Astrocelerate v0.2.0

[ButteredFire]

This update marks the first stable release of the 0.2.x cycle. After months of architectural overhaul, Astrocelerate now sits on a robust engine foundation.

The goal of this release is to stabilize the engine to provide a reliable foundation upon which future features can be built.

Changelogs

Fixes:

• PHYSICS: Fixed critical TEME $\rightarrow$ J2000 transformation and Earth nutation/precession errors; the engine is now fully capable of TLE + SGP4 simulations
• UI/UX: Centralized simulation controls, and enabled time scale to be changed while paused
• UI/UX: Overhauled camera controls and viewport interaction
• ENGINE: Parallelized physics simulation and supported multithreaded rendering
• ENGINE: Resolved major memory leaks resulting from worker threads emitting infinite events while the main thread is too unresponsive to poll the event queue

Additions/Features:

• RENDERING: Added useful live information to the viewport (e.g., controls, current epoch, observer)
• ENGINE: Added watchdog thread to immediately stop rapid memory leaks caused by unresponsive main thread
• ENGINE: Implemented C++20 thread wrapper with CPU-efficient start/stop/request-stop functions
• ENGINE: Overhauled Vulkan resource management system by replacing stack-based destruction with custom-implemented N-ary resource tree

Notes:

• Performance may be subpar due to difficulties parallelizing UI rendering, with the added overhead of lock contention as a result of multithreaded physics and scene rendering. Expect substandard FPS.
• There may be input delay and visual instability, especially at high time scales, due to linear interpolation of object motion currently not working correctly 100% of the time.
• Installer issues still have not been resolved. For the mean time, please go to the directory in which Astrocelerate is installed, and run Astrocelerate.exe in the bin directory.

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This discussion was created from the release Astrocelerate v0.2.0.