This release brings volumetric rendering of the Milky Way, a new SMAA anti-aliasing implementation, a reworked camera, and support for gaiasky:// URLs, among many more new features and bug fixes.
- Add volumetric rendering of the Milky Way, with per-slot depth so that dense dust lanes hide the stars behind them while the faint outer haze does not.
- Support non-cubic and RGBA (color+density) volumes, crop unused data at load time, and skip empty bricks in the raymarcher.
- Expose the ray-marching iteration count to the JSON format and add reference system transformations to volumes.
- Improve the scripts that convert particle fields to 3D textures.
- Add SMAA, now the default anti-aliasing method, selectable in the preferences window with three quality levels.
- Rework the camera stop behaviour in cinematic and regular modes, and improve the camera close to planets and other bodies.
- Smooth gamepad axis and RB/LB vertical input with a configurable smoothing setting, and recalibrate controls in game mode.
- Register and handle the
gaiasky:// protocol on Windows, Linux, and macOS, with the gaiasky://load?dataset= handler and single-instance support.
- Move the REST server to the main Gaia Sky core, with a preferences section to start and stop it, show the API endpoints, and restrict it to the loopback interface.
- Add version 4 to the binary format, with astrophysical parameters such as log(g) and metallicity.
- Add initial implementation of Sesame name discovery in the search dialog.
- Size the light glow halos from the angular size of the light and grade their intensity by apparent magnitude, and occlude them with the depth buffer instead of a pre-pass.
- Automatically compute smooth vertex normals for wavefront models without normals, and add Phil Nowell's mapping to the cube sphere creator as the default.
- Accept 4 images per dataset, with horizontal scrolling, and update the default star visual settings.
- Lots of bug fixes.
