Hello everyone! Version 0.990.41 has now finished public beta testing and is being released to all users! This update primarily aims to improve performance through optimizations and moving some significant tasks to parallel threads. Lighting and eclipse shadows are now calculated on multiple CPU threads, reducing a major performance bottleneck in some cases.

Sprite sorting in galaxy and nebula models is now also multithreaded, which can slightly improve performance when a model with a lot of sprites is displayed, but significantly improves performance when flying through dense galaxy clusters (galaxy models load in much faster and with less impact to performance). However, multithreaded sprite sorting can cause issues in cases where multiple galaxies with the same sprite model are resolved on screen at the same time, such as in dense clusters of catalog galaxies. If you see strange issues with the appearance of galaxy models, you can revert to the old single-threaded behavior by entering AsyncSpriteSort in the console, and switch back to the new method by entering it again.

Ship engine effect shader definitions have been moved into their own file, so they are now modular and new ones can be added without affecting the main ship engine effect shader file (this means spacecraft addon makers can add custom engine effects without worrying about compatibility issues with vanilla updates and other mods).

The comet shader has also been modified to increase the realism of cometary dust tails (work in progress).

CHANGELOG

Build 0.990.41.1824

• Lighting refactoring and optimization
• Multithreaded update of lighting and eclipse shadows
• Optimized performance of Star browser
• Customizeable ship engine effect shaders
• Ability to speed up time to more than 10,000x in Flight Simulator mode when using the cheat code TARDIS
• More realistic comet tail appearance (WIP)
• Updates in catalogs
• Multithreaded sorting of sprites with galaxy and nebula models (see description above for known issues)
• Optimized video memory consumption by PBR environment maps
• Optimized loading performance of large sc catalogs
• Optimized rendering performance of large comet catalogs per planetary system
• Fixed some bugs with comet tails
• Fixed some bugs with the Chart mode
• Fixed some bugs with the Star browser