Space Engine - ridiculously vast space sim software

Malix · Post by **Malix** » Wed Mar 20, 2013 12:49 am

Tonight I accidentally stumbled upon this: http://en.spaceengine.org/, Space Engine 0.9.6.2 beta and... I was just blown away. Did a quick search on the forums and didn't find a thread of it, so here goes:

So what this app is?
It's basically "google maps"/physics simulator for space, most of space known to us is accurately represented (or so I've been told) and unknown areas are randomly generated.
The space-to-planets transition is somewhat similar to EM, but the scale of everything is ...well, astronomical, even our moon seemed almost endless. I went several times back and forth to the deepest space I could find (even galaxies and nebulae vanished to the blackness) and zoomed back to where my hometown should be.
After initial loading, there are no loading screens, even if you just fly from galaxy to another, bypassing millions of starsystems and it seems you can explore _every_single_dot_ you see against the blackness.

What this isn't
Space Engine is not a flight/combat/etc sim, there is no gameplay that I know of, though apparently you can fly few different space ships.

Also worth noting, bumping up the randomly generated planetary detail seems to require quite a bit of processing power, my i7 & GTX680 dropped to ~30fps or lower when blazing through the terrain several hundreds of kilometers per hour.

Some random screenies, because why not.
Some desert planet at Betelgeuse 4
Another Betelgeusean desert planet, approaching pretty fast here.
Found some neat earth-like planet

+ The authors video of the upcoming patch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6sq1O4KF-A

Anyway, thought I should share this gem before heading to bed.

edit: wouldn't you know it, I suck at searching, this was mentioned ages ago here: http://www.starwraith.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8133

[Edited on 3-20-2013 by Malix]

[Edited on 3-20-2013 by Malix]

Austin · Post by **Austin** » Wed Mar 20, 2013 11:21 am

Just... WOW! I'm drooling. This is so amazing I just don't know what to say. Many thanks to you, Malix, for making this post and bringing the joy of Space Engine to me!!! You rock good Sir!!!

Maarschalk · Post by **Maarschalk** » Wed Mar 20, 2013 12:36 pm

Some one else had posted about this a year or so ago!
I never got the detail planet generator to work though for some reason!
How did you get the planets to render with the landscape detail? Mine just look flat!.....

Malix · Post by **Malix** » Wed Mar 20, 2013 3:43 pm

From post: 160066, Topic: tid=10704, author=Maarschalk wrote:How did you get the planets to render with the landscape detail? Mine just look flat!.....

graphics settings -> planet lod to higher value.
Also worth noting that planets/etc objects actually mapped by mankind (like pretty much everything on Sol) are generated from heightmap/textures/etc, and without addons their resolution are poor at best.
The procedurally generated objects further away look *much* sharper and detailed since, well, they are procedurally generated instead of lowres textures/heightmaps

edit: also worth noting that the planet geography generation can take a while to kick in if your PC isn't fast enough, even more so if you fly really fast.

Anyhoo, time to put on some dark ambient / drone on playlist and head back to space exploring

also: yea, I noticed this was posted already, but people rarely read year old forum posts I thought to leave this in place since the app is so cool

edit1: can't ever make a post without fixing it several times.
edit2: added link to addons.

[Edited on 3-20-2013 by Malix]

mikeuk · Post by **mikeuk** » Wed Mar 20, 2013 7:31 pm

Thanks the video clips on the site look good

zzone · Post by **zzone** » Mon Aug 25, 2014 3:05 pm

space engine is now a newer version with some news I read the page of the game site to see the intended objectives and are really very interesting, please read and give your opinion. I particularly bought Evochron and I am very happy and would also help spaceengine since the software is free and the developer needs to raise funds to continue the project:

http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/21-11-1

Nigel_Strange · Post by **Nigel_Strange** » Tue Aug 26, 2014 3:20 am

I have had Space Engine for a while now. However, at some point, the graphics got demolished. I think maybe some Nvidia driver update was not being supported. In any case, I can't use it until I find a fix for the graphics. I'm not holding my breath.

Post by **Marvin** » Tue Aug 26, 2014 4:19 pm

Maybe I'll try again when joystick support has been implemented. Also, a cockpit would be nice. Kudos to the ship modders, though ... some really nice ships (and the TARDIS).

zzone · Post by **zzone** » Tue Aug 26, 2014 7:07 pm

I'm using a gtx 650 ti and the graphics are the maximum and it is in the range 35-60 fps

Nigel_Strange · Post by **Nigel_Strange** » Wed Aug 27, 2014 4:01 am

It's not the fps that is the problem: it's that the textures are nonexistent. A star, up close, should be a sphere, but instead, I see a couple of disks that are crossed in the middle. The star is also so dim that it is barely visible. Planets are just black, with no detail.

This was not always the case. It used to present gorgeous vistas, bright stars, and limitless panoramae.

Now, it is nothing.

Post by **Vice** » Wed Aug 27, 2014 5:27 am

If recall correctly, a driver update can cause that. All you need to do is delete the \\cache folder, then relaunch SE for it to work.

Nigel_Strange · Post by **Nigel_Strange** » Wed Aug 27, 2014 7:40 am

Wow! It worked! Thanks, Vice.

Post by **Marvin** » Wed Jan 21, 2015 4:06 pm

Btw, the new version, with joystick support, is currently available (Beta) for download. One drawback: it doesn't run on Windows XP.

Nigel_Strange · Post by **Nigel_Strange** » Wed Jan 21, 2015 5:11 pm

Also note: there is a special patch for Nvidia card users. Apparently, the game does not work right with Nvidia cards. The patch makes it work perfectly.

Post by **Marvin** » Wed Jan 21, 2015 6:38 pm

What patch? I haven't done much except spend a few hours heading for Mars at 10 ly/sec but, so far, it's worked for me. I did make the change suggested in the Bug report (something about turning bla-bla threading off in the nVidia control panel) but that's about it. I didn't see any patch.

P.S. If the game can be patched, why isn't the Dev releasing a patch for WinXP? According to the fixes, it's already been fixed.

Nigel_Strange · Post by **Nigel_Strange** » Thu Jan 22, 2015 12:00 am

Marvin,

You should be able to find the patch here:

http://funix.mirror.spaceengine.org/engine/se0971/

I don't know if they support XP. XP support officially stopped a while ago at Microsoft. It might be time to upgrade.

Just so you know, I use Windows 7 now, and I'm not sorry that I did. I was skeptical of the upgrade at first, as I have been with all prior upgrades. One thing it does a lot better than XP, though, is that it can find and install its drivers.

A few years ago, I had to rebuild my XP system, and just getting it to be able to go online, read from the CD ROM drive, and use the hardware was a chore. I had to go online on a different computer, burn the drivers to a CD, then get them from there. Figuring all that out (I didn't even know why it was not able to read the hard drive initially) was a horror.

When I built my latest system with Win7, I just installed Windows 7. It pretty much handled everything else. I go to Nvidia site to get the latest drivers.

One thing I do not like, though, is that if you uninstall Nvidia drivers, you have to reboot. When you reboot, the system will automatically start downloading and installing new drivers, which may or may not be the ones that you downloaded. Weird, but in any case, the system seems to work.

Post by **Marvin** » Thu Jan 22, 2015 2:22 am

What is funix?

Btw, the next release of SE will support WinXP ... which is installed on my desktop computer. The laptop runs on Win7 and nVidia refuses to leave me alone.

P.S. The fix referenced in the link you posted is for version 097.1 ... I'm not sure it wasn't already incorporated into v.097.2 ... the current DL.

[Edited on 1-22-2015 by Marvin]

PirxThePilot · Post by **PirxThePilot** » Fri Jan 23, 2015 4:14 pm

97.3 is out in patch form. I use ATI so I don't know if the nVidia problem is fixed.

Post by **Marvin** » Fri Jan 23, 2015 10:14 pm

I must be blind ... I don't see a 97.3 patch listed anywhere.

PirxThePilot · Post by **PirxThePilot** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 1:14 am

Sorry, it is hard to find. Look here for the .0973 patch:

http://funix.mirror.spaceengine.org/engine/latest/

I haven't tried it yet.

Post by **Marvin** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 7:30 am

Looks like the patch fixes the problem with Windows XP ... assuming I can figure how to install the patch, it's worth a try.

Post by **DaveK** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 3:53 pm

From post: 175076, Topic: tid=10704, author=Marvin wrote: I haven't done much except spend a few hours heading for Mars at 10 ly/sec but, so far, it's worked for me.

Where are you coming from? - obviously not anywhere near Sol. At 10ly/sec you'd get from the Centauri system to Mars in under half a second. 2 hours is 72K light years away! The galaxy is only 100K light years in diameter:P

Post by **Marvin** » Sat Jan 24, 2015 6:14 pm

I started from some planet which was inside what looked like a globular star cluster approximately 900 million light years from Sol.