# Space Engine



## camouflage (May 7, 2016)

Just thought this deserves it's own thread really, I know there's at least one other fan of this "game" on the forum. The game has one developer, and apparently it isn't a mod of the excellent Celestia, he built the whole thing himself from scratch. It's achingly gorgeous stuff. Random one of the many youtubes of the game here to see how it looks:



Feel free to post you planets an parsecs porn here.

Space Engine - Home page


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## Vintage Paw (May 7, 2016)

camouflage said:


> Feel free to post you planets an parsecs porn here.



I will do my best not to abuse that 

It's a lovely... er, space sim I guess rather than game (I still call it a game though, don't know why). 

The first time I flew out of the Milky Way into darkness, despite knowing the distances involved I was still really awed by how much nothing there was. You could spend your entire time just exploring a small fraction of one galaxy. But why would you want to do that when you can go and visit all the others?

Today I'm going to make it my task to take a picture of a nebula. 

To follow up on what you said in the NMS thread, I can't help but like planetary rings. They're so pretty. And so very "science fiction."


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## camouflage (May 7, 2016)

Vintage Paw said:


> I can't help but like planetary rings. They're so pretty. And so very "science fiction."



you mean like...


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## Vintage Paw (May 7, 2016)

Haha, that's bonkers 

*writes down name to visit later*


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## camouflage (May 7, 2016)

Vintage Paw said:


> Haha, that's bonkers
> 
> *writes down name to visit later*



Can't help imagining it orbiting with a jaunt in its step...







Just to be clear... that place actually exists, it's not one of SE's procedurally generated worlds or anything, it's an actual place in the actual catalogue of known objects used by Space Engine that's actually out there in our actual bonkers universe within which we actually live. Amazababbles.


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## Vintage Paw (May 7, 2016)

Brilliant 

I need to work out the naming system. Presumably anything RS-xxxxxxx is procedurally generated, because that's the prefix in galaxies other than our own. I've read very little about Space Engine, I just jumped straight in and started flying around.

Really difficult to take a decent picture of a black hole at the moment, but I don't have the latest beta, which introduced accretion disks. I have downloaded it, I'll fire it up and take a look.


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## Vintage Paw (May 7, 2016)

This is the best I managed so far: Sagittarius A*


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## Vintage Paw (May 7, 2016)

Anyway, posted here again (already posted in the NMS thread): my album of Space Engine pictures.


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## camouflage (May 7, 2016)

Vintage Paw said:


> Brilliant
> 
> I need to work out the naming system. Presumably anything RS-xxxxxxx is procedurally generated, because that's the prefix in galaxies other than our own. I've read very little about Space Engine, I just jumped straight in and started flying around.
> 
> Really difficult to take a decent picture of a black hole at the moment, but I don't have the latest beta, which introduced accretion disks. I have downloaded it, I'll fire it up and take a look.



I'm the opposite sadly, left neglected in linux-land and a refuse-to-run-it Wine, I can only read the forum and watch the youtubes and your own flikr stuff forlornly, my face pressed up against the window of it all like a hungry Victorian street urchin staring at those who feast within.

Anyhoo, JOON.


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## NoXion (May 7, 2016)

Things I like about Space Engine:

- The graphics
- The procedurally generated objects
- The fact I can zoom right down onto an object's surface and still get details.

Things I don't like about Space Engine:

- The controls for moving around, very unintuitive. I'm more used to Celestia's controls.
- The lack of surface details for objects within the Solar system.
- The tendency to crash when exploring star systems in other galaxies.

Another thing I have noticed is that this program is *very* demanding on the hardware. I think this is the only program I've ever run which had my 3.07Ghz i7 CPU running at 100%! Admittedly that was a brief spike (normally it's 10-15%), but it made me sit up and notice!


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## fishfinger (May 7, 2016)

NoXion said:


> ...The lack of surface details for objects within the Solar system.


There is a 37GB add-on with solar system textures and bump maps


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## NoXion (May 7, 2016)

fishfinger said:


> There is a 37GB add-on with solar system textures and bump maps



Sounds good, I wonder what- 37GB?!


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## fishfinger (May 7, 2016)

NoXion said:


> Sounds good, I wonder what- 37GB?!


That's if you want it all - you can just download the bits you want:

Download - Space Engine


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## Vintage Paw (May 7, 2016)

Well, I've tried the latest beta, and the textures (for procedural planets) don't seem as good. They're far blurrier. Some things are nicer - there are more varied mountain textures, clouds, that sort of thing, but they're all lower quality. Which seems strange.

Accretion disks are fun. They're not worth the jump to 0.9.7.4 for me though.

And ReShade doesn't work quite as well with it either. I can't get some effects to work properly. I couldn't to begin with in 0.9.7.3 but whatever I did to get them to work in that one isn't working in .4.

So it looks like, for the time being at least, I'm going back to .3. Which is no big problem. Just a shame I'll miss out on some of the stability improvements.


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## Vintage Paw (May 9, 2016)

My transit of Mercury is better than anyone else's, lol


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## Vintage Paw (May 9, 2016)

camouflage said:


> you mean like...




Paid it a visit:


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## camouflage (May 10, 2016)

Vintage Paw said:


> Paid it a visit:



Maybe there's another just like it nearby because God is a DJ.


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## NoXion (May 19, 2016)

Vintage Paw said:


> My transit of Mercury is better than anyone else's, lol



Damn, that's good! Reminds of me of those "artists' impressions" you see floating around.

I tried taking some screenshots of my own, but for some reason I can't find the folder where they're supposed to go. Even running the program with admin privileges doesn't seem to help.


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## fishfinger (May 19, 2016)

NoXion said:


> Damn, that's good! Reminds of me of those "artists' impressions" you see floating around.
> 
> I tried taking some screenshots of my own, but for some reason I can't find the folder where they're supposed to go. Even running the program with admin privileges doesn't seem to help.


They should be in a directory named "screenshots", which is inside the directory that you installed SpaceEngine.


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## NoXion (May 20, 2016)

fishfinger said:


> They should be in a directory named "screenshots", which is inside the directory that you installed SpaceEngine.



There's nothing there except the "shaders" folder.


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## fishfinger (May 20, 2016)

NoXion said:


> There's nothing there except the "shaders" folder.



I installed SpaceEngine 0.9.7.2 in "E:\SpaceEngine" (It will probably be on your "C:" drive).

Inside that directory there should be the following directories:

cache
catalogs
config
docs
export
locale
models
music
screenshots
system
textures

The main executable file is in the "system" directory, but it's the "screenshots" directory that you're interested in.

If you can't see these directories, then you are most likely looking in the wrong place, or something strange has happened to your installation.


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## NoXion (May 20, 2016)

I've found the folder where the screenshots are at. Weird how there's two directories for this program.






I forgot where I took this. But hey, aurorae!






VY Canis Majoris, the largest known star.






This planet is about 8.30ly from Sol. The sort of planet we could reach with realistic interstellar travel technology.






A real exoplanet. A beautiful but brutal desert landscape.






A cold Titan-like world with twin suns. I like to imagine that this is the homeworld for an ethane-chemistry intelligent species that lives at a pace one hundred times slower than we do, and is about twenty thousand times older than we are. Instead of carving in stone as we do, they carve in water ice, which is as hard as rock at the temperatures on this planet.






Deneb 8 is too young for native life to have evolved here. But it is a prime target for colonisation due to local conditions.


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## Vintage Paw (May 20, 2016)

Deneb is a system they let you start in in Stellaris. So you can start in Sol, Deneb, or a random unknown fake system.

Once I've got to grips with stuff I'll start a human colony style game there. At the moment I'm doing a "I have no idea what I'm doing" cat people game


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## fishfinger (May 20, 2016)

Lens flare


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## Vintage Paw (May 20, 2016)




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## camouflage (May 20, 2016)

Can you 'walk around' on the surface of these planets then or do you carefully have to nudge the camera view as close to the surface of a planet as you can without passing right through it and seeing the sky beneath? Always wished with Celestia there was an 'astronaut view' you could place on the surface of a planet and look around from there.

Would be nice to have a "walk view" in those mountains fishfinger posted for example.


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## fishfinger (May 20, 2016)

camouflage said:


> Can you 'walk around' on the surface of these planets then or do you carefully have to nudge the camera view as close to the surface of a planet as you can without passing right through it and seeing the sky beneath? Always wished with Celestia there was an 'astronaut view' you could place on the surface of a planet and look around from there.
> 
> Would be nice to have a "walk view" in those mountains fishfinger posted for example.


Click on planet, press "Shift G" to land and have a walkabout.


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## Vintage Paw (May 20, 2016)

There's a 'land on...' option, but you can just move the camera down until you hit ground. Sometimes it can clip through a bit, but you just inch it back up again and you're fine. You can zoom around the surface then. It can be a bit unwieldy at times, but doable.


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## camouflage (May 20, 2016)

fishfinger said:


> Click on planet, press "Shift G" to land and have a walkabout.




In that case as I can't actually play the game (I am no longer PCMR) any chance of a Shift-G sunset/sunrise veiw of that big weird looking walnut star then?

And come to think of it, that planet with the ridiculously massive rings if it's got a suitable moon to view from.


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## Vintage Paw (May 20, 2016)

I'll see if I can get some sunset/sunrise pics like that for you.

Thing with the stars is the nearest planets are generally quite far away, unless you're near the centre of a universe, when you can be really close (like in the first pic I posted in my last post). I don't know about that exact star that noXion posted, but I'll take a look. Can't remember what the moon situation was with J1407B but I'll look.


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## camouflage (May 20, 2016)

I guess even that giant-glowing-brain star just looks like a bright dot from a planet anyway. Or like... y'know, the sun.


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## NoXion (May 20, 2016)

Vintage Paw said:


>



Damn, how do you get your screenshots to look so nice? Mine look like shit by comparison.


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## NoXion (May 20, 2016)

camouflage said:


> Can you 'walk around' on the surface of these planets then or do you carefully have to nudge the camera view as close to the surface of a planet as you can without passing right through it and seeing the sky beneath? Always wished with Celestia there was an 'astronaut view' you could place on the surface of a planet and look around from there.
> 
> Would be nice to have a "walk view" in those mountains fishfinger posted for example.



There is a "go to surface" option in Celestia. Ctrl-G. The ground itself usually looks like a featureless flat plane, unless you have some hefty detail textures installed for the body in question, or land in/near a model. But it's good for looking up into the sky.

As for getting a good view from the ground of the local star in Space Engine, I find the best places to look for those kind of views are in red dwarf star systems, since habitable/interesting-looking planets will orbit close to the stellar primary.

Here's an example:


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## camouflage (May 20, 2016)

sigh. i wish our sun looked like a giant-glowing-brain.


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## NoXion (May 20, 2016)

camouflage said:


> sigh. i wish our sun looked like a giant-glowing-brain.



Just wait five billion years, you'll get your wish.


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## Vintage Paw (May 20, 2016)

NoXion said:


> Damn, how do you get your screenshots to look so nice? Mine look like shit by comparison.



Skillz.



j/k 

2 things in particular, beyond being careful with composition:

1) ReShade - this is a tool that lets you apply your own shaders to more or less any game out there. There are a bunch of shaders available for it, and you can modify them to create something pretty. I've created a preset for Space Engine, and I change elements of it depending on the colour of whatever planet I'm taking pictures of, to enhance, alter entirely, or whatever. It's all done in-game, no post-processing in photoshop or similar. If you use ReShade, you have to use ReShade's own screenshot function, because Space Engine's (or most other games') won't capture the shader information, so it'll look like a vanilla scene instead.

2) SRWE - this lets you 'hotsample' in various games (coverage is patchy, but there are other tools that do similar, or enable proper downsampling, if any given game won't play ball). What that means is that I run Space Engine in windowed mode, I select Space Engine from the list of applications in SRWE, and then I can imput the resolution and aspect ratio that I want SRWE to render Space Engine in. So, I can set up a shot at 1440 x 1440 for my 1:1 square shots, and when I have it aligned nicely I can momentarily change the resolution in SRWE to 3000 x 3000 and take a high resolution shot, then change it back to 1440 x 1440. The resulting screenshot will be 3000 x 3000, which when displayed on a regular 1080p or 1440p monitor will look better than if shot at 1080 or 1440. It's a really good method of AA (effectively manual super-sampling), but it also enhances depth, shadows, colours, etc because there are far many more pixels being rendered, meaning the final picture simply has more information at its disposal.


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## Vintage Paw (May 21, 2016)

Red dwarfs aren't the only stars that will have planets close by. Anything near the centre of a galaxy or in a smallish nebula can have them. Red dwarfs, red (super)giants, yellow giants like the pic below:






Generally if you get really close to the centre of a galaxy you'll find plenty. How interesting the planets will be varies of course. It might well be that red dwarfs have more interesting topography. But of course, there's always the editor.


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## Vintage Paw (May 22, 2016)

An example of what ReShade can do: 3 pictures of Sirius B, no post-processing; all rendered in-game.


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## Vintage Paw (May 22, 2016)

For comparison, the bottom shot at 1400 x 1400 (resized for upload), and no ReShade:


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## Vintage Paw (May 22, 2016)

Another:


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## alsoknownas (May 30, 2016)

This would be awesome on Oculus Rift.


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## NoXion (May 30, 2016)

I just downloaded and installed the latest stable version (v0.972 I think?), and hey, music! Spacey ambient stuff. Very fitting. I tried searching to see if there was more music that could be added, but so far I've turned up nothing. That said, I highly recommend listening to the album _Lifeforms_ by Future Sound of London while using this program (it was a favourite back when I only knew of Celestia).

It seems to run a bit faster and look more polished as well. Very well done. Still looks better when you turn off the diffraction spikes.

edit: SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!


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## Vintage Paw (May 2, 2017)

Having a little pootle around in this again at the moment.

Discovered you can take super hi-res screenshots without the need for SRWE (although SRWE is easier so that's what I'm using), by just changing the windowed resolution under Display (shift+F8). It's a bit fiddly, but you can change aspect ratio as well. Thought I'd mention it in case anyone finds the perfect system they want to take a picture of and potentially print at any point - the larger the better for print. 

The game can still be temperamental depending on your hardware. Seems to differ from person to person, and isn't necessarily more stable the better your PC. I start to get unstable if I hotsample while on the surface of planets, but it's okay more or less if I'm just in space. I'm hotsampling to ~8k atm and it's fine.

This is 8648x3392 2.55:1 (not using ReShade at the moment, it's more stable without it, so this is in-game colours):


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## Vintage Paw (May 3, 2017)

This is bonkers.



 

RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 B2 (planet in the foreground), in orbit around a white dwarf, which is part of a binary star system with a red hypergiant.

So here is the second planet in the white dwarf’s system (foreground). On the left you can see the closest planet (with the tail).

Right ahead of us is  RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 A, the red hypergiant -- one of the stars from this binary system (which has its own system of planets). The white, flat disc to its left is  RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 B, the white dwarf (that these two planets orbit). The red hypergiant is far, far further away than the white dwarf: From this planet, the white dwarf is 0.20 AU away, and the red hypergiant is 85.05 AU away.

I’d only seen the white dwarf and her planets, until I turned the camera around and BOOM! there was the red hypergiant. I’ve fooled around in Space Engine enough to know that scale is impossible to comprehend, but this blew me away. 

Two pictures of RS 1228-2706-0-0-114 B1, the planet on the left with the tail:



 

 

Super-massive png versions available at flickr.


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## Steel Icarus (May 25, 2017)

I just got this - for the first time since buying Elite Dangerous at the end of March last year I've not felt like logging onto ED today but space, as Frank Sidebottom always reminded us, is ace.

Feels like I've only begun to scratch the surface - I've visited some obvious places like a few nebulae and well-known stars and bodies in our solar system - but I'm a bit lost as to what to do next. Would love to check out some planet surfaces...


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## NoXion (May 25, 2017)

S☼I said:


> I just got this - for the first time since buying Elite Dangerous at the end of March last year I've not felt like logging onto ED today but space, as Frank Sidebottom always reminded us, is ace.
> 
> Feels like I've only begun to scratch the surface - I've visited some obvious places like a few nebulae and well-known stars and bodies in our solar system - but I'm a bit lost as to what to do next. Would love to check out some planet surfaces...



I suggest looking for the kind of worlds you are interested in by using the Star Browser. You can access it by clicking on the icon on the left hand of the screen, it looks like this:


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## NoXion (May 25, 2017)

I like to try and find Terran planets around white dwarf stars. They're rare but they do happen.


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## NoXion (May 25, 2017)

This here for example is the third planet orbiting the white dwarf star RS 8474-1385-8-11859833-640. 






1.2 times Earth's surface gravity, 0.185 Earth atmospheres of pressure at sea level. Not an ideal candidate for a new home, even before we consider the high levels of toxic sulfur dioxide in an anoxic atmosphere - but hey, it has a solar day of 23 hours and 28 minutes! That alone could make it worth something for those with the patience or resources to terraform. 






Here's a nice view I took from the surface. Good spot for a habitat I reckon.


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## NoXion (Mar 5, 2021)

This program still looks fucking amazing






Might have to find a proper host for sharing images, though.


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