That's one way to make it crystal clear that you view GOG users as second-rate.

I still roll with the beta version (which is still free) from before they released on Steam but now, I may have to actually buy this to support the dev and because it's DRM-free.

Didn't notice originally that you were answering questions here in an official capacity. Thanks for doing that!

Note that you can ask gog to mark your account as a developer account, which will make your text show up orange, as an easy way for everyone else to distinguish your position.

While I'm here: what are the chances of a Linux release of SpaceEngine at some point down the road? Is that something you're considering for 1.0, or later, or just really not at all?

Gog's store pages can include an "acceptance of end user licence agreement required to play" at the bottom of the system requirements page. SpaceEngine's page doesn't, but here's a random example with one. OTOH, I think yours is the first one I've read that seems a reasonable clarification/addition to what's normally expected in a DRM-free game store*, so maybe ask Gog if they can word it as "acceptance of EULA required for commercial use".

* I think every other EULA I've seen here is about requiring DRM or online accounts.

Appreciate the official response. I totally get the desire to not have to deal with W7 related post-sale support tickets, especially when it involves a third party (I may be R&D but I know plenty of tech support people). It's unfortunate that tech sector's language for communicating performance and compatibility doesn't really have a way to handle a "technically feasible but unsupported" situation. It'd make the age old question of whether a given application can be tweaked to run in Wine or a VM a lot easier, too. But, it is what it is.

The minimum requirements are what we can confidently say it will work on and will be supported by us if you have any issues. As far as I'm aware, that's how the minimum requirements are defined for most games. If you can technically get the program to run at 3 fps in 720p at lowest settings on an entry-level GPU from 10 years ago, does that mean that should be listed as the minimum? Far more people would be unhappy if you used that strategy when determining minimums, and they see them and think their PC is good enough, and then find that it's effectively unusable. Obviously minimum requirements must be based on what will offer a reasonably usable experience and will be officially supported. So no, we didn't deceive anyone, we wrote the requirements using a typical industry method.

I would rather we have fewer sales than advertise compatibility for system configurations that we can't support.

On the contrary, such problems already do exist; there are a few issues with SE that have been fixed by driver updates in the time since support for Win 7 was dropped by GPU vendors. This is what prompted us to update the requirements to Windows 10 in the first place. This is not hypothetical, this is already a real issue that is only going to get worse with time.


Dude what? Every part of that is true, unless you're using a narrow definition of "simulator".

How so? The only reason that Pro isn't available via GOG is due to technical limitations. If/when that changes, of course we will offer it.

Native Linux support is planned, but won't be available until at least after we complete our upcoming complete code overhaul and migration to Vulkan. Part of the overhaul is making the code platform-agnostic to the greatest extent possible, making Linux and Mac ports much more straightforward when we get to that point.


We will look into it, not being able to set up the store page ourselves (had to do it by back and forth emails with GOG) made it hard to know what options were possible and iterate on changes.

They are completely different programs with nothing in common besides involving space and being guided by realism. Universe Sandbox is an interactive physics sandbox where everything takes place in a confined sandbox space with a (relatively) small number of objects but with many ways interacting with them in the physics simulation. SpaceEngine is a seamless 1:1 scale representation of the entire universe, and can be explored from any perspective, from the surfaces of planets to intergalactic space. Planets, moons, and stars (in multi-star systems) rotate and move on their orbits as you would expect, but you cannot influence their orbits or physical properties to change because it's not a physics simulation.

Universe Sandbox is about interactive simulations in a closed sandbox, while SpaceEngine is about exploring and learning about the whole universe without restriction on where you can go, but with less interactivity than Universe Sandbox. So it depends on whether you want to play with physics simulations involving planets and stars, or want to explore the universe in a seamless manner and take in the sights.

Thank you, that's very hopeful to hear. I'll wishlist SpaceEngine for when you reach that point. Good luck with it all!

Repeating the lie doesn't make you or your product look any better. The part which is a lie, which anyone with a modicum of grey matter and storage knowledge can easily spot, is "featuring billions upon billions of galaxies, nebulae, stars, and planets, all shown at their full real-world scale". One doesn't even need to know anything about the product in order to know that that statement is a lie in two ways. First, "billions upon billions" at far less than "full real-world scale" would take a minimum of several exabytes of storage space. Second, there's not enough storage capacity in the entire world to store "billions upon billions" at "full real-world scale".

Your claim "The only reason that Pro isn't available via GOG is due to technical limitations" is also a likely lie, but I'll hold off on making a judgement until you answer this question -- what specific Steam function(s) is/are required in order for Pro to run successfully?

Elite II: Frontier (released 1993, so 30 yeas ago) managed to get a fully working galaxy, with most of the visual objects we can see from the earth, it had in total 200,000,000,000, stars with over 30,000 inhabited planets. In adition it had a realisitc physics engine (you could for example slingshoot around larger stars and planets), all the different ships and spacestations, seamless transition from ground to space, and the game play in there. This came on one single floppy disk for the Amiga (so less than 880KB). And it did not even fill the disk. If you download it today (from sites that should not be mentioned) the size is 457 KB.

This is achieved via procesural generation, the same reason Minecraft, Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky, etc. don't require petabytes or exabytes of storage. Most of the universe doesn't exist until it's needed, at which point it is generated in real time. Such techniques have been used for decades. In the future, please do not call someone a liar because you assumed something was false without first asking whether it's true.

Great to finally see it on GOG.

I didn't call you a liar because I assumed something was false. I called you a liar because I KNOW your claims are false. Procedural generation literally means "we make it up as we go". It means you take a relative small set of models, textures, shaders, etc, and keep re-using them in different combinations to create what the user sees. That approach works great if you're creating a generic universe simulator, but that's not what you're claiming to do. You're claiming to simulate, at least partially, our ACTUAL universe. The store page says "Explore Earth and our neighboring worlds in the Solar System, orbit a black hole in a galaxy billions of light-years away, or visit anything in between seamlessly, with no transitions". You cannot accurately recreate Earth or our neighboring planets using procedural generation, especially not "at their full real-world scale".

Let's look at the numbers. Take a look at the Earth DLC. The store page says "This Earth HD DLC (addon) contains high-resolution textures of Earth. It improves level of detail of Earth's surface compared to the default SpaceEngine installation." It goes on to specify the elevation map effective resolution as "0.46 km/pix (land areas, SRTM), 1.85 km/pix (ocean floor, GEBCO", the surface albedo map effective resolution as "0.46 km/pix (land areas, BMNG), 1.85 km/pix (ocean floor, GEBCO)", the city lights map effective resolution as "0.75 km/pix", and the clouds coverage map effective resolution as "0.93 km/pix". I really shouldn't have to explain this, but none of those effective resolutions are anywhere close to "full real-world scale".

You are very strange person...