0.991.49.2080 Public Beta

NOTICE: This Beta involves a Universe reset. Many of your saved locations from 0.990 will not work in this version. Use caution, and label your old locations!

Hey folks!

We're opening the gates on 0.991 with an extended Beta to ensure everything is working before release. We anticipate the Beta to run for at least two weeks, during which we may push further updates and/or fixes, which will further affect generation. We will let you know if this happens.

The purpose of this Beta is to ensure the generation improvements are in their best form, and that none of the changes made have broken other aspects of SpaceEngine. Suspected bugs should be reported in the Troubleshooting and Bug Reports section of the Steam forums, or in our #bug-reports channel in our official Discord.

On the topic of bugs, there are a few known issues we're already aware of, but they are self-contained, so they won't hamper the beta launch:

• Globular Clusters are sometimes too common in the most massive galaxies

• Intermediary mass black holes and other high-density objects have strange artifacting when viewed at certain angles (described as "angry sparkles" or "occasional Pac-Man'ing")

• Spatially thick accretion disks may not generate

Whether you want to help test or are eager to see what's new, you can opt in to the Beta by going to your Steam library, right-clicking SpaceEngine, then selecting Properties > Betas and picking beta - public beta branch from the dropdown menu.

Changelog:

• Calibrated mass-radius distribution of terrestrial planets

• Calibrated iron core mass distribution in terrestrial planets

• Fixed giant-terra-giant-terra meander sequence in procedural planetary systems

• Fixed a bug with incorrect procedural metallicity of stars

• Fixed a bug with generation of double Wolf-Rayet systems, where the secondary star has hundreds of times larger luminosity than the whole system.

• Fixed suppression of generation of procedural galaxies near the Milky Way

• Fixed generation of dwarf planets

• Improved generation of globular cluster luminosities

• Increased the maximum number of clusters per galaxy

• Improved the number of globular clusters generated in galaxies

• Added ability to specify the number of globular clusters in a catalog galaxy (galaxy catalog keyword: GlobClusters)

• Improved the effective temperatures of M5-M9 (main sequence), L, T, and Y spectral types

• Improved the radii of L, T, and Y spectral types

• Improved galaxy type generation probabilities

• Improved shading of underwater surfaces to mimic absorption of sunlight by water

• Improved temperature generation for star granules (convection cells)

• Improved temperature generation for sunspots

• Improved brightness of blurred interface background relative to main scene

• Fixed a bug that caused lava to appear 10% hotter than it should

• Fixed a bug where a star's age could be greater than its lifetime

• Fixed a potential bug where the star generator thread can overrun its working array, corrupting data in the other worker thread's working array

• Fixed a bug in calculation of stellar magnitudes

• Fixed a bug in the climate model where some planets in systems with a binary star had a huge temperature spike

• Fixed a bug with star corona color

• Improved diversity of properties of procedural rings and accretion disks

Catalog Updates:

• Added several of the brightest and largest known galaxies

• Improved distances and magnitudes for numerous galaxies, especially in the Local Group

• Tweaked brightness of a few Local Group elliptical galaxy models for greater realism

• Added globular cluster population data for multiple galaxies

• Removed unsupported/refuted black holes

• Changed "_ Central Black Hole" names to "_*" to match astronomical naming conventions

• Added LMC globular cluster NGC 1978

• Added LMC open cluster NGC 2164

• Improved distance and size of the Owl