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

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.

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.

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.

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).
Fixed crash due to early resolution of attitudeindicator.png path when changing data directory (#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.

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.

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.