This is a major update for our core mechanics and content. It’s built on Godot Engine 3.5.2, perhaps our last 3.x update before the big port to Godot 4!
Try the new Planetarium here!
Highlights:
- Saturn Rings are now shader-based (i.e., programmatically generated by the GPU).
- Models for the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope.
- Orbit lines for asteroids. It looks crazy if you show all ~48,000 present in the web-based Planetarium (see below) and that’s a small subset of the ~1.14 million we can add!
- Mouse-over identification of individual bodies (yes, including the ~48,000 asteroids!) and their orbit lines. This involves shader magic that will in the future be extended to almost everything: individual bands and gaps in Saturn’s Rings, individual stars, etc.
- You can now save and revisit “views” which optionally include target body, camera position, HUDs visibility & colors (e.g., asteroid points & orbit lines), and/or time state.
See the full changelog here.
Screenshots below!








Well, that’s it for core I, Voyager and the Planetarium…
In other news, the code I use to crunch raw asteroid orbit data is now public in GitHub repository ivbinary_maker. It isn’t polished (and maybe never will be) but, if you are so inclined, it will allow you to generate binary files for >1.14 million asteroids (numbered and multiopposition). I don’t know what kind of graphics card you’ll need to show those orbits! This also has the code I use to convert Saturn Ring data from Björn Jónsson (backscattered, forward-scattered, unlit, transparency & color data files) into the “1-spatial-dimension” texture used by the new the rings.shader.
Also, by the way, I’m making a game! It’s set in our Solar System. Well, I have been working on in for some years now. More on that soon…