videos (not made by me) :
scr00013.png


Space Engine 0.96 Update - kurtijmac

The Size of the Known Universe - JSSJR90

Billions and billions - pebblegarden

Probe-style video - bboyenw


Settings please.:tiphat:
 
My PC run Space Engine very well.
It's a Core I5 3470.(Ivy Bridge)
nVidia 660 GTX 2 GB ram.
8 GB ram.
My older PC, which was a Core 2 Duo E4400, with 2 GB of ram and a Gforce 9600 GT, struggle a lot with Space Engine.
 
There was also [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctis"]Noctis[/ame], but that had a very low resolution (320x240).
 
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Brilliant piece of gear. But could get very boring after a while, without many more sections to apply.
We could do with something like that for Orbiter for station building modules etc. etc.
 
There are some ship / station building tools for Orbiter, like:
[ame="http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=4075"]http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=4075[/ame]
 
Thanks. Now we have D3D9 and D3D11, Orbiter is capable of rendering far better meshes.
 
This is just amazing.
I like the Auroras.
But there is something missing in the 0.97 version.
The Alpha Centauri AB system do not have a life sustained moon anymore.
 
The English Language Space Engine website has been down for several days. The Russian Version is still up. Anybody know what's going on? I hope all is O.K.

Losing Francophone/dansteph AND Space Engine in one weekend is too much. :thumbsdown:


This is just amazing.
I like the Auroras.
But there is something missing in the 0.97 version.
The Alpha Centauri AB system do not have a life sustained moon anymore.


It's because a real exoplanet around Alpha Cent. B was discovered last year, and it's represented instead. The real exoplanet database has precedence over fantasy and procedural.
 
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