Enhanced Asteroid impacts.

[tesco]

I think it would be awesome if when you smash an steroid into earth, the shock wave pushes clouds out of the way and can also create water disturbances.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vexo1tQ_zMc

[Gregory]

Also, it would be great if the impact of an asteroid/comet large enough and fast enough, like at least 0.5 km, with a mass of at least 1371742 M kg, hitting Earth at a speed of at least 5 km/s caused global havoc across Earth, and set off not only shock waves and tsunamis (one 100 meters tall), but also that the debris and heat waves would heat our atmosphere up to 500 degrees F, and if the asteroid/comet were 5 km in radius, and had a mass of 1.4 x 10e+20 kg, and hit Earth at 16 km/s, then should cause an earthquake of M12.7 and a tsunami 1 km tall, the debris raining down would heat our planet up to 750 degrees F, and then it would cool down to -270 degrees Celsius, and would cause everything to freeze, putting nearly all life to an end.

That would be more realistic and accurate, even a city sized asteroid/comet is enough to cause a major global catastrophe.

This should be implemented in the next update.

[shadow6061be]

If you really want this kind of behavior "in the next update", be prepared to wait for quite a while...

Not only would it require a huge ammount of work to get these effects to show up even remotely (even though we already have the debris, the heat and a visual shockwave, getting tsunamis to appear would require a rewrite of how water works on the current builds and probably some sort of fluid dynamics to allow the simulation of multiple impacts, same thing for earthquakes (how would they even be visible ?)), but current computers would not be able to efficiently process such ammount of information.

Also, although I would LOVE these kinds of effects, let's remember that we are talking about UNIVERSE sandbox, not "meteor impact simulator". Impacts are not the point of the game (look at what happened when colliding two bodies in US1: a sprite to show the impact location and a few particles) and imagine how much calculations would be needed to simulate an entire system collapsing (such as the "moons collapsing" simulation) with this ammount of detail.

Now, I am in no way a part of Giant Army, this is just my opinion (even though I'm pretty sure about the "not in the next update" part - collisions are already incredible as they are, and as far as I know, US² is the only 'game' that has this kind of thing).

Maybe in a few years, when Universe Sandbox³ will be announced ? 

[tesco]

Yeah that's the bad thing

[Gregory]

This should probably be one of the last things to implement before the full complete version is released, in the mean time, there should be some things to update each at a time, first being the oblateness, second being the textures, random textures are fine for fictional or exo worlds, but not for worlds like Ganymede, Callisto, Dione, Tethys, Titan, Iapetus or the main Uranian or Neptunian moons, yet Earth should have more clouds and have a darker texture for its oceans, yet Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune should look more realistic, Venus should have its own cloud texture and not that of Earth's, same thing goes with Titan, Saturn's second largest moon.

Those should be done first before improving the impact effects, so take your time.