Revision history

Version 2.8.7

• Side-by-side 3D modes are now properly supported. This should work with most brands of 3D displays, though you normally have to manually enable it on the display. Note that the effective resolution is halved though, which is why...
• AMD HD3D is now supported for full-resolution, full-colour stereo 3D (NB; this requires an AMD graphics card and an HDMI 1.4 compatible 3D TV or 3D projector).
• Minimum requirements now include a CPU with SSE2 instruction support.

Version 2.8.6

• Improved compatibility with orange-blue colour anaglyph stereo glasses (constellation lines & planetary orbits now get colours with better visibility for both eyes).
• In the Stereo vision tutorial, the selected anaglyph type is now more clearly indicated using a check-mark in the menu.
• Reduced the flickering when rendering rotating planetary surface feature names.
• StarLua programming: Updated the Lua language core to v5.1.4. Added tmenu.setitemstate for setting various states for menu items. Added tbmp.free for explicitly releasing bitmap memory.

Version 2.8.5

• Dialog boxes (e.g. the Object finder) now works when running in 24-bit fullscreen modes on Windows 7 / Vista..
• Added support for 30-bit (10-bits / color component) deep color fullscreen modes. This is available for some newer video cards only. It is a definite improvement for the rendering of faint gradients (e.g. the milky way). You do not need to have a 30-bit capable display - the video card can "dither" the image down two 24-bits, which reduces visible banding artifacts. NB: Dialog boxes are disabled when running in 30-bit modes (since Windows can't display them in that format). If you try to open a dialog in such a mode, you'll just get an error text. The exception is the "Load file" dialog box, which is replaced by a listing of the files in the "Scripts and Views" directory.
• The "nesting depth" of the menus have been reduced. Most important is that the "Video mode" menu has been replaced by a "Fullscreen video mode" menu, where you now select the desired color format, resolution, and refresh rate, all from the same menu level, then use "Switch to fullscreen" to set the mode. I.e. you no longer have to navigate through as multiple levels of sub-menus to do this.
• The textures from the previously separately available "2048x texture pack" are now included with the default textures.
• The joystick control mappings have been updated to work well with the XBox360 game pad.
• A "Pixel aspect ratio" listing in a new "Device & display" menu replaces the previous "Display aspect ratio" menu (most modern displays & projectors use square pixels, i.e. a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio).
• The "Add Kuiper Belt Objects" script have been updated, and now includes Pluto & Charon, which following an IAU decision, are no longer counted among the "main" planets.
• The "Enable dual-core use" and "Enable pixel-shader support" options have been removed - these features are now always enabled (if supported by the hardware).
• The "Configure controls" option has been removed as the standard dialog for doing this were removed by Microsoft in Vista / 7.
• Various minor bug fixes.

Version 2.8

• It is now possible to add new planets & satellites so that you can construct your own new (fantasy) solar systems. This is all done via new StarLua extensions. Our own solar system is of course defined in same way (see the file "Solar system bodies.StarLuaLib") so that you can completely customize it if you want.
• It is now possible to run multiple simultaneous StarLua programs.
• Added a two-page on-screen help box (for controls & commands). Toggle it by pressing F1.
• Now surface feature names, constellation names, sky object names and planetary names are all translated into your selected language.
• A new option, "Use Latin names", turns off the above mentioned name translations in case you prefer the Latin ‘scientific’ names.
• The "Select next/prev in solar system" commands has been replaced with the following commands: "Select prev sibling object" (Alt+Left key), "Select next sibling object" (Alt+Right key), "Select parent object" (Alt+Up key), and "Select first child object" (Alt+Down key). This allows you to fully navigate the selection throughout the whole "solar systems -> planets -> satellites" hierarchical tree.
• Added an "Add Kuiper belt objects" StarLua program (in the 'Scripts & Views' directory) that adds several recently discovered Kuiper-belt objects.
• Added "from your current position" and "from currently selected object" options to the "Find all stars within" function.
• The clock display has moved to the right hand "info stack" and is now labeled "Time:".
• The "Save preset" command has migrated from the File menu to the "View->Quick presets" menu. But that's not all, presets are now saved in the "Presets – View" subdirectory and are selectable on the "Quick presets" menu - i.e. you can customize those as you see fit.
• Keyboard shortcuts have been reorganized and improved (e.g. object type toggles are now on the number keys instead of Alt + Number key and the latter is now used for name toggles).
• The "Numeric /" key now slows down the time scaling by a factor 10x and the "Numeric *" speeds up time by a factor 10x (these new keyboard shortcuts replace all the previous time-scale short-cuts).
• The mouse back/forward navigation buttons now toggle the main menu - useful if you're running in full-screen mode without keyboard attached...
• You can now pause the program at (almost) any time using the 'Pause' key on the keyboard.
• Several minor improvements and bugs fixes.
• Several StarLua improvements.

Version 2.7

• Added optional "Surface feature names" together with a database of 577 such surface features for the various planets and satellites (and you can edit this and add more yourself using a new StarLua extension).
• Added bump-mapping support for several planets and satellites, this option has to be enabled under the visible objects menu. NB, it is only available if you have a video card with support for 'Pixel Shader 2.0'.
• Single-pass rendering of the earth (with all options turned on) is now possible on hardware with Pixel and Vertex Shader 2.0 support - yielding a major performance improvement and image quality improvements too.
• Added specular high-light maps for some satellites. This is used to improve the realism of icy and other highly reflective surfaces.
• Added the new option 'Planet pole lines'
• Added an "Interface language" selection to the Options menu. Available languages (for now) is English and Swedish. Volunteers to translate it into other languages are welcome!
• The logic for organizing the textures into texture packs has changed. Now if a texture is missing from the selected texture pack, then it is instead loaded from the default pack. This avoids unnecessary duplication of files.
• All the textures from the previous "Large texture pack" are now included with the "Default" texture pack. Instead there's now an optional "Small texture pack" that you need to install if you want to run StarStrider properly on video cards with less than 32MB of video memory. There's also new (optional) "2048x1024" and "4096x2048" texture packs with a few additional larger texture if you want that (note that only very few cards supports 4096x textures at the moment).
• New option 'Store uncompressed textures on disk'. Enabling this 'caches' uncompressed, fully mip-mapped, texture files on disk. It also precomputes bump-maps from height maps. This can make loading the program, and/or changing video mode or resizing the window go much faster! But can also eats up quite a bit of disk space so the choice if you want to use this or not is yours!
• Many new and/or improved textures.
• Turning off 'Cloud layer' on the objects menu now shows Venus (and Earth too) without the cloud layer.
• Added modeling of some 'interplanetary' light reflection: reflection of light by a planet onto its moons (e.g. 'Earth-shine' on our moon), reflection of the light from the nearest satellite onto a planet (e.g. 'moon-light' on the Earth), and the reflection of scattered light from the rings onto a ringed planet.
• The menu structure has been rearranged in order to make it more logical and easier to use.
• If you have a 'center mouse button' or 'mouse wheel', then you can drag with the mouse (while holding down the center button or wheel button) in order to rotate around a selected a object. Rotating the mouse wheel while the button is down rotates the view in the third direction. Rotating the mouse wheel while the button is not down, now moves towards or away from the selected object.
• The graphical design of the window menu has been improved.
• Improved cursor graphics.
• The 'Rename Tellus/Luna/Sol to Earth/Moon/Sun' option has been removed. Instead, planets can be renamed through the new language translation feature (hint, we have elected to use Tellus/Luna for 'English (Brittish)' and Earth/Moon for 'English (US)').
• Several StarLua improvements.

Version 2.6

• Updated the code to use DirectX 9 (so DirectX v9.0 or later is now required).
• Minimum CPU requirement is now a Pentium III or AMD Athlon or later.
• 16-bit video modes are no longer supported.
• Added Pentium 4 code optimization (it will of course still run well on other CPUs too). Also added some multi-processor support (retrieval and projection of 3D stars can now run in parallel with other tasks). This will also work on HyperThreading enabled P4s (which should show a frame rate improvement of 10-20%).
• If you have 3D-hardware that supports "Pixel shader v2.0" plus "Vertex shader v1.1" (or later) then planets are now drawn using new pixel and vertex shader code. This not only provides much improved performance on the latest generation of video cards, it also adds per-pixel lighting for improved realism.
• Also added pixel shader support enabling single-pass rendering of stars in "saturated gauss" and "gauss+cross" mode for hardware that supports this (this too requires "Pixel Shader v2.0" which means that it is only enabled for Nvidia GeForce FX or ATI Radeon 9500+ class hardware). The frame rate improvement (i.e. for cards that supports this) is typically 20-50% (depending on the number of stars and the video mode).
• When rendering in "windowed mode", it is now synchronized to the vertical retrace. This means that 1) you don't get any 'tearing' and 2) you wont get insane fps figures way higher than the screen refresh rate - saves CPU cycles for other things... Note: older video card drivers might only allow updates at half the screen refresh rate.
• When rendering stars in "saturated gauss" and "gauss+cross" mode, the blending with the background is now done in a more photo-realistic way.
• Added a new "Tutorial 6 - Stereo vision" that will teach you about the fundamentals of using stereo vision with anaglyph glasses.
• Improved the graphic presentation of various text infos - including adding graphical illustrations of the field of view and visibility + saturation limit settings.
• Cursor movement in full-screen mode is now smoother when the mouse is in "pointer mode".
• In mouse pointer mode, it is now possible to hold down the left mouse button (which also selects objects beneth it) or the middle mouse button (if any) and drag the mouse to scroll the view.
• In mouse pointer mode, you can now use the mouse-wheel (if any) to zoom (wheel not pressed down) or to change the magnitude limit (wheel pressed down).
• Added a "Load recent files" list as a sub-menu to the file menu.
• "Tellus/Luna/Sol" are now 'renamed' into "Earth/The moon/The sun" by default - even though the latter are the colloquial names rather than the proper names. You can turn this off in the "View"->"Names and lines" menu.
• The "Look back" control (normally on the 'minus' key) has been renamed to "Flip viewing direction" and will now work without breaking travel or orbit states, i.e. you can now e.g. look back while traveling someplace. It is now also possible to interrupt and reverse an ongoing flip in a nice way.
• It is now possible to get closer to objects without 'bouncing away' - the starship will now automatically start to 'brake' (and thus go slower) if you drive near an object.
• Added a "Set time & place" dialog on the "Space & time" menu. This allows you to set the clock to a specific time and/or go view a specific longitude and latitude coordinates on a planet.
• 'Travel to' and 'Orbit' modes now require a larger input control movement to break and return to 'free movement' mode. This should avoid breaking them by accidentally nudging the mouse a tiny amount, or by e.g. joysticks that do not want to stay properly centered.
• The sky is now lit up when traveling very close to a planet with an atmosphere.
• It is now possible to drag'n'drop .Star* files to the StarStrider window.
• Added a new option "File->Enable startup script" which allows you to dsiable the short start-up script.
• Screenshots are now saved in the sub-directory "Screenshots".
• Added a code editor add-on - this is a "must have" if you are making your own StarLua or StarScript extensions! It is based on the excellent SciTE editor, modified and set up specifically for editing StarLua and StarScript code with proper syntax high-lightning et c. Context sensitive keyword help, and output of error messages to the editor "output pane" has also been added (simply double-click on an error message to go to the line where the error occured).
• A number of StarLua and StarScript improvements

Version 2.5

• We've managed to optimise the star database even further, especially for relativistic effects. This means that the program now both loads and runs faster - though perhaps mostly noticeable when you have a very large database (see below).
• We have created an optional 'ASCC database add on' - containing a whopping 1,462,812 stars in 3D plus a further 572,733 distant stars, i.e. 2,035,545 stars in total. They are mostly taken from the 'All-Sky Compiled Catalogue'. Compare this with the 118,218 stars of our (default) Hipparcos database. Note that for the vast majority of these stars, no distance measurements are available. Instead the distances has been derived based on know data for the stars (star class, luminosity et c) and current theories about stellar evolution and classification. Comparison with stars of known distances gives a statistical mean error of 35% for this method. Still, having 2 million stars can be fun :-) This is a an *optional* add-on - and by its very nature it's quite a large download (about 32MB).
• Updated the database with refined positions of 1022 stars based on recent astronomical research. Among them are the stars of the Pleiades and the Hyades star clusters. In addition, we have applied statistical methods to tweak parallaxes of known cluster stars to make the clusters appear more isotropic.
• For most stars, planets and satellites there's now a 'More info on the web...' selection in the info dialog (right click on an object to bring up the info dialog). Selecting it takes you to a web site with more info about that object (e.g. the 'SIMBAD Astronomical Database' or the 'Nine Planets web site'). You can also add your own links for any object in StarStrider by adding a line with an http: address in the 'annotation file' for that object (see 'How to annotate objects' in the program help file).
• In window mode, you now have a standard Windows-style program menu in addition our custom 'Tab to open' menu. It enabled on by default, but if you want a cleaner window, you can disable it by unchecking 'Use standard menu in window mode' under the File menu.
• Introducing StarLua! StarLua is a programming environment based on the 'Lua 5 (alpha)' language (see www.lua.org). It can be used to write custom extensions as well as to construct more advanced scripts and other kinds of 'programs' that runs inside StarStrider. The 'StarScript' language introduced in v2.0 is still supported (and even extended with several new options in this version). Choose which one you want to use, depending on the situation - StarScript is much simpler to learn while StarLua (being a 'real' programming language with variables, functions et c) is much more powerful but necessarily also takes more effort to learn how to use.
• Added the possibility to load and save .StarPreset files - containing the current star type, size and coloration, as well as field of view, magnitude limit and saturation magnitude.
• Pressing numeric '0' and strafing when in orbit now changes orbit radius. Pressing numeric '0' and changing velocity while orbiting changes orbit velocity.
• 'Shift-F11' now re-centers a view in 'travel' or 'orbit' mode, if it previously has been altered (by making use of numeric '0' for instance).
• Added optional display of planet and satellite orbits.
• Added optional display of constellation borders, i.e. the borders between the areas of the sky belonging to different constellations. Only displayed when you are near the Solar system.
• Added options to display 'Bayer star names' and 'Flamsteed star names'.
• It is now possible to search for Bayer and Flamsteed star names in the Object finder (e.g. Alpha Leonis).
• Added 'Tutorial 5 - Space Travel' as well as updated the other tutorials.
• All object name display options are now moved to their own sub-menu 'Names & lines'.
• Added support for Microsoft Direct Draw Surface (.dds) texture files.
• Added an option 'Show names of selected' that forces rendering of the names (if any) of a selected object.
• Added an option to display the coordinates of the 'viewing direction'.
• Added a 'Hide names & lines' option (with 'Caps Lock' as short-cut key). Used together with with 'Hide all info' (with 'Scroll Lock' as short-cut key) it will give you a completely 'clean' sky view. Also, if you enable 'Show names of selected' but disable constellations, and then select a constellation (using the object finder) then this will draw the selected constellation (only).
• 'Hide all info' now also hides selection markers.
• Added selections for 4:3 ('rotated monitor') and 16:10 aspect ration (used by some up-coming note-books).
• Corrected satellite rotations/orbits (should now turn the correct face towards the planet).
• Replaced the Tellus cloud cover texture with a new one (in the 'large texture pack' it is now in higher resolution than before).
• Windows 95 is no longer supported, sorry...
• Numerous minor improvements, optimizations, and a few bug-fixes..

Version 2.0

• Now includes all the planets of the solar system, plus all the major satellites! All i glorious real-time 3D of course! Special effects include atmospheric shadings, ray-cast ring shadows (on Saturn and Uranus), ocean high-lights and moving clouds shadows (on Tellus) and more.
• Now includes deep-sky objects: Galaxies, nebulae and star clusters.
• A nice background of the starry field of the milky way has been added.
• Stars are extented (as opposed to pointlike) when you stride close enough.
• New 'on-screen' menu system.
• A new 'scripting engine' allows the crafty person to make presentations and automated planetarium shows. Two 'tutorials' that helps you learn about StarStrider and two that teaches you about astronomy have been made using this scripting engine and are included with the program. More are expected in the future (possibly made by *you*!). Script language documentation included in the program manual.
• The graphics engine has been rewritten for DirectX 8. This alone gives you a 0-30% speed boost - depending on video card and selected options. Other optimisations have been done as well to improve performance (then of course, many of the new features are CPU hungry too - so the difference may not be so noticeable!). Compiler improvements give another 5-8% speed boost.
• DirectX 8 'action maps' are now used for controllers. This means that not only is the keyboard and the mouse available for navigation, you can use *any device* (joysticks et c) that is compatible with DirectInput. You can configure the function of every key, button, axis, or hat switch yourself! See the 'Configure controls' option in the menu.
• Added support for 'color anaglyph stereo' giving you a true depth stereo view in colour with no special hardware (Orange/Blue and Red/Cyan anaglyph glasses, often provided in amusement parks and IMAX cinemas that show 3D-movies, are supported).
• All names now fade in and out nicely instead of abruptly popping up or disappearing.
• Constellation lines are now drawn anti-aliased.
• The 'sol map' display is different - and hopefully easier to understand.
• Added an info->'hide info' option that allows you to quickly toggle texts and controls on and off.
• You can now rotate the viewpoint without halting in orbit by holding down the numeric keypad 0 key.
• 'Travel To' starts out and ends more slowly, travelling faster in between.

Version 1.5

• Added relativistic effects: space time aberration and/or Doppler shift of light spectrums.
• Added a 'ship-clock' which can be selected to go much faster than the 'real life' clock by setting a 'time-scale' factor. I.e. by cheating with a 'fast' clock we can now stay 'realistic' and constrain the ship to sub-light speed and still get somewhere in less 'real time' than a life-span.
• Added a 'Space-time' menu where you can select such things as a Newtonian or an Einsteinean universe, time scale, and related options.
• Added 'speed unit' selection under 'Info' in the menu. The selection 'light years per second' behaves in a special way in that it multiplies the displayed speed with the time scale factor. I.e. you see the speed in 'real-life' time (as in the previous version of StarStrider) rather than in the scaled 'ship' time.
• The StarStrider logo is no longer drawn when in 'Zoomed' mode.
• The screen saver mode now is considerably nicer.
• If you hold down the numeric 0 key, you can now rotate the viewing direction without changing the travelling direction, this also works in 'travel' mode.
• The field of view, the visibility limit, and the saturation limit are now also stored in .ssview files. When you open them, you have a checkbox in the open file dialog, which determines if these parameters should be loaded or not.
• Added a new view quick preset: Starfield view.
• Added a travel time 'count down' when clock display is turned on.
• To conform with accepted practice, the 'Disc' star rendering mode no longer scales the disc intensities with the star brightness - only their radius.
• Ctrl-M now toggles a special 'movie making mode' where it used a discrete time step between frames (e.g. 25fps) and continuously saves a screenshot to disk for every frame.

Version 1.0

• This was the first public release.