Work in Progress History for Digital Universe version 1.6

November 2007

Twilight rendering.

When twilight is enabled the rendering of planetary images has been greatly improved.
Previously regardless of the sky colour, the planet was rendered in its normal colours and the shadowed part of the phase filled with the sky colour. Now a more realistic effect is obtained by merging the sky and planet colours.

November 2007

Status Line.

The screenshot shows the new optional (default = enabled) status line below the main display.
The left section displays the time (which is no longer drawn on the main display) and also the progress of the drawing process - though blink and you may well miss the latter. The middle section displays whether the Advance mode is set to Auto or Manual. The right hand section displays in real time the Right Ascension and Declination beneath the mouse pointer.

November 2007

Planetary Grid Lines

Introduced progressive grid plotting to avoid clutter with smaller planet sizes.
Previously a small planet render only had the equator line plotted until a threshold size when all the grid lines and lables were shown. Now there are several thresholds which reduces the clutter for the intermediate sized images.

April 2008

Alert Window.

A brief alert window will now appear informing the user of certain event, such as data being copied to the clipboard or when the FOV is zoomed to a new value when finding a faint object. The window will auto close after a brief time.
A new menu option "Last Message" will display the last alert DU displayed.

April 2008

New Environment Window.

There are two new additions to the Environment Settings.
It is now possible to set a customised "Home" location rather than have to use the "Other" option. The name of the Home location can now be specified.
There is a new Timezone option (the default) to use the Timezone as specified in your OS4 system Preferences. Using this option will automatically update for so called Daylight Savings Time when in use thus saving the user a twice a year zone change.
The columns are now fully sortable by clicking the headers.

October 2008

More Solar System Feature Maps.

All the major planets, the sun and now many of the larger planetary satellites now have the ability to display features.
The image here shows Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Callisto.

November 2008

Milky Way Outline

The Mily Way is one of those things that as far as the human eye is concerned, beomes more than the sum of its parts. So a faint shaded area representing the Milky Way is now displayed so that it is now visible despite the individual stars making it up are too faint to show.

December 2008

Statistics Window

Added a window which displays various information pertaining to the current display.

December 2008

Planet Plotting and Labelling

Planet plotting is slightly faster than before - though it is rather difficult to tell that from a screenshot. Also the labelling method has been rewritten and increases in size and style depending upon the object size.