Gaia Sky 3.5.8

By tsagrista on

📢 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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