Astrocelerate v0.2.0-alpha

This major update includes fixes primarily pertaining to user experience, and a new, more capable physics engine.

Changelogs

Fixes

• INSTALLER: Removed UI background for text readability
• UI/UX: Auto-closed the loading screen
• UI/UX: Changed SPACE and L-SHIFT for Up and Down movement to E and Q respectively.
• UI/UX: Fixed camera Alt+Tab issue
• UI/UX: Fixed Earth completely black on dark side

New Features

• UI/UX: Implemented orbital camera
• RENDERING: Improved camera implementation to allow for visual stability even AUs away from a coordinate system's origin
• PHYSICS: Integrated the NASA SPICE Toolkit, with support for the J2000 ECI and SSB frames
• PHYSICS: Added support for N-body physics
• PHYSICS: Added support for TLE parsing and body propagation (with the SGP4 propagator)
• PHYSICS: Recreated the VNREDSat-1A orbit with SGP4 orbital propagation using publicly available TLE data
• OTHER: Overhauled simulation file syntax, with the addition of built-in common celestial bodies
• OTHER: Added 2 simulation samples (SP_SolarSystem.yaml and SP_SGP4Test.yaml) to demonstrate the new additions to Astrocelerate

A note on the installation process

As of now, I'm still experimenting with installers, so Astrocelerate's installer for this release will be quite basic, and require some manual intervention.

By default, the installer puts Astrocelerate in Program Files. After installation, please go to Program Files\Astrocelerate v0.2.0-alpha\bin and launch the Astrocelerate.exe executable.

A note on the crazy installer size

The reason why v0.2.0's installer is almost 1GB in size compared to v0.1.0's 100MB is primarily the sheer size of the prerequisite SPICE kernels for the Solar System simulation (and, for all intents and purposes, all simulations). If anyone knows an industry-standard approach to packaging huge binary content, I'm all ears!