Gaia Sky 3.6.8

Tons of new features and improvements

By tsagrista on

Today we release Gaia Sky 3.6.8. It brings a major UI refresh, significant performance improvements, and many new features and bug fixes. Keep reading to know more.

The new welcome window in Gaia Sky 3.6.8.

New Features & Improvements

User Interface

  • Major UI overhaul: consolidated fonts, updated themes, removed deprecated components.
  • Improved visual quality: increased padding and higher image resolution in UI.
  • Switched to Inter as the default label font.
  • Panels in the main UI now expand when the mouse hovers over the buttons.
  • Welcome window enhancements:
    • Displays the list of enabled datasets.
    • New “Recommended Datasets” option for one-click download and launch.
    • Updated background image.

Usability Enhancements

  • Time and calendar:
    • Julian date tab added to date/time dialog.
    • Time zone support improved; system-default time zone now used.
  • Dialogs remember the last opened tab (e.g. Preferences, About).
  • New star texture selector added to Preferences.
  • New object debug tool available via the debug panel—inspect and edit component fields.
  • Pointer coordinates display disabled by default (can be re-enabled in Preferences).
  • Console output:
    • Messages and full log can now be copied to the clipboard.
  • Bookmark improvements:
    • Bookmarks can now include camera position, orientation, time, and settings.
    • Bookmark information dialog added (accessible via right-click).
    • Empty folder bookmarks are removed automatically.
    • Bookmark operations persist immediately.
    • Invalid characters are now restricted in bookmark and folder names.
    • See this blog post.

API & Scripting

  • Added:
    • setCameraDirectionEquatorial() and setCameraDirectionGalactic()
    • Enhanced goToObjectSmooth() with solid angle and sync options
  • Stars and particles now support a new shading style: default or twinkle.
  • Added Thiele-Innes conversion script and support in the Gaia NSS processor.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed incorrect formatting of uptime duration.
  • Julian vs Gregorian calendar automatically selected based on date.
  • Fixed layout issues in Preferences and other dialogs.
  • UI components:
    • Image button alignment corrected.
    • Anchoring of the top info interface improved to prevent jitter.
    • First UI text size adjusted.
  • Fixed crash when setting data directory to a root drive in Windows (#825).
  • Fixed crash due to early resolution of attitudeindicator.png path when changing data directory (#795).
  • Improved orbit rendering:
    • Constant true anomaly spacing used for high-eccentricity orbits.
    • Better handling of edge cases in Keplerian-to-Cartesian conversion.
  • Reused GZipped file streams no longer break on non-gzipped JSON files.
  • Context menu in bookmarks pane now positioned correctly.
  • Error window layout made consistent.
  • Visibility dialog now properly handles ‘Invisible’ object types.

Performance Improvements

  • Replaced Apfloat with Quadruple: faster 128-bit floating point math with adequate precision. See this and this for some performance benchmarks.
  • Reduced short-lived object allocations in many systems.
  • Major speed-up in label rendering via task refactoring.
  • Star size factors now cached instead of recalculated per frame.
  • Internal maps replaced with faster, boxing-free versions.
  • Half-precision (16-bit) floats now used for non-critical star/particle magnitudes.
  • Particle updates split over multiple frames to reduce frame drops.
  • Old particle and variable record types unified into a compact, immutable Particle record.
  • PointCloudData reimplemented using records with a more compact memory footprint.

This blog post covers some of these performance improvements in more detail.

Code Refactoring

  • Removed duplicate star/particle index arrays.
  • Replaced boxed integers with primitives.
  • Top-K particle sorting now uses a priority queue.
  • All shader files renamed to use the .glsl extension.

Build System

  • Upgraded to libGDX 1.13.5.
  • Default builds now use JRE 24 with Generational ZGC for lower latency.
  • Java source compatibility updated from 17 to 20.
  • Gradle upgraded to 8.13.
  • Install4j AUR package URL updated to gaiasky.space.
  • Added test infrastructure:
    • Includes tests for Keplerian-to-Cartesian conversions.
    • Enabled JUnit dependencies.
  • gdx-tools moved to compile-only dependency.
  • Enabled logging for Gradle test runs.

Documentation

  • Improved descriptions for many fields in the attribute map JSON file.

Merge Requests

  • Merged quadruple branch (128-bit math support).
  • Merged particle-update-refactor branch (particle update system overhaul).

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