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StarStrider v2.7 : What's New

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• 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 a 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).
  Cards supporting 4096x textures: Nvidia GeForce 3 Ti (not MX!), GeForce 4 Ti (not MX!), GeForce FX-series.
  Cards supporting 2048x textures: All Nvidia cards, all ATI Radeon-series cards, Intel i845 and later.
  
  
• 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)').
  
  
• StarLua improvements:
  
  
  • The StarLua language has undergone a few changes - that are not backwards compatible - everything that previously involved 'handles' now use regular lua tables instead and a C++ type syntax for accessing 'member functions'.
    
    Where you previously would write this:
    
    ubmp = draw.loadbitmap(...)
    
    draw.drawbitmap(pos, ubmp, ...)
    
    You now instead write this:
    
    bmp = draw.loadbitmap(...)
    
    bmp.draw(pos, ...)
    
    Same thing for sound, menus, et c. One advantage of this new scheme is that it is regular Lua tables you are using instead of 'user-data'. This means that you can do anything you can normally do with a lua table with these 'objects' such as creating your variables and functions inside them (e.g. bmp.nextbmp = draw.loadbitmap(...) to create a chain of bitmaps for an animation!). Another advantage is that it is possible to set and get 'properties' of the objects as normal variables.
    
    

    Added a StarLua extension for adding surface features - see the StarLau reference manual and the 'Solar system surface features.StarLuaLib' file in the 'Extensions' directory.
    
    

    It is now possible to add or change all types of object names using a StarLua extension.
    
    
  What was new in v2.6