What would happen if a scaled-down version of the Earth, the Sun or a black hole fell into a pool of water? It's a fun little experiment and also a showcase of some improvements of the renderer in version 0.8 - the raymarcher can now render mirror...
2025-05-05 19:54:13 +0000 UTC View PostOne of the most requested features is an option to run the simulation on the GPU. It's certainly a good idea. While there are a lot of obstacles to overcome and a number issues that come with GPU programming, the benefits can be clearly seen in th...
2025-04-12 16:00:50 +0000 UTC View PostAs you probably heard, the flight of Starship 7 didn't go exactly according to the plan. The spacecraft exploded, creating numerous fragments and providing a spectacul...
2025-01-19 00:11:29 +0000 UTC View Post
SpaceSim uses the classical, non-relativistic theory for the gravity simulation, governed by the Newton's law of universal gravitation. The only exception is the relativistic 2024-12-27 14:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
A new update adds more simulation options, improves shadow rendering, allows objects to pass through wormholes, and much more.
The update is available to all Patrons. You can download it in the patron-only channel on 2024-11-16 13:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
The upcoming version 0.7 adds a new simulation option - viscosity. It represents the internal friction caused by the movement of particles. Although this effect is not very important in planetary simulations, it can significantly affect the soluti...
2024-10-26 16:40:58 +0000 UTC View Post
This video explores a hypothetical scenario where a stray black hole makes a close approach to Earth. The mass of the black hole gradually increases from 0.5 M_Earth to 10 M_Earth, causing more and more chaos in the simulation.
Note that the...
2024-10-04 12:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Recent updates have made the real-time renderer much more realistic, thanks to improvements like the surface smoothing, specular textures, and gas particles. However, there are still issues that sometimes cause strange artifacts. The two biggest o...
2024-07-21 12:00:12 +0000 UTC View PostA video showcasing gas particles added in update 0.6. Planets with high-density core and low-density mantle collide and merge together, creating ring of gas around the merger. And in some cases, a moon!
2024-06-17 12:00:09 +0000 UTC View PostNew version adds gas particles, a material editor with customizable emission and opacity curves, textured meshes, anti-matter, and much more.
The build is available on 2024-06-07 12:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
We often need to follow a specific object during the simulation, or in other words, track its position with the camera over a period of time. How to do it?
The problem seems easy to solve at first, but gets progressively more difficult when ...
2024-04-29 10:00:11 +0000 UTC View PostThe current version of SpaceSim can add a texture which is mapped to the surface of a sphere. This works well for sphere-like objects, but creates visible distortions when the shape is significantly different from the sphere.
I'm adding addi...
2024-03-03 11:38:47 +0000 UTC View PostThis is one of the most frequent questions people ask, so I thought I'll go a little more in-depth and explain how the simulation speed works, how to control it, and most importantly, why you cannot simply set the time step to an arbitrarily large...
2024-02-27 07:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostSome experiments with the cloud object and stellar wind. The radiation pressure needs improvement on the simulation side, but still can make nice results.
2024-02-12 07:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
A major update that improves the real-time renderer, adds collisions of rigid objects, makes the simulation history better, and much more.
The update can be downloaded exclusively on 2024-02-04 13:57:52 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm back with another development update. Introducing Screen-space Surface Smoothing (SSSS) - a great feature of the real-time renderer with the best acronym.
A major difference between the real-time renderer and t...
2024-01-15 07:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostDefinitely the longest video I made. A group of 100 asteroids is placed inside a periodic boundary and given random velocities. Will they cluster into a single large planet or fragment into thousand small pieces? Place your bets.
The simulat...
2024-01-08 08:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
The next version of SpaceSim will have an improved handling of interactions between various objects in the simulation. How does it work?
One of the additions to this version is a solid boundary (previously only a p...
2023-12-26 09:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
The video shows the collision event that led to the formation of the Moon. It mostly uses the "Origin of the Moon" preset, except it's simulated with 3 million particles and a custom camera path.
It nicely shows some of the features from the...
2023-11-20 08:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Another update is here! It comes with a handful of rendering improvements, better time step calculations, Roche limits, and much more.
As usual, it can be downloaded from this 2023-11-13 08:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Hello everyone,
What is your favorite kind of simulation? What would you like to see in a video? Vote and let me know in the comments. Multiple options are allowed.
2023-11-07 08:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
This video is mostly a showcase of the light bending effect. There are two black holes orbiting the common center of mass on highly eccentric orbits, each having an accretion disk made of 1M particles.
While it's still not perfect (black hol...
2023-10-30 08:00:03 +0000 UTC View PostBlack holes are arguably the most fascinating objects in the universe. Even though we can't see them directly, we can see the influence they have on the light passing around them, as they bend the spacetime and change the direction of light rays.<...
2023-10-23 07:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostNext major update will include improvements to the bloom effect - the glow around stars and other hot objects.
Previously, the glow was done by a simple Gaussian blur of the pixels containing hot particles. This meant the radius of the glow ...
2023-10-16 07:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
A big update - asteroid cohesion, astrophysical jets, particle stabilization, motion blur and antialiasing, and a lot of bug fixes.
The build can be downloaded from Dropbox using 2023-10-05 07:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
The next version of SpaceSim will include a few useful improvements to the "raytracing" renderer, including antialiasing and motion blur. This will make the simulations look much more dynamic and cinematic, especially with fast moving particles. 2023-09-28 19:36:01 +0000 UTC View Post