In this post, I’m mirroring the Gaia Sky 3 tutorial I wrote for the official Gaia Sky documentation to use as a rough script for the workshop given in a splinter session of the 2021 DPAC consortium online meeting held on March 17 and 18, 2021. You can find the original page here.
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Dramatic performance improvements and lots of new features in Gaia Sky 3
It’s been a while since I last talked about new Gaia Sky releases. Today I’m doing a recap of the last four releases, starting with 3.0.0. This very verison came out with Gaia eDR3 on Dec 3, 2020. It was a big jump for Gaia Sky, as it introduced a plethora of new features and QOL improvements along with lots of bug fixes and little tweaks. This post goes over the latest versions from 3.0.0 to 3.0.3, and reflects on what they brought to the table.
Jump to the analysis for each of the versions directly:
Planetary surfaces, keyframed camera, new scripting and more
Today we are releasing a brand new version (2.2.0) of Gaia Sky with several major changes and new features. To sum up, github reports 1071 changed files, with 81672 additions and 31763 deletions. Gitlab displays a “Too many changes to show” banner, as their cap is at a 1000 files. This makes it by far the largest release ever, followed by version 1.5.0 in the summer of 2017.
Gaia Sky gets keyframe-based camera paths
During the last months I have been working on a QOL improvement for Gaia Sky video production. Currently, Gaia Sky offers a couple of ways to persist and reproduce camera behaviours: scripting and camera paths. Scripting offers a high level API which allows for the interaction and manipulation of the internal state. Conceptually, a running script is no different from a regular user. A script runs in its own thread and, like a user, interacts with Gaia Sky’s core through the event manager, a message-passing entity which encapsulates the core functionality.
Jumbo release 1.5.0 brings lots of new features and improvements
This time around we’ve had a slightly longer development cycle so Gaia Sky 1.5.0 ‘Jumbo Summer Release’ is here with a ton of new features, enhancements and bug fixes. Most importantly, we have essentially refactored the way star catalogs are handled, so that we can now stream data from disk when it is needed. Also, we’ve been working hard to make better use of the GPU and we are proud to announce that we’ve increased the performance fourfold while being able to display many more objects on screen at once.
Version 1.0.2 brings spacecraft mode, lens glow, 360° and lots of bugfixes
Gaia Sky is here again with a brand new release packed with new features and bug fixes. Here are the most important: