I don't think you get the concept of computing power...If they made the surfaces realistic, it would be difficult to do anything, since the frame rate would be extremely low. Most computers just don't have processing power do that many calculations per second, so you either have to make your time step very low or deal with having 0.5 frames per second... if even that... so many of your suggestions would be possible if we could have a computer with infinite processing power, but unfortunately, there is no computer on Earth like that, so we have to make compromises. Space Engine is able to do this because it sacrifices the physics calculations; once something is put on an orbit it stays there forever, it never moves into another orbit, because gravity is not calculated. the planets are essentially "on rails", unlike in Universe Sandbox where we have to deal with gravitational pulls and the such, even if there are over a thousand objects pulling on each other, which in itself takes a lot of processing power to deal with, so adding on top of that having to generate the surfaces of the planets to a realistic level would mean they would need to do a lot of optimization, which people would just complain about until they actually did, and I suspect there's a limit to how well that would work even then. People asking for things on the surface like trees or buildings or people just isn't really possible if you want to see the planets move and not have some interruption while the program loads those things such as a lot of lag or a loading screen, meaning it is theoretically possible but very difficult to do, especially if you don't want interruptions or you do want good performance.
Topic: Improve Surface Textures of stars, gas giants, rocky planets & asteroids (Read 2708 times)