Version 3.0.3 - 13th February 2015
Version 3.0.3 of AstroGrav is an upgrade containing a range of minor improvements and bug fixes. This information is intended for existing users who are already familiar with AstroGrav and want to quickly find out about the main changes. This is a free upgrade for customers who have already purchased an AstroGrav 2 or AstroGrav 3 license, so that all you need to do is download Version 3.0.3 and use it in place of your old version. If you have any problems with this new version, please don't hesitate to contact us so that we can help you out.
Version 3.0.3 of AstroGrav has the following new and improved features.
Editing Improvements
Version 3.0.3 of AstroGrav includes the following editing improvements.
- The Edit / Edit Object..., Edit / Add Object..., and Edit / Add Family... commands have been improved to leave the position and velocity of the parent family's barycenter unchanged. In earlier versions of AstroGrav, it was the position and velocity of the parent object itself that was left unchanged, and this improvement results in much smaller changes to the parent's orbital elements after editing. In cases where there is no change of mass, the changes to the parent's orbital elements are now entirely eliminated.
- The Tools / Calculate Orbits... command has been added to give you a choice of two different ways of calculating orbital elements. One option is calculate orbital elements relative to the parent object only, and the other option is calculate orbital elements relative to the barycenter of all inferior objects. The difference between these two options is fully explained in the documentation.
- A bug has been fixed that caused AstroGrav to crash when an eccentricity of exactly one was entered into the object editor. The handling of near-parabolic cases has also been improved.
- Editing an object's eccentricity now leaves the object's true anomaly invariant, rather than its mean anomaly.
Other Improvements
Version 3.0.3 of AstroGrav also has many other minor improvements and bug fixes, including the following.
- The value used for the astronomical unit has been changed from 149597870691.0 meters to 149597870700.0 meters - a difference of 9 meters. Since AstroGrav always uses meters internally, this will not affect the way that simulations evolve. The only effect is that distances that are displayed in astronomical units or parsecs will be slightly different.
- A bug has been fixed that could prevent a simulation from evolving when collisions were not being ignored.
- A bug has been fixed that could cause a simulation to evolve differently depending on the collisions setting, even when no collisions actually occurred.
- A color randomizer has been added to the Edit / Split Object... command so that the individual objects in a rubble pile can be easily distinguished.
- The extension '.txt' has been added to the default filename of the File / Export... command.
- The File / Import... command has been enhanced so that it automatically strips out Excel's surrounding double quotes when attempting to parse numbers.
- A bug has been fixed that could cause the tool tips of the Edit / Undo and Edit / Redo commands to be incorrect.
- Various improvements have been made to the documentation and tutorial.