v0.10.6

Release notes:

Released 2010-12-06

The Stellarium development team is proud to announce the release of version 0.10.6 of Stellarium.

This release brings some interesting new features:

• New feature for installing landscapes from ZIP archives.
• New plugin: Solar System editor.
• New plugin: Time Zone manual override.
• Oculars plugin: customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Satellites plugin: added new orbit prediction engine w/ orbits.
• Satellites plugin: can now update TLEs from a local file.
• Telescope control plugin: added manual equinox / epoch override.

There have also been a large number of bug fixes and some performance improvements.

New users will find that some plugins have been enabled by default. Computers where an older version of Stellarium has been run will continue with the old settings unless default.

Changelog:

New feature for installing landscapes from ZIP archives.
New plugin: Solar System editor.
New plugin: Time Zone manual override.
New translatable strings: stars and nebulae.
Selected plugins loaded by default.
Fixed on change of sky culture. (LP: #595914).
Fixed clearing of single constellation selection. (LP: #600889).
Fixed constellation art engine, removing distortion of images. (LP: #629405).
Changed GUI styles (all dialogs now use "Title Bar", the two different tabbed widget implementations are styled consistently).
Changed Solar System engine, allowing "Comets" and "Minor planets" to be handled as classes of objects separate from "Planets".
Translatable plugin names, descriptions and some other strings.
Oculars plugin: now uses a configuration file instead of SQL (LP: #596453).
Oculars plugin: added manual override of keyboard shortcuts (LP: #514530).
Oculars plugin: CCD sensors formula fixed (LP: #604975).
Satellites plugin: added new orbit prediction engine.
Satellites plugin: added trajectory visualization.
Satellites plugin: fixed problems leaving satellite TLEs out of date (LP: #616627).
Satellites plugin: can now update TLEs from a local file.
Satellites plugin: satellite visibility can now be saved from satellites dialog.
Telescope control plugin: fixed bad serial port names on Windows (LP: #596167).
Telescope control plugin: fixed telescopes disappearance on startup (LP: #608533).
Telescope control plugin: added manual equinox/epoch override (LP: #608544).
Various rendering problems resolved (LP: #569701, #596678, #641855, #642990, #666837, #629405, #591971, #615006, #671633).
SQLite dependency dropped. The Qt SQLite driver no longer needs to be packaged with Stellarium.

Files:

• stellarium-0.10.6.1.exe [MD5:8a60b39bdc6d2f458a8bd9d31af3d065] - Stellarium 0.10.6 for Windows (32-bit)

v0.10.5

Release notes:

The Stellarium team is very proud to announce the release of stable version 0.10.5. This is an important bug fix release closing more than 30 bugs in the main application and in the plugins. It also brings small GUI usability improvements, as well as a much reduced starting time.

A huge thanks to all community bug reporters who helped us a lot finding bugs!

Changelog:

0.10.5 [2010-06-02]
Bug fix release.

Fixed:

• various problems with OpenGL shaders. If you experience problems with unreadable fonts, try adding the line "use_qpaintenginegl2 = false" in the [main] section of the configuration file (config.ini).
• distorted menu icons on Windows. (LP: #512060)
• LC_NUMERIC locale not being set properly, causing problems on some systems with old_style landscapes (LP: #518809) and the Satellites plug-in (LP: #522520). (fix proposed by Hleb Valoshka and others)
• planet orbits not being toggled by pressing 'O'. (LP: #536684)
• setting landscape altitude (patch by Georg Zotti).
• making a series of location changes in a script. (LP: #500192)
• telescope control sending RA=0 for objects with RA between (12 and 24?) on Intel Macs. (LP: #544250, fix proposed by David Hulse)
• windows and toolbars not being affected by night vision mode. (LP: #539665)
• a crash on Windows when exiting Stellarium after a search. (LP: #534674)
• the Oculars plug-in not closing its SQL database on exit.
• the last star catalog not being offered for download. (LP: #538291)
• system clock running fast on some Windows systems using ACPI power managment (LP: #514184)
• the top labels of vertical grid lines not being displayed, and improper label rotation.
• script engine was recoded thread-free, this fixes many script related bugs.
• handling of negative/large dates in scripts.
• wrong time at startup when a time zone different than "system_default" is set in the configuration file (LP: #487232)

Changed:

• the Date/Time window is now synchronised with the date/time displayed in the toolbar, instead of showing the last date/time that has been entered.
• the visual style of some plug-ins.
• optimized loading of cities.
• optimized loading of planet textures (lazy loading).
• restructured src/ subdirectories to match code dependencies. Directories modules/, external/ and planetsephems/ are now under core/.
• stars positions and grid are now coded in float instead of double, to avoid huge memory consomption when loading all 9 star catalogs.
• improved management of OpenGL context in StelPainter.
• StelStyle class was moved from core to GUI library.
• GUI related resources are now compiled as part of GUI library.
• don't use a generated config.h anymore (use simple compile definitions instead).
• suppressed most compilation warnings with -Wextra even without the -Wno-unused-parameter flag.
• suppressed all the TelescopeMgr/Telescope code within the core. It is replaced by the TelescopeControl plugin.
• suppressed many unused files from installation target.

Added:

• option to create a desktop shortcut in the Windows installer.
• time dragging: Hold down Ctrl+Space and drag the mouse across the sky to change time speed.
• re-added the "planet trails" feature. Toggle with Shift+T.
• some Sky-Watcher mounts to the list of devices supported by the Telescope Control plug-in.
• yet unused code for computing atmosphere refraction and extinction.

Files:

• stellarium-0.10.5.exe [MD5:b9733e5cccd3caf5fae9ddf784b0df4a] - Stellarium 0.10.5 for Windows (32-bit)
• stellarium-0.10.5-win32-serial-port-patch-2.exe [MD5:9aa52e5c1783c5479fe983db05bf49e4] - A test patch for the serial port issue on Windows