Astrocelerate v0.2.0

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

Known Issues:

• 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 the newly multithreaded physics engine not being able to effectively synchronize with the renderer for smooth linear interpolation of object motion.
• Resizing the application window while a simulation is running or loaded freezes the entire application. This is an unfortunate oversight that was not accounted for when multithreading was integrated into Astrocelerate, and will be resolved by the next release.
• Installer issues still have not been resolved. In the mean time, please go to the directory in which Astrocelerate is installed, and run Astrocelerate.exe in the bin directory.