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📢 Today, coinciding with the end of the sky-scanning phase of Gaia, we publish Gaia Sky 3.6.5. The most noteworthy addition is the introduction of the volume rendering infrastructure.

Features

• Add support for volume rendering. The infrastructure is in place with a new archetype Volume. This is necessary for the new volumetric aurora dataset and volume nebulae in NGC2000.
• Add ‘volumes and effects’ catalog type.
• Enable "flip" attribute for boxes/cubes in mesh builders.
• Add "cameraCollision" attribute to bodies.
• Shader include statement now supports targets in datasets.
• Add on-demand re-compilation of post-processing shaders from their source files, in runtime.
• Add new attribute renderLabel to label component. This enables/disables the actual rendering of the label.
• Increase default quality of FXAA filter, provide a simpler implementation (disabled by default), and enable hot shader reloading for FXAA effect.
• Update Gaia Sky icon.
• Add Bluesky link to readme file and about page.

Bug Fixes

• Position of context menu in dataset manager is off.
• Unknown dataset types crash Gaia Sky. Fixes #787.
• Do not crash when reloading non-compiling glsl shaders.
• Wrong size initialization for ray-marched objects.
• Prevent non-focusable objects to appear in search results and to be set as camera focus.
• Enable atmosphere/cloud procedural generation even when the surface is disabled due to cubemaps being used.
• Do not attempt setting a window icon in Wayland, it is not supported and results in a (harmless) crash.
• Position tracking does not work with objects in orbital elements group.
• Correctly populate window width and height in preferences dialog.

Build System

• Update configuration file version number. This implies that your old configuration file gets overridden with the new version during the first startup of the new Gaia Sky version.
• Update to LibGDX 1.13.1.

As always, you can grab it right here (link to repository).