Gaia Sky 3.7.0

Lots of features and fixes

By tsagrista on

Today we publish Gaia Sky 3.7.0. The main point of this release is to fix a show-stopping bug that occurs with the latest version of macOS, code-named Tahoe. On macOS Tahoe, Gaia Sky 3.6.11 crashes at startup due to the operating system hardware information library (oshi) returning nothing when asked for the operating system code name. This has been fixed in 3.7.0. But the fun does not end here, as 3.7.0 is cut from the bleeding edge development branch, so it includes all sorts of new features, QoL improvements, and additional fixes. Read on for more.

Features

  • Gamepad mapping changes: map labels on/off to button X, unmap toggle mini-map, map A to camera speed-up (hold to make camera faster). RB and LB mapped to vertical movement (up/down) in free camera mode.
  • Replace ‘displays’ section in about window with ‘graphics cards’.
  • Add infrastructure to be able to create and load ray-marching effects on-demand in the background. Make sure that ray-marching effects stay at their designated location by allowing addition of effects at a particular position in the post-processing chain.
  • Enable IDs in particle groups. Trim down IDs in camera info pane from 14 to 12 characters.
  • Improve ’no connection’ dialog, with more information and hints as to whether the issue is with our server or with the local internet connection.
  • Do not show blocking dialog if base data is present when we can’t connect to the datasets server. Show a popup notification instead. In the dataset manager window, make installed datasets tab the default view in some cases.
  • Add support for pulling cloud textures from online resources.
  • Add calls to clear label regexp filtering. Improve documentation on some API calls.

Bug Fixes

  • Guard OS code name getter behind NPE check during Flatpak discovery. This fixes a crash at startup with macOS Tahoe.
  • Remove UI window shadow, as it messes with the internal padding due to the 9-patch implementation in Libgdx.
  • Gamepad focus order in welcome GUI. Decrease poll delay for gamepad axes.
  • Misalignments in about window layout.
  • TLEParserTest does not initialize settings, leading to NPE.
  • Synchronize TLE initializer to prevent multiple creations/editions of TLE data and derived JSON files at the same time.
  • Size issue in gamepad image in gamepad settings window. Increase maximum value of axis power slider to 15. Set value of vertical movement (RB/LB) to 1 instead of 0.1, to match other camera motion inputs.
  • Reduce range of sensitivity and axis power sliders in gamepad config window.
  • Connect LABEL_CLEAR_FILTER_REGEX_CMD event to scene observer. This fixes the clearLabelFilterRegexps() method.
  • Increase maximum eye separation in stereo mode, fix star/particle label positioning in stereoscopic mode.

Build System

  • Update bundled JRE in install4j scripts to Java 25 (jdk-25+36).
  • Remove -XX:+ZGenerational flag from run script, as support was removed in Java 24.
  • Clean up gradle build file, and separate dist task into multiple sub-tasks to increase granularity and improve tracking in case of errors. Make it compatible with Gradle 9.1.x.
  • Migrate from multi-string notation to single-string notation for dependencies to prepare for Gradle 10.
  • Upgrade Jackson version to 2.20.0.
  • Upgrade OSHI to 6.9.0.
  • Add additional languages to installer (French, Deutsch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish).

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