Gaia Sky 3.5.8

By tsagrista on 26 Jan 2024

📢 Gaia Sky 3.5.8 available now!

Features

  • add bookmarks section in gamepad GUI. See #757.
  • cloud shadow projections on the surface of planets, for regular textures, cubemaps and SVT clouds.
  • add new backupSettings() and restoreSettings() API calls to back up and restore the entire settings in Gaia Sky from a script.
  • move ‘star glow over objects’ check box to Scene settings > Stars section.
  • add used, free, allocated and total memory to memory information window in help dialog.
  • enable eclipse outlines (for umbra and penumbra) by default in configuration file.
  • add application-level shader disk cache that stores binary shaders to disk to speed up application startup. Disabled by default, as most GPU drivers already do this on their own.
  • add binary particle group loader/writer to be able to load particles using an own binary format that loads much faster.
  • support PARTICLE_EXT attributes, additionally to the base PARTICLE attributes in the new binary format for particle groups.
  • increase number of divisions in shapes around objects from 15 to 35. Do not cull faces. See #756.
  • enable exporting cubemap sides to image files, action bound to F7 by default. Fixes #753.
  • adjust constants so that the Sun size is accurate.

Bug Fixes

  • use actual tree map for currently pressed keys in keyboard input controller, so that actions can be retrieved reliably.
  • do not activate surface mode (where the view follows the mouse location) with gamepad input.
  • layout and information in about/help dialog.
  • dataset detection to use dataset key by default instead of name.
  • apply graphics quality after restart. Remove graphics quality update events.
  • graphics quality update is now a ’needs restart’ operation, otherwise the system crashes trying to load in new parameters, textures and so on. This is part of #719.
  • increase constellation and boundaries line width to prevent rastering artifacts. This is part of #719.
  • star flickering issues due to quad sizes mended by setting a minimum quad solid angle roughly equal to the pixel size of the back-buffer. Fixes #719.
  • tooltips in number validators using the MAX_VALUE or MIN_VALUE should use infinity instead. Part of #756.
  • add orientation to shape dialog (camera, equatorial, ecliptic, galactic). Fixes #756.
  • remove all shapes [& around object] actually removes all shapes and not only the first in the list. This is part of #756.
  • default to scientific notation only when abs(num) > 9999. Fixes #755.
  • possible null pointer exceptions in OpenXR driver.
  • enable breaking string sequences at forward and backward slashes, as well as whitespaces. This prevents overflown content in the error dialog in certain cases.
  • run actual octant update code in the main thread.
  • particle sizing and size limits in the loader.

Performance Improvements

  • remove unnecessary synchronized blocks from index.
  • use parallel sort instead of regular single-threaded sort for particle and star sets.
  • make sure that unseen stars (i.e. computed final color is 0) do not take up fragment shader resources.

Code Refactoring

  • rename attributes of UCD and UCDParser to comport with the global style.

Build System

  • upgrade to gradle 8.5.

Merge Requests

  • Merge branch ‘star-shading’

You can get this release in our repository.

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