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.
In light of the current server downtime, we are creating this post describing how to get Gaia Sky up and running with the base data package.
Gaia Sky installer – first, you will need to download the installer for Gaia Sky version 3.7.0. Since our server is currently inaccessible, we have made this version available for download at the following link:
It’s been a month now, and unfortunately, our main download server is still offline. We know this is quite frustrating for users, as it is for us too.
For those just catching up: our server, which holds all the Gaia Sky installers, data packs, and docs, is hosted behind a Heidelberg University domain. About a month ago, the university’s IT center detected a widespread security incident and took major preventative action, which included taking our server (and many others) offline.
We regret to inform our users that our server, hosting Gaia Sky packages, datasets, and documentation, is currently inaccessible from external networks. This is due to precautionary measures taken by the University Computing Center (URZ) at the University of Heidelberg.
For more details on these measures, please refer to the official announcement from the URZ: Precautionary Measures by URZ.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will keep you updated as the situation evolves.
