I am excited to announce the first public demo release of the Space Game engine! The goal of this demo is predominantly to start testing the game on a wide variety of hardware. There are many quirks to the GPU-side double-emulation code that have been exposed on new hardware in the past. It is better to eliminate these issues now while the code base is relatively small, than to discover them later when many more lines have been written based on the current assumptions.

There are a few new features relative to the previous update. I had mentioned adding HDR and exposure support. Well, I jumped the gun and implemented a basic system without eye adaptation. The atmosphere and sun are now at more realistic brightness levels relative to the rest of the scene, although this will still require some tweaking in future updates. The output is also now gamma-corrected for completeness.

The Space Game engine still has a long way to go, and has plenty of yet undiscovered bugs. But this first release is a big milestone in its development. I hope you enjoy experimenting with it! Please feel free to share any ideas, and don’t get too upset at the many deficiencies at this point.