# Gaia Sky 3.6.8 – Release Notes **Gaia Sky 3.6.8** brings a major UI refresh, significant performance improvements, and many new features and bug fixes. --- ## 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. ### 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](https://codeberg.org/gaiasky/gaiasky/issues/825)). - Fixed crash due to early resolution of `attitudeindicator.png` path when changing data directory ([#795](https://codeberg.org/gaiasky/gaiasky/issues/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. - 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. --- ## 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).