There are a few things that I was wondering whether or not they will be eventually in the simulation engine.
1. Will black holes eventually be more realistic?
By more realistic, I mean will planets and stars that get too close be shown to be ripped apart rather than suddenly exploding? Planets would have their atmosphere stripped and start breaking apart form such high gravity, and stars would just be sucked up like a vacuum cleaner. There could be different settings for this though based on how powerful your computer is. The lowest could just show the body being stretched into it, while the highest setting actually rips pieces of the planet off to be sucked into the black hole.
2. Aren't supernovas explosions?
I might just be wrong on this, but I figured that supernovas were intense enough to just disintegrate planets, not just super heat them.
3. Nebula Clouds.
Will Nebula clouds formed from supernovas eventually be affected by gravity? I think it would be cool to watch the birth of a star, not just its death. It might be very intensive on hardware to simulate a nebula condensing to form little fragments that eventually form into a star with planets though.
4. Pulsars and Solar Flares.
Do solar flares really do anything? I see them come off the sun, but do they really go out into space and hit planets? I can't tell if it's just for visual effect or not. Also, do pulsars actually emit pulses that affect anything sometimes? It seems like if a planet gets hit by a pulse, it would suddenly become pretty hot.
5. Incredibly strong magnetic fields, and magnetism in general.
Will magnetars ever be a thing? They have magnetic fields so strong that it practically turns electrons in atoms alone from circular orbits to lines. I also wonder if increasing the magnetic field on any body to high levels affects anything, like the pull it has on other objects or heating.
6. Strange Mass Increase Effects.
Why does increasing mass turn a rocky planet into a gas giant, then a star, then a black hole? If I had a lump of iron and I increased its mass continuously, I wouldn't expect it to suddenly explode into a ball of gas. When I first played, I tried to increase the density of Earth until it turned into a black hole, but it wouldn't let me so I just increased mass instead until the core collapsed upon itself into one which, if realistic black hole physics were in place, would be awesome to watch in real time. Instead, Earth just explodes into a gas giant and turns into a star. It seems like material make up should decide what a body turns into at different masses, not just mass itself.
7. Sun evolution.
I've seen a lot of documentaries talking about how the sun will turn into a red giant, but in the sandbox it just spontaneously turns into a super nova remnant instead of expanding greatly. Is this accurate? A lot of times with realism turned on, nothing seems as realistic.