SpaceEngine is a 3D astronomy program and game engine developed by Russian astronomer and programmer Vladimir Romanyuk. It creates a three-dimensional planetarium representing the entire universe from a combination of real astronomical data and scientifically-accurate procedural generation algorithms. Users can travel through space in any direction or speed, and forwards or backwards in time. SpaceEngine is in beta status and is currently freeware for Microsoft Windows. SpaceEngine's latest release, version 0.990 beta, is the first paid edition. Properties of objects, such as temperature, mass, radius, spectrum, etc., are presented to the user on the HUD and in an accessible information window. Users can observe celestial objects ranging from small asteroids or moons to large galaxy clusters, similar to other simulators such as Celestia. The default version of SpaceEngine includes over 130,000 real objects, including stars from the Hipparcos catalog, galaxies from the NGC and IC catalogs, many well-known nebulae, and all known exoplanets and their stars.
Functionality
The proclaimed goal of SpaceEngine is scientific realism, and to reproduce every type of known astronomical phenomenon. It uses star catalogs along with procedural generation to create a cubical universe 10 billion parsecs on a side, centered on the Solar System barycenter.
Catalog objects
The real objects that SpaceEngine includes are the Hipparcos catalog for stars, the NGC and IC catalogs for galaxies, all known exoplanets, and prominent star clusters, nebulae, and Solar System objects.
Wiki and locations
The software has its own built-in "wiki" database which gives detailed information on all celestial objects and enables a player to create custom names and descriptions for them. It also has a locations database where a player can save any position and time in the simulation and load it again in the future.
Limitations
Although objects that form part of a planetary system move, and stars rotate about their axes and orbit each other in multiple star systems, stellar proper motion is not simulated, and galaxies are at fixed locations and do not rotate. Most real-world spacecraft such as Voyager 2 are not provided with SpaceEngine. Interstellar light absorption is not modeled in SpaceEngine.
Development
Development of SpaceEngine began in 2005, with its first public release in June 2010. The software is written in C++. The engine uses OpenGL as its graphical API and uses shaders written in GLSL. On May 27, 2019, the Steam store page for SpaceEngine was made public in preparation for the release of the first paid version, 0.990 beta. SpaceEngine is currently only available for Windows PCs; however, Romanyuk has plans for the software to support macOS and Linux in the future.
Space Engine Archive Project
A project carried out by a member of the community called Space Engine Archive Project, offers the community a web application to archive their discoveries in order to keep in memory all the celestial bodies that have one day been discovered by the community. Moreover, it is the first digital tool using directly the sharing system via the generation of URLs in the game.
