Orbital Physics Simulator · published · build 24012988
Dynamic GUI: Replaced older bitmap fonts with a native, high-resolution interface across all primary panels. Text elements are now significantly crisper and easier to read at all resolutions.
Polished Surfaces: All menus, panels, and readouts have been rebuilt to match the new glass UI style, with consistent spacing, typography, and visual weight throughout.
Glass Panels: Guide, Discoveries, and Settings windows now use a frosted glass rendering effect with real-time background blur.
Note: The main game logo and select legacy text elements will remain as bitmap graphics for now.
Rotating Planet Previews: Planet and moon detail views now display a live, slowly rotating 3D preview of the body, rendered in real time using the full surface shader including diffuse, normal, specular, and night-side textures.
Atmosphere Visualization: Bodies with atmospheres now display a rendered atmosphere shell in the preview, showing the correct atmospheric color, density, and scattering. A new atmosphere composition chart shows the breakdown of major atmospheric gases at a glance.
Atmosphere Info Panel: Detailed atmospheric data is now shown alongside the preview, including shell scale, density, and cloud coverage where applicable.
Settings Save & Load: All settings; shader parameters, mouse controls, and display preferences; are now saved automatically to Resources/Settings/settings.ini and restored on every launch. No more re-tuning after restarting.
Settings Menu: A fully redesigned settings menu lets you tune shader parameters, mouse controls, and display preferences without restarting.
Shader Presets: Four named presets: Default, Minimal, Deep Space, and Warm Glow, let you switch between visual styles instantly. Each section also has individual Save and Reset to Defaults buttons.
Orbit Ring Visibility: Planet orbit rings now hide automatically when the camera enters that body's sphere of influence, reducing clutter during close approaches. Rings reappear as you zoom back out past the SOI boundary.
Per-Body SOI Logic: The Moon and ISS orbit lines now follow their own SOI independently. Flying near Earth no longer hides the Moon's orbit ring, and vice versa.
Go Back Button: Guide, Discoveries, and Settings panels now have a clearly visible Go Back button pinned to the bottom of the left sidebar, replacing the old title-bar close button.
Left-Click Orbit: Orbiting the camera now defaults to left-click drag instead of right-click. This can be changed in the new Settings menu.
Crosshairs: Crosshairs are now enabled by default for new installs.
Timescale Increases: Maximum simulation speed has been significantly increased. Within a planetary sphere of influence the cap has been raised to 65,536x, and outside of any SOI it can now reach 4,194,304x, enabling far faster interplanetary transit without leaving the simulation running overnight.
Attitude Control Scaling: Fixed a bug where manually rotating the spacecraft was not scaled with the current timescale, causing attitude changes to feel inconsistent at high warp speeds.
Camera Lock Snap: Fixed a bug where the camera lock would snap to a different angle when crossing an SOI boundary, causing a jarring jump in view direction.
Geometry Flickering: Fixed a rendering issue that caused distant geometry to flicker intermittently due to a depth buffer precision problem.
What's Next?
More polish and bug fixes are on the way. Thank you for playing!