---

Edit (2025-07-03): Update post with fixes in patch release 3.6.9-2.

Exactly one month after Gaia Sky 3.6.8, today we are proud to release Gaia Sky 3.6.9. This new version brings some exciting features, like motion trails for star and particle groups, a new Turkish translation, and a new API (v2), and fixes some bugs. Keep reading for the full list of changes included in this release.

New Features & Improvements

• Add motion trail effect, which stretches stars and particles in the velocity direction. Can be toggled off in the settings.
• Add Turkish translation, contributed by Erdem Uygun.
• Migrate go-to-object operation in the camera info pane to use the smooth transitions API, which creates seamless, bumpy-free rides between two camera states.
• Add a new API v2, which re-names and re-organizes the single access port we had in the previous API into several modules grouped by function. It also improves documentation and standardizes function and parameter names when possible.
• Adapt REST server and console to also accept APIv2 calls.
• Add new setting to enable and disable notification messages, and add checkbox to preferences window. Notifications are off by default. Fixes #847.
• Update monospace fonts to include all supported characters, now using Liberation Mono.
• Add missing characters to font files to ready them for the Turkish translation.
• Left and right trigger buttons (LT, RT) in gamepads to control slider values in gamepad GUI.
• Update default lens flare shader.
• Add generateIndex attribute to particle sets, so that the index can be omitted for sets that do not need it (which is most of them).

Bug Fixes

• Fix issues with upper- and lower-case conversions not using the correct locale.
• Star glow effect flickers due to using a different method to render the billboard depending on whether the effect is active or not.
• Big bug fix campaign in scripting. All scripting tests were reviewed and fixed so that they all run fine.
• Add missing " character to fonts, fix custom and messages interfaces’ computation of position coordinates.
• Dataset highlight API call not working properly.
• Use concurrent set as collections in event manager to avoid concurrent modification exceptions.
• Proper motions produce index out of bounds due to incorrect computation of maximum number of arrows.
• Correct many instances where the wrong locale is used to convert strings to upper and/or lower case. Enable star name localization for the index and labels.
• Properly scale camera mouse scroll and drag operations with the current frame rate.
• Disable OpenAL system.
• Use RGBA16F float format for the lens flare ping-pong buffer, otherwise AMD APUs show banding artifacts. Fixes #846.
• Resolve redirects for Wikipedia titles, as the API does not resolve redirects automatically. This leads to 403 errors.
• Make sure versionFile task is executed when packing the app by setting the right dependencies.
• Adjust layout and width of about window to avoid UI overflow.

Performance Improvements

• Use GL_RGB16F instead of GL_RGBA16F format (omitting the alpha channel) for internal post-processing effects buffers (lens flare, bloom, etc.). This saves some VRAM, especially useful in integrated graphics.
• Set a default value of 0.4 scale for the lens flare effect to minimize fill rate and make the ping-pong pass much faster.

Code Refactoring

• Harmonize and consolidate star and particle set creation methods under the same class.

Build System

• Disable OptFlowCam export option for keyframes in Flatpak in order to avoid Python dependencies.
• Upgrade to Gradle 8.14.2, which supports Java 24.
• Update to bundled JRE 24 in packages.

Documentation

• Add new APIv2 package-level documentation.