About a couple of months after the last release, today we are proud to announce Gaia Sky 3.7.3. This release focuses on quality-of-life features and on important bug fixes.
Here is a summary of what’s new in this release:
Complete redesign of “Load dataset” dialog.
Improve file picker with proper history stack and more goodies.
New line shading method based on screen-space derivatives.
PBR extensions to wavefront format.
Improve index creation speed for particle and star sets.
Fix breaking bug in 3.7.2 where model-based sets (e.g. star clusters) were not positioned correctly.
Today is release day! We are proud to present Gaia Sky 3.7.2. This release contains many new features and bug fixes. We wrote a post covering most of them last week, so you may want to have a look at that. Nevertheless, below is a non exhaustive summary and further down a full list of all new features, bug fixes, and more.
New shading types for billboards.
Refactor of orbital element groups into particle groups.
Dataset updates (FPR asteroids, Saturn rings).
Anaglyph custom colors mode.
Logarithmic and reset UI sliders.
New languages: Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Italian.
I have been skimming the Gaia Sky git log, and I think we have enough new stuff to warrant a new release. This means that we now enter a testing period that will, hopefully soon, end up with the new version 3.7.2.
If you follow my BlueSky or Mastodon feeds, you have probably already seen most of these features in action. However, for those of you who don’t, this post aggregates and summarizes all the information on the upcoming version.
We are excited to announce the release of Gaia Sky 3.7.1. This release was planned for last Christmas, but we had to postpone it due to the server outage issue. Now it is here! While there are many under-the-hood fixes, the highlights of this version are:
The new procedural galaxy generation system,
the PBR shader overhaul,
some notable UI improvements,
a revision of the atmospheric scattering algorithm,
If you’ve checked out our documentation lately, you’ll notice things look a bit different. We’ve just finished a major overhaul of how we build and host our docs. While we’ve had a version switcher for a while, the “engine” under the hood was getting a bit clunky, and some of the Sphinx extensions we used were unmaintained.
We moved away from the Read The Docs theme and sphinx-multiversion in favor of a custom, decoupled build system using the PyData Sphinx theme. Previously, we had to re-generate the documentation for every single version of Gaia Sky every time we made a change to the master branch. As you can imagine, that didn’t scale well.
Running VR on Linux is notoriously “experimental,” especially when mixing NVIDIA hardware with Wayland-native compositors like Hyprland. However, using the Valve Index via the open-source Monado runtime is now fully viable for Gaia Sky.
Based on our recent testing, here is how to achieve a stable, high-performance, and color-accurate VR experience.
For years, Gaia Sky’s UI themes have been completely static: each theme required its own set of pre-rendered source images. Want a different color scheme? You’d need an entirely new theme with separately generated assets.
Not anymore.
For the next release, we’ve implemented a new theming system by creating a single base theme with purple motifs and applying runtime color transformation through shaders. The new system converts purple elements to any accent color you choose, all happening in real-time on the GPU. The old “Theme” property in the preferences window has been replaced with an “Accent color” color picker, as demonstrated in the video below.
After several months of downtime, we are excited and relieved to announce that the Gaia Sky server is officially back online and accessible to the public!
A few months ago, the University computing center, the URZ, decided to implement a series of precautionary security measures aimed at protecting the university IT network from a cyberattack. One of these measures was to put most IT services behind a VPN network, which rendered our server inaccessible for most users.
