# Gaia Sky 3.5.0-RC5

## Features
- update wording on point and line styles in preferences dialog to make it more concise and clear.
- add extended particle sets. These support, in addition to positions, proper motions and sizes. They also can be rendered with icosahedron sphere models instead of quads. Add lazy initialization of render systems.
- enable arbitrary models rendered with instancing in extended particle sets.
- adapt star cluster loader to use the new extended particle set features by default.
- add geometry shader stage (optional) to shader program provider and to extended shader program.
- use GPU lines as the default line renderer for trajectories. This results in a big performance improvement, especially when many lines are on display. GPU lines now also can use the geometry shader to render as polyline quad-strips.
- use a geometry shader to generate the triangles in the polyline quadstrip renderer instead of the CPU. Performance is much improved.
- add alpha value to color map in the dataset highlight color picker.

## Bug Fixes
- regression in texture binding introduced in 3.5.0-RC3 (commit 7db456cc).
- adjust rotate/turn strength when using the arrow keys.
- random bugs in label render system.
- do not show collapse/expand buttons in collapsible windows if collapsing is disabled.
- wrong key used in galactic latitude attribute in color map picker.
- input multiplexer and welcome GUI initialization sequence may cause a startup crash in certain conditions.
- initialization sequence for distance scale factor, and particle groups breaking in VR when using triangles.
- do not skip processing of LOD-based object when it is the current camera focus.
- adjust visibility and opacity determination for entities with active fade in map; mostly used for NEARGALCAT objects.

## Performance Improvements
- remove guard clauses in shader interpolation function that are already covered by `smoothstep()`.
- additionally, clusters and lines have received huge performance updates, as pointed out in the features section.