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Exoplanet Explorer 2.5.6: lots of improvements

Space Exploration

With the new Exoplanet Explorer apps out for nearly a week now, I’ve had some feedback and time to fix some minor issues and make improvements.

What’s new

  • The ghostly labels that looked like a fog appearing near the center of the screen are now gone. A side effect of the Tegra fix. They didn’t show up on my desktop computer because the frame rate is too high.
  • The star labels now sort correctly and the nearest 50 stars to the selected system (within 100 light years) will be labelled.
  • Due to a typo, the gravity value was being written into the radius field during import. In addition to not showing a value for gravity, the planet sizes were slightly incorrect. Generally the gravity increases with radius, so it was a subtle problem. I made some adjustments to the scaling so that the planets now appear to have a larger size variation.
  • Gas giants closer than 2AU to the parent star will never have rings under the assumption that the solar wind would disrupt small orbiting particles. 50% of the rest will randomly have rings.
  • There’s now an option to keep the screen active while the app is focused. It defaults to “on” and can be turned off in settings.
  • A translation bug that turned “Rock and Iron” into something completely different in Italian is hopefully corrected.
  • The star habitable zones are now tilted to the average inclination of the planet orbits. This fits most systems better, with the exception of crazy systems such as Gliese 876 which have planets orbiting all over the place.
  • The star and planet filter presets are now merged into one list for less clicking.
  • Fixed a bug causing the hab zone to vanish occasionally
  • And a big database update… I forgot to refresh the database for last week’s release. It’s now up to date with about 1,800 planets now in the Pro version.

What’s planned over the next couple of versions

  • A method for identifying new planets with each release. Currently the PHL data only shows the year, and sorts by planet name, so there’s no easy way to identify which planets have been added recently.
  • Free flight mode, just like Solar Explorer.
  • Fill in the blanks. It looks like some of the blank fields in the PHL database could be estimated.
  • Lens flares for brighter stars
  • Lots more
  • Kelly Lord

    Awesome. Keep up the great work on a great app.

  • Kelly Lord

    When I search and hit the info button the information area is blank. I took screenshots to show what I mean. Is there anywhere to send them if it wont let me upload them here?

  • Kelly Lord

    Example

  • Kelly Lord

    Another

  • Kelly Lord

    List to show what I am hitting to find planets

    • Thanks Kelly.

      if the previous system that was looked at had lots of planets and you scroll to the bottom of the list before moving to a new system, then info for the new system’s planets appears off the bottom of the screen so that the window looks empty.

      It’s a bug in the User Interface plugin I’m using. I thought I had figured out a way of tricking it into working in 2.5.6, but it seems that there’s still some method for triggering the problem that I hadn’t thought of.

      I’ll try again with the next update.

  • Robert Seifert

    Zooming in and out from systems and hitting I when changing system temporarly solves the bug Kelly have. I know because i havet the same. I confirm this on Galaxy S3 i9300 and Sony Tablet Z. A cool thing would be to have the ESI value on all planets, other than this, I LOVE this app and the graphics + music makes me almost dream when using it. I love it

    • I think the trigger is if the system changes while the system info panel is not visible, or showing the filter results. It should be resetting the scroll value when the system info next becomes visible, but isn’t doing it sometimes. There’s probably another event that I need to catch.

      The ESI is loaded, it’s just not displayed due to limited space. I need to think about how I’m going to show the rest of the data that gets loaded (68 fields) without flooding the system panel with too much info. Maybe some sort of “advanced” option for those who are looking for more detailed info.

      • Robert Seifert

        Awesome thanks for good and fast answer. You are 100% right about the trigger i think. Advanced option for more details would be really really good . I love the app and I am happy that you regularly update it, really worth the money, i hope you get more attention for your apps because they are worth it