Gaia Sky 3.5.8

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’