December 27th, 2012View Window Improvements:
· Includes the following improvements and bug fixes to the operation of view windows.
· There have been several improvements made to the display of ecliptic grids and equatorial grids. The details of these improvements can be found below.
· In solar system simulations, ascending node indicators and descending node indicators have been added to the orbits of selected objects that have the Sun as a parent.
· The magnitude key has been made much more useful by making the magnitudes of the key stars sensitive to the magnification and brightness.
· The crosses indicating selected objects have been made visible regardless of whether or not the object itself is bright enough to be visible.
· A bug has been fixed that caused AstroGrav to crash when viewing from the single object in a simulation with just one object.
· Trajectory drawing and history drawing have been significantly speeded up.
· A bug has been fixed that caused some history values to disappear near the edge of a window.
Coordinate Grid Improvements:
· Includes the following improvements and bug fixes to the display of ecliptic and equatorial coordinate grids on view windows.
· The display of ecliptic grids and equatorial grids has been greatly speeded up at high magnifications.
· More ecliptic grid lines and equatorial grid lines are now displayed at low magnifications.
· A bug has been fixed that caused some angle labels on the ecliptic and the equator to not be displayed when they should be.
· A bug has been fixed that caused angle labels on the ecliptic and the equator to jump from one side of the line to the other at low magnifications.
· The orientation of the angle labels used for the ecliptic and the equator have been changed from parallel to horizontal.
Object Import Improvements:
· Includes the following improvements and bug fixes to the Edit / Import Objects... command.
· A bug has been fixed that caused the fragment codes of comets to be missing from comet import tables.
· In asteroid import tables, the Name column has been renamed the Designation column.
· In asteroid import tables, the default sort column has been changed from the Number column to the Designation (previously Name) column.
· In asteroid import tables, sorting on the Designation column has been greatly improved to make it more intuitive and easier to manually search for a particular asteroid.
Other Improvements:
· Has many other minor improvements and bug fixes, including the following.
· A bug has been fixed that could cause an edited orbital period to become corrupted when using the object editor.
· The Tau Ceti sample simulation has been added in order to illustrate the system of five planets that have recently been found to be orbiting the star Tau Ceti.
· In most of the sample simulations in the Abstract Systems and Exoplanet Systems, the origin of the reference frame has been made stationary at the center of mass.
· The documentation has been updated to cover the recent improvements.
November 12th, 2012Evolution Improvements:
· The evolution algorithm has been multi-threaded, so that it runs significantly faster on multi-processor and multi-core computers.
· A bug has been fixed that caused the General Relativity option to be very unreliable in some circumstances.
· Animated evolution has been significantly speeded up on multi-processor and multi-core computers by using one processor/core to update the screen display while a second processor/core works on calculating the following state of the simulation.
· The handling of collisions with the Combine option has been improved to correct a fault that could cause evolution to grind to a halt when a collision occurred.
· The handling of collisions with the Bounce option has been improved to correct a fault with the evolution of simulations in which multiple bounces occur close together.
· The results of multiple single steps are now identical to the results of a single run over the same time period - something that wasn't the case in earlier versions of AstroGrav.
Background Star Names:
· The Solar System, Solar System 2, and Space Missions sample simulations have been adjusted so that choosing the View / Background / Star Names command immediately shows a reasonable number of star names. In AstroGrav 2.0, it was sometimes necessary to choose the View / Background / More Star Names command many times before any star names actually appeared.
· The name of the View / Background / Fewer Star Names command has been changed to View / Background / Less Star Names.
· The View / Background / Less Star Names command is now disabled whenever all star names are hidden.
· The View / Background / More Star Names command is now disabled whenever all star names are shown.
Sample Simulations:
· The accuracy of the data has been improved in the Comet Gehrels 3 sample simulation.
· The Comet Oterma sample simulation has been added.
· The Solar System, Solar System 2, and Space Missions sample simulations have been adjusted so that choosing the View / Background / Star Names command immediately shows a reasonable number of star names. In AstroGrav 2.0, it was sometimes necessary to choose the View / Background / More Star Names command many times before any star names actually appeared.
· The Collapsing Cloud sample simulation has been modified to make the stars different colors, so that they can easily be distinguished when they've collected together after running with bouncing collisions.
· In non-English installations of AstroGrav, the default sample simulation folder has been changed from the English sample simulation folder to the the appropriate non-English sample simulation folder.
Other Improvements:
· A bug has been fixed that could cause AstroGrav to crash on Windows PCs with Intel Core i7 processors.
· A bug has been fixed that could cause a crash when trying to find the object that the viewpoint is attached to in a view window.
· A bug has been fixed that caused closing and re-opening a tool palette to result in an empty tool palette, without any tools.
· The positioning of a new tool palette has been improved so that it no longer obscures part of the window that it belongs to.
· When you choose the File / Save command or the File / Save All command, an 'Are you sure?' message is now displayed before overwriting an existing simulation file, so that it is harder to accidentally overwrite a file that you want to retain.
· The font size used for the constellation names that are displayed with the View / Background / Constellation Names command has been significantly reduced.
· The default coordinate axis color in view windows has been changed from white to orange.
· The tutorial has been updated to cover some of the more recent features.
August 7th, 2012· Added a completely new evolution algorithm that is much more accurate than the evolution algorithm used in previous versions, and which contains several new settings.
· Added two new commands in the View / Show menu.
· Added two new commands in the View / Show All menu.
· Added the new View / Show Selected menu, together with its eight new commands.
· Added the new View / Background menu, together with its twelve new commands.
· Added the new Edit / Reverse Objects command, which reverses the direction of the current selection of objects in the active window.
· Added the new Edit / Import Objects... command, which imports comets and asteroids from the web sites of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the IAU's Minor Planet Center.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
December 10th, 2011· Added the View / Show / Barycenter and View / Show / Grayscale commands.
· Made several improvements to the sample simulations.
· Corrected a fault that caused the Evolve / Evolve To... command to evolve to the wrong time when the time step was changed during evolution.
· Added the Control+U (Command+U on a Mac) keyboard shortcut to the Window / Units command.
· Corrected a fault that caused Control+Double-Click (Command+Double-Click on a Mac) on a view window to incorrectly show the object editor.
· Corrected the Undo/Redo tool tips when the operation that is to be undone/redone is an edit of one of the units.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
October 24th, 2011· Changed the way that Units and Notes windows are displayed, so that they can be left open while interacting with other parts of the user interface.
· Added the asteroid 2010 SO16 to the Earth's Quasi-Moons sample simulation.
· Added the Earth Trojan sample simulation to show the asteroid 2010 TK7, which was recently discovered to occupy a Trojan orbit with respect to the Earth.
· Added the Units window to many of the sample simulations.
· Corrected a fault that could cause the significant digits of position and speed quantities to get reduced to 4.
· Corrected a fault that caused a window with a tool palette to disappear when another application's window was clicked.
Various minor bug fixes and improvements:
· A bug has been fixed that could cause the significant digits of position and speed quantities to get reduced to 4.
· A bug has been fixed that caused a window with a tool palette to disappear when another application's window was clicked.
· A bug has been fixed that sometimes prevented the angle cursor from being displayed on a view window when specifying an angle to display.
· Number formatting has been improved so that unwanted zeros are no longer appended to quantities.
· The 'auto correction' of quantities in the object editor has been modified, with the aim of making the automatic changes less intrusive.
· The minimum size of windows has been increased from 160 x 160 pixels to 200 x 200 pixels.
· Several minor performance optimizations have been made.
July 4th, 2011· Added the display of the (x, y, z) coordinates of the viewpoint to the status bar of a view window.
· Corrected a fault that could cause 60 to be displayed as the number of minutes or seconds in formatted angles.
· Corrected a fault that prevented the File / Import... and Edit / Paste commands from working.
· Corrected a fault that caused a new or duplicate view window to initially appear blank on some computers.
· Corrected a fault that caused the newly visible part of a maximized view window to initially appear blank on some computers.
· Corrected a fault that prevented the angle cursor from being displayed on a view window when specifying an angle to display.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
March 31st, 2011· Includes a correction to a serious fault that caused version 1.9 of AstroGrav to crash during startup for a small proportion of users upgrading from version 1.8.4 or earlier.
· The symbols for elements (a, e, i, omega, etc) have been added to object windows, the object editor, and the new family editor, in order to make it clearer which element is which.
· Separators have been added to the lists of units in popup menus to separate units into groups of SI units, imperial units, astronomical units, etc.
· A bug has been fixed in the Edit / Add Family... command that incorrectly allowed a separator to be selected in the popup menu of the Quick Setup box.
· Minor corrections have been made to the notes of the Spiral Arms sample simulation.
· Several corrections have been made to the capitalization of units.
March 19th, 2011Evolving:
· Version 1.9 of AstroGrav includes several corrections to minor faults in the evolution algorithm that could affect evolution accuracy. These faults are all of a subtle nature, and were most likely to be noticed when studying comets in solar system simulations, when occasionally a comet would slowly wander away from its correct path.
· There is also a significant performance improvement in the evolution algorithm. This varies from one simulation to another, but is typically around 15 percent faster.
Sample Simulations:
· Much more accurate masses (several significant figures) have been used for the major bodies of the solar system, which has the effect of reducing errors in solar system simulations by well over 99 percent.
· 27 recently discovered large Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) have been added.
· The start date has been changed from 01/01/2010 to 01/01/2011.
· The Tutorial sample simulation has been updated to have a start date on 01/01/2011, and the text of the tutorial has been updated to correspond.
· In addition, the Spiral Arms sample simulation has been updated so that the disturbing galaxy approaches on an eccentric orbit rather than having a circular orbit.
Units:
· Units have been made easier to read on tables by changing from one-line table headers to two-line table headers.
· On the Edit/Units... dialog, the order of the units in the popup lists has been improved.
· The arcminutes and arcseconds units have been replaced with the degrees : minutes and degrees : minutes : seconds units respectively.
· The grads : centigrads and grads : centigrads : centi-centigrads units have been added.
· The date and date + time units have been renamed the fractional days and local time units respectively.
· The universal time unit has been added.
· The symbols used for Earth radii, Solar radii, Earth masses, Solar masses, and Solar luminosities have been changed to use the single Sun and Earth characters.
Other Improvements:
· A bug has been fixed that could cause table sorting to only partially sort the objects.
· A bug has been fixed that could cause a slight modification of a simulation's state whenever a view window was opened.
· The Edit / Date/Time... and Evolve / Evolve To... dialogs have been improved to allow minutes and seconds to be omitted without reporting an error.
· A bug has been fixed in the File / Import... command that caused the time unit to be ignored when importing a simulation.
· A bug has been fixed in the File / Export... command that caused the time in an exported file to always be expressed in seconds, regardless of the specified unit.
· A bug has been fixed that could cause the animated series of dots on a status bar to appear when they shouldn't.
· The display of data in tables has been speeded up.
October 30th, 2010· Made many improvements to the sample simulations.
· Added a "beep when finished" checkbox to the Evolve / Evolve To... dialog.
· Corrected a fault that could cause a highly eccentric orbit (such as Comet McNaught's) to be inaccurately displayed.
· Corrected a fault that could cause unwanted orbit lines to be displayed with a highly eccentric orbit (such as Comet McNaught's).
· Improved the algorithm used to calculate the magnitude of a non-luminous body.
· Simplified the installation of AstroGrav on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
· Made table column selectors focusable, so that column selection can be done with the keyboard.
· On view windows, made the negative coordinate axes slightly more prominent.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
· The HD 10180 sample simulation has been moved from the Abstract Systems folder to the new Exoplanet Systems folder.
· The Gliese 876, Kepler 9, and Upsilon Andromedae sample simulations have been added to the new Exoplanet Systems folder.
· The Comet Hartley 2 sample simulation has been added to the Solar System 2 folder.
· The brightness of the Projectile sample simulation has been reduced to make it look correct, as in AstroGrav 1.8.2 and earlier.
· The magnitudes of planets and major moons in the Solar System sample simulations has been improved by changing their colors.
· A "beep when finished" checkbox has been added to the Evolve / Evolve To... dialog.
· A bug has been fixed that could cause a highly eccentric orbit (such as Comet McNaught's) to be inaccurately displayed.
· A bug has been fixed that could cause unwanted orbit lines to be displayed with a highly eccentric orbit (such as Comet McNaught's).
· The algorithm used to calculate the magnitude of a non-luminous body has been improved.
· The installation of AstroGrav has been simplified on Windows Vista and Windows 7.
· Table column selectors are now focusable, so that column selection can be done with the keyboard.
· On view windows, the negative coordinate axes have been made slightly more prominent.
September 1st, 2010· Changed the way that columns are shown and hidden in a table.
· Added a new sample simulation illustrating the system of exoplanets orbiting the star HD 10180.
· Corrected a fault that could cause AstroGrav to crash on computers with Intel Core i7 processors.
· Corrected a fault that caused the Edit / Units... command to not work on an object window.
· Corrected a fault that caused structure nodes to fail to stay open during evolution when the Open Root Parent preference was selected.
· Corrected a fault that caused a comet with more than one illuminator to be vastly brighter than it should be, have an incorrect phase, and have an incorrect color.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
May 11th, 2010Orbit Calculations:
· A smaller object is no longer shown as orbiting a larger object when it is too far away to be retained in orbit for long.
· A smaller object is no longer shown as orbiting a larger object when it is really just passing close by. [Eg, near-Earth objects.]
· Complex multi-level object structures are replaced with simpler structures with less levels.
· There are less orbital discontinuities visible during evolution.
· The calculation of orbits has been significantly speeded up in most situations.
· The above changes in no way affect the way that simulations evolve. Only the calculation of orbits is affected.
Units:
· A Units... button has been added to the general preferences, allowing you to specify your own default selection of units to use in place of the SI units.
· A Default Selection button has been added to the Edit / Units... dialog, allowing you to change a simulation's units to the default selection of units defined in the general preferences - much faster and less error prone than having to change each unit individually.
· A bug has been fixed that caused an undo of a change to a time step unit (made with the Evolve / Settings... command) to be ignored.
Sample Simulations:
· The 'Planets, Moon' and 'Planets' sample simulations have been corrected, because in version 1.8.1 the objects were shown at their locations on 22/12/09 instead of 01/01/10.
· The orbits of moons 2003J4 (Jupiter) and Tarvos (Saturn) have been corrected in the 'Solar System' and 'Planets, All Moons' sample simulations.
· Minor corrections have been made to the sample simulation notes, both in the simulations themselves (viewed with Edit / Notes...) and in the corresponding documentation.
· The non-English sample simulations now have their notes (viewed with Edit / Notes...) translated to the appropriate language, instead of appearing in English.
Other Improvements:
· A bug has been fixed that caused version 1.8.1 to crash when opening a simulation with a table that was last modified with version 1.6.3 or earlier.
· A bug has been fixed that caused an undo of an evolver settings edit made during evolution to sometimes not work.
· A bug has been fixed that caused double-clicking on a Mac data file to result in the startup preference activating as well as the file opening.
· The Edit / Add Child... command has been improved to not add the new object to the system until after the dialog has been accepted.
· The algorithm used to set the brightness of a new View window has been improved to take account of the number of luminous particles.
· Several minor speed improvements have been made - primarily on Windows.
· There are major improvements to the quality of the Italian translations of menu items, button names, text labels, messages, etc. Thanks to Danilo Attard Barbini from Rome for providing these.
December 18th, 2009· Speeded up displays of table and view windows. Ensured that a tool palette remains on screen when its owning window is moved, resized, or maximized.
· Added recent discoveries to the Solar System sample simulations and changed their start date to 01/01/2010. Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
October 21st, 2009Model Window Commands:
· The View / Show / Auras command has been replaced with the four new commands in the new View / Object Style menu. These give you a choice of four ways of displaying objects instead of just the two.
· The View / Show / Objects command has been added, allowing you to suppress the display of the objects if you wish. This may be useful if you want to study the changes in orbits without being distracted by flashing objects after each time step.
· The View / Show / Inverted command has been added, allowing you to invert the colors on the display, so that black becomes white, blue becomes yellow, etc. This may be useful if you want to print screenshots without wasting a lot of printer toner or having to use a separate application to invert the colors.
· In addition to these new commands, the View / Show / Data command has been removed, with the data now being permanently displayed on the status bar.
Date and Time Units:
· The Time unit has been split into separate Period and Date/Time units, so that you can now specify different units for the period and the simulation date/time.
· The Date/Time units now includes a Date + Time choice which replaces the old View / Show Time as Date command.
· The Date/Time units now includes a Date choice which allows you display dates in the format 'AD 2010 Jan 01.234567'.
Tool Bars and Palettes:
· Tools that are specific to only one type of window have been moved to separate tool palettes which take the the form of small windows that can be moved about by dragging their titles bars.
· Tool palettes can be shown or hidden using the new View / Show Tool Palette command.
· Tool bars are now the same across all types of windows, so that the View / Customize Tool Bar... command now affects all windows rather than just windows of one particular type.
· A tool bar will no longer 'wrap', but instead displays a >> icon when there are too many tool buttons to display. When clicked on, a popup menu is shown allowing access to the 'overflow' commands.
· A Search box has been added to the right of each tool bar. This provides the same functionality as the Edit / Find... command, but is quicker to access.
· The default set of tool buttons has been expanded and improved.
Preferences:
· Version 1.8 of AstroGrav includes new preference settings allowing you to specify the positions of tool bars and status bars if you don't like having tool bars at the top of windows and status bars at the bottom of windows. Tool bars can be positioned at either the top, left, bottom, or right of windows, and status bars can be positioned at either the top or bottom of windows. Each of the four different types of windows can be configured separately, so that (for example) you can have tool bars at the top of model windows and at the left of tree windows if you desire. If tool bars are positioned at the left or right of windows, the new Search box will be suppressed.
Other Improvements:
· The size of the Windows download has been significantly reduced.
· The terminology used for the different types of windows has been improved, with Model windows now being called View windows, Tree windows now being called Structure windows, and Detail windows now being called Object windows.
· Several different custom cursors corresponding to the different key modifiers have been added, in order to make navigation less error prone.
· The graphics display has been speeded up in most cases.
· The View / Show Status Bar and View / Show Tool Bar commands now only affect the frontmost window, rather than all windows of the same type.
· Changing the language preference now updates the About and Navigation Guide windows as appropriate.
· The documentation and tutorial have been updated to reflect all the new and improved features.
June 12th, 2009· Added a facility to save and restore family patterns in the Edit / New Family... command.
· Added the Comet Gehrels 3 and Disaster! sample simulations.
· Corrected a fault that caused a very slow response to an attempt to select a large number of objects.
· The keyboard shortcut for the Evolve / Run Backward command now works correctly.
· Expanding and collapsing a tree node can now only be done by using its handle, and not by double-clicking on it.
· Corrected a fault that caused the preference for opening the root node of trees to be ignored in some cases.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
May 9th, 2009· Added the speed of an object to its label when it is selected on a model window.
· Added the speed and magnitude of an object to its information popup.
· Corrected a fault that could cause AstroGrav to not run at all on a small proportion of Windows PCs.
· Added a preview panel to the color chooser.
· Corrected a fault that could cause unwanted gaps to appear in some lines on model windows.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
February 3rd, 2009· Added facilities for selecting multiple objects, together with several new and enhanced commands that operate on multiple objects.
· Added three new commands that can be used to cut, copy, and paste groups of objects.
· Improved the commands for deleting and merging objects so that they operate on multiple selections.
· Simplified the addition of new objects by splitting the Edit / Add Object... command into two separate commands.
· Added a new Type field to the physical elements of objects, which may be set to Star, Planet, Moon, Asteroid, Comet, Spacecraft, or Projectile.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
November 4th, 2008· Improved the Edit / Find... command.
· Added the View / Show / Data command to allow the data in the corners of model windows to be shown or hidden as desired.
· Corrected a fault that could cause valid .ast files to be rejected as invalid.
· Added recent discoveries and changes to the Solar System sample simulations and changed their start date to 01/01/2009.
· Corrected a fault that could cause the status bar to fail to update correctly.
· Slightly speeded up simulation evolution.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
September 5th, 2008· Improved the way that evolution is indicated on the status line.
· Corrected a fault that occasionally caused part of an orbit to be drawn as a straight line instead of as a curve.
· Corrected a fault that caused the magnitudes of objects to be displayed incorrectly.
· Significantly speeded up the drawing of model windows.
· Corrected a bug that sometimes caused a non-luminous object (such as a planet) to be invisible when in transit against a luminous object (such as the Sun).
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
April 15th, 2008· Improved the 'Edit / Add Family...' command.
· Corrected a bug that could cause object collisions to sometimes not work correctly.
· Improved number displays.
· Corrected a bug that caused the horizontal scroll bar to never appear on new tables.
· Corrected a bug that caused the Peri Arg column of exported data to just be a duplicate the Mean Anom column.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
January 15th, 2008· Added 13 new keyboard commands for adjusting magnification and brightness and for controlling simulation evolution in full screen mode.
· Improved the 'Edit/Find...' command.
· Added the 'Help / Enter License...' command to allow easier license entry.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
December 4th, 2007· Added an animated and interactive full screen mode.
· Added recently discovered objects to the Solar System sample simulations and changed their start date to 01/01/2008.
· Speeded up simulation evolution, tree display, and phase drawing.
· Various minor bug fixes and improvements.
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