# Gaia Sky 3.6.9

## Features
- Add motion trail effect, which stretches stars and particles in the velocity direction. Can be toggled off in the settings.
- Add Turkish translation, contributed by Erdem Uygun.
- Migrate go-to-object operation in the camera info pane to use the smooth transitions API, which creates seamless, bumpy-free rides between two camera states.
- Add a new API v2, which re-names and re-organizes the single access pont we had in the previous API into several modules grouped by function. It also improves documentation and standardizes function and parameter names when possible.
- Adapt REST server and console to also accept APIv2 calls.
- Add new setting to enable and disable notification messages, and add checkbox to preferences window. Notifications are off by default. Fixes [#847](https://codeberg.org/gaiasky/gaiasky/issues/847).
- Update monospace fonts to include all supported characters, now using Liberation Mono.
- Add missing characters to font files to ready them for the Turkish translation.
- Left and right trigger buttons (LT, RT) in gamepads to control slider values in gamepad GUI.
- Update default lens flare shader.
- Add `generateIndex` attribute to particle sets, so that the index can be omitted for sets that do not need it (which is most of them).

## Bug Fixes
- Fix issues with upper- and lower-case conversions not using the correct locale.
- Star glow effect flickers due to using a different method to render the billboard depending on whether the effect is active or not.
- Big bugfix campaign in scripting. Went over all scripting tests and fixed all bugs so that all of them run fine.
- Add missing `"` character to fonts, fix custom and messages interfaces' computation of position coordinates.
- Dataset highlight API call not working properly.
- Use concurrent set as collections in event manager to avoid concurrent modification exceptions.
- Proper motions produce index out of bounds due to incorrect computation of maximum number of arrows.
- Correct many instances where the wrong locale is used to convert strings to upper and/or lower case. Enable star name localization for the index and labels.
- Properly scale camera mouse scroll and drag operations with the current frame rate.
- Disable OpenAL system.
- Use `RGBA16F` float format for the lens flare ping-pong buffer, otherwise AMD APUs show banding artifacts. Fixes [#846](https://codeberg.org/gaiasky/gaiasky/issues/846).
- Resolve redirects for Wikipedia titles, as the API does not resolve redirects automatically. This leads to 403 errors.
- Make sure `versionFile` task is executed when packing the app by setting the right dependencies.
- Adjust layout and width of about window to avoid UI overflow.


## Performance Improvements
- Use `GL_RGB16F` instead of `GL_RGBA16F` format (omitting the alpha channel) for internal post-processing effects buffers (lens flare, bloom, etc.). This saves some VRAM, especially useful in integrated graphics.
- Set a default value of 0.4 scale for the lens flare effect to minimize fill rate and make the ping-pong pass much faster.

## Code Refactoring
- Harmonize and consolidate star and particle set creation methods under the same class.

## Build System
- Disable OptFlowCam export option for keyframes in Flatpak in order to avoid Python dependencies.
- Upgrade to Gradle 8.14.2, which supports Java 24.
- Update to bundled JRE 24 in packages.

## Documentation
- Add new APIv2 package-level documentation.