Gaia Sky 3.6.9 – Release Notes

Gaia Sky 3.6.9 brings a new Turkish translation, motion trails, a new API (APIv2), and many bug fixes.

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.
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).

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.

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.

Harmonize and consolidate star and particle set creation methods under the same class.

Add --sun-misc-unsafe-memory-access=allow to launch VM options to prevent logging unsafe operation access in LWJGL3.
Disable OptFlowCam export option for keyframes in Flatpak in order to avoid Python dependencies.