What’s new?

The most important new feature in Gravity Sim is the tutorial which introduces the app to new users. It’s a step-by-step, interactive explanation of how the app works, demonstrating editing a scene and giving a brief overview of the most important controls. By default, it’s disabled for existing users. If you already have the app and want to try the tutorial, the options menu has a new tick box which can be used to activate the tutorial it next time the app starts.

I’ve made a change to the way planets or stars are added to the scene. In the old version, selecting a planet size allowed you to tap around the screen adding planets. This sometimes resulted in a planet being added when a user was simply trying to click on an existing planet but missed. To avoid this, I’ve made the size buttons turn off once an object has been added. To keep adding objects, you’ll have to choose the size first, every time. It’s more intuitive this way, and less prone to error.

The introductory tutorial waiting for user input

What’s been upgraded?

Now that support for Unity 4 has officially ended, I’ve upgraded all of the 3rd party tools used in Gravity Sim to the latest versions which support Unity 5. For all but one of the plug-ins, this was a simple process. The problematic one was abandoned by the developer late last year, and while it doesn’t complain when imported into Unity 5, it doesn’t officially support it. Because of this I can’t be sure it would remain stable, so I’ve had to replace it. This was a big job which involved re-working all of  3D graphics in the app.

Another big change was getting rid of the sub-par trails that follow the planets. These were built in to Unity, and while not particularly attractive, they did work… at least until Unity 5 arrived. In the latest version, the standard trails don’t work anymore. This forced me to replace them with a completely different trails package. The new trails look a lot better than the old ones, and they bear a striking resemblance to the fiery trails seen on the splash screen.

The new fiery trails, planets and stars

For those who prefer to travel without bells jingling, I’ve added an option called “Holiday Mode” to the Settings menu. This can be used to turn Santa off.

A busy few weeks

I’ve been busy releasing a series of incremental updates on my apps for the past week or so. Apologies to anyone who’s had multiple update requests for any of my apps. The pace will slow down a bit from now on.

January update

Thanks to Santa, Solar Explorer is going to be featured on the Google Play front page in early January! To celebrate, I released a quick update that extended Santa’s visit for a couple of weeks and also fixed a bug in the german translation.

The best images of Pluto that I was able to find cover about 30% of the surface because New Horizons was moving so fast it could only take detailed shots of one side as it whipped by.

Because of this, I’ve created an “artistic impression” of the missing part of Pluto based on the part that we can actually see. One day we’ll have photos of the whole thing.

I’d always imagined that Pluto it would be a fairly uniformly pockmarked ball, tinted pink by methane ice on the surface. The reality was very different. Pluto appears to have quite an active surface with mountain ranges and nitrogen glaciers smoothing out craters over large swathes of the surface.

Pluto as seen in Solar Explorer

Exoplanet Explorer & Gravity Sim

There weren’t many new confirmed planets added to the catalog over the past few months, so I haven’t released an update for Exoplanet Explorer. I checked again late last week and the total is up to 33 so I’m readying a new update. It should be out in a few days.

Gravity Sim is also getting an update soon. I’ve converted it to Unity 5 now that most of the 3rd party components support it. Thanks to competition from other 3D development tools, Unity were forced to unlock most of the features in the Pro version for the free version of Unity 5. This will add new features that weren’t possible with the old version of Unity… at least not without spending thousands of dollars buying full version licenses.

According to principal investigator Alan Stern, this is the last, best look anyone will have of Pluto’s far side for decades to come.

The far side of Pluto. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

The photo looks like an artist’s impression of Pluto, not what I imagined the real thing to be. At least it’s better than the first official photo of the far side of our moon, taken by Luna 3 in 1959.

This side of Pluto that always faces Charon, and New Horizons will whip past the other side of Pluto in a few days time. By the time that New Horizons sees the far side of Pluto again, the probe will be on its way out of our solar system.

If we aren’t going to get better photos for decades, then I just hope nobody spots a pattern that looks like a human face…