v1.2.2 Patch Notes

This update will bring another expansion to the interior, mainly that to Tidally locked worlds having per-hemisphere interiors, and improvements to Barycenter systems. Alongside a number of quality-of-life improvements, rendering improvements, performance optimizations, and bug fixes in general.

New Features

• One of the biggest additions is adding Per-hemisphere interiors for worlds locked to stars. So instead of a symmetric interior it now solves both the subsolar and antisolar sides with a shared deep interior. The Structure subsection lists the two sides stacked at the moment while I prepare for the coming GUI upgrade, same goes for the Tectonics. The shared deep interior is the coupling of a 1D mantle circulation model where hot material upwells under the substellar point, and sinks cold material under the antistellar point, this ends up being effectively scaled by the contrast between the day and night sides. Part of the model is that Mobile fluids that can flow between hemisphere will now settle to a common level and then can refreeze locally. This is so a cold nightside can grow a thick ice gap over a thin ocean while the warm dayside stays mostly liquid. The deep interior stays genuinely shared in the readout, with the day and night difference confined to the convecting mantle and the lithosphere, so what you see in the cross-section (a warmer upwelling dayside, a cooler downwelling nightside) is the phases that circulation produces rather than an imposed shape, and the core no longer gets dragged cold by a frozen nightside surface. The Structure subsection now lists that shared deep interior once and then only each side's outer layers, and the full degree-1 convection profile is written into the export for the climate sim. Non-locked worlds are unchanged by this.
• Per-body Age, the composition tab will now have an editable "Age (Gyr)" field. By default it tracks the host star's age as before, but now you can override it per body, and it feeds into the body's interior solver and recalculations instead of always just inheriting the Star's age.
• Orbital lines for stars around barycenter, and bodies can orbit a specific pair's barycenter. In hierarchical and binary systems, companion stars now draw their actual foreshortened orbits around the pair's barycenter and with a barycenter marker. And Ghost orbit lines will now appear for stars too, not just planets and moons. And a body can now be parented to the barycenter of a chosen pair of bodies or stars, with a drag-to-reparent respecting the pairs combined hill sphere.
• The "+ Add Gas" picker is now grouped by family (Noble, Major, Trace & Volcanic, Organic, Halogen, Refractory, Solids & Aerosols, Atomic Radicals) instead of one long flat list, so finding a species is much easier.
• Radius proposal after Calculate Structure, When the structure solve finishes and the solved total radius differs from the value in the Physical section by more than 0.5%, a popup will now offer to overwrite the stored radius with the computed one. And will wait its turn after the atmosphere prompt so the two never stack
• Editable star orbital periods. I have no idea why I forgot to include this, so now you can edit a companion star's orbital period directly
• Unsaved-changes prompt when opening a system, opening another system from the file browser while the current one has unsaved edits it will now ask to Save, Discard, or Cancel first.

Improvements

• An "Open Viewer" button now sits at the bottom of the STRUCTURE list, so the standalone interior viewer can be opened with a click instead of only the Ctrl+E keybind.
• The interior should show differential rotational flattening, A spinning body bulges at the equator while its deep interior stays nearly round, so each layer is drawn squished by its own oblateness instead of the whole cross-section sharing one flattening value.
• Atmosphere colors revamped to be more physical instead of the old tinting system. Rayleigh scattering gives a blue sky and reddens as the air thickens, Mie scattering colors the aerosols. If you leave out the aerosols there is a basic prediction model in place for such a haze if the right ingredients are present. Adding any aerosol yourself and it overrides the prediction step entirely.
• The Rotation field will now give warnings when a body is spinning fast enough to disrupt said body. An Amber "Fission risk" appearing when its approaching the limit, and a Red "Rotational Breakup" warning for when centrifugal forces would exceed gravity and sheed mass. It does account for how condensed a body is and is only Informational, not altering whatever the user has inputted.
• Surface pressure now has a unit selector (Pa, atm, bar, psi, mmHg), like the radius field. The value is still stored as Pascals internally, but now there are a couple different units for display. Typing a value with a unit suffix would convert it and switch to that unit.
• Revealed hex color codes can be copied. Clicking on a color swatch to reveal its hex code, and then clicking the hex text itself to copy it to the clipboard.
• Made the copy/paste toast linger longer before fading, so its more readable.
• The Simple Mass fractions now have a "Normalize Mass Fractions" button. It already renormalizes back to 100% normally, but now you can double check and lock that in yourself. And Normalizing also keeps the Fe/Si Ratio in step with the rebalanced core.
• The dashed reference orbits now will show up with some new criteria; The orbit was selected, when it is tilted enough to show up, and/or when you are zoomed in enough to actually see the difference. Reason for this is that with many objects the orbits are all essentially drawn twice, and so this should reduce the amount of draws, and assist with performance on larger saves.
• Hill spheres will now account for their children, and each sphere of influence is drawn against the right combined mass. So nested systems should now read correctly
• Barycenters will now sit on the orbital line, allowing better displays of nested sub-pairs.
• Reduced lag over long sessions with caching barycenter computations and rewriting of those dashed reference orbits.
• Extremely tenuous atmospheres no longer bloat. This was occurring because the "top of the atmosphere" pressure was a fixed fraction, so now there is an absolute floor so the shells stay sensible.
• Aurora brightness labels now properly read from the ACTUAL peak band intensity, so it shouldn't be claiming "brilliant" while every single band is faint.
• Layer thickness is now being shown next to the percentage ranges in the Structure subsection.
• The Tectonics subsection now surfaces the water/cryosphere whenever liquid water is separated from the silicate, and not just on deep ocean worlds.
• Ice surfaces report their cryosphere regime and ice thickness alongside the silicate seafloor under it.
• The Interior calculation estimate now has a bit more detail to it and should be more accurate to bodies, and accounts for differences in the rendering for Tidally locked bodies.
• Ice-covered ocean worlds will now report if their ice shells convect or not, decided by a ductile zone test instead of the old size gate. Same test replaces the old radius and thickness heuristic for the frozen-through convecting ice lid.
• The Silicate melt-lid regime now separates Heat-pipe from squish lids from how the magma is disposed rather than the old raw heat-flux. So melt that reaches the surface reads as heat-pipes, and melt that intrudes the upper lithosphere now reads as the squishy lid, and magma-rich but non-erupting flux under a thick brittle lids is now squishy instead of a heat-pipe.
• The Eggshell and subductable lid tests are now relative to the thermal lithosphere and should now scale properly with body size and gravity.
• To assist with the surface tectonics, the brittle-ductile crossover is now sampled with a near-surface grid so a high-heat-flux crust can resolve to a couple kilometers instead of snapping to ~10km steps.

Fixes

• You can now deeply zoom into a body's interior cross-section in order to inspect the body much closer. Previously it grew until it filled the display panel (due to being drawn to a fixed-size cache), so past a certain point it started to shrink and then disappear from view.
• Orbital lines no longer jump straight across the screen at certain zoom levels. When part of an orbit swung off-screen its off-view points were being dropped, so the line reconnected across the gap. Now they are kept and clamped just off the edge. So an orbit follows its ellipse and simply leaves and re-enters at the screen edge.
• Intensely tidally heated bodies should no longer generate an internal magnetic field, as a Dynamo needs heat to be carried out of the core across the CMB, by the core being hotter than the mantle above it. While a body like Io, whose interior is pretty much all at one temperature would pin the mantle, and with no temperature drop to drive the actual dynamo, it should now have no self-generated field
• Volcanic moons held molten by a maintained resonance should now read as heat-pipe. This is because the Tidal-heating feedback is bistable and a molten state is only kept is the resulting flux is strong enough to keep it hot, while weakly heated moons would fallback to being cold.
• Mercury and other bodies with a thin-mantle with a low-heat-flux, no longer should read as heat-pipe or squishy lid. The interior geotherm was holding the whole mantle at its convective potential temperature with no conductive lithosphere. So the solver should now build the actual conductive lithosphere at the top before the convective adiabat takes over. So, a low-flux body grows a thick cold lid with no weird shallow melt.
• Turning off the atmosphere generation now should actually stop the popups. A single edit path was running the seeding and the classification regardless of the toggle, so now its gated properly so off means off.
• Hopefully no more freezing on deep zooms where two events were occurring. Dashed lines were being rasterized at millions of pixels offscreen, and some draws overflowed into the 32-bit coordinate limit. Both are now guarded.
• Ctrl + S and clicking away no longer drop the note/description edits. One of the commit paths was reading a field that just didn't exist and ate the error. So now text edits committed by saving or clicking way shouldn't be lost as all commit routes can now read the same field.
• Cut-off and overlapping text has had some cleanup. Several panels had crowding at the panel width and ran off-screen, While I plan to make a dynamic panel system in the near-ish future for GUI adjustments and such, so this is a temporary fix in the meantime.
• Decided to hide the L-shell radiation values by default in the flux-sources list, now only showing with the debug fields when enabled. So the normal view isnt cluttered with information that was deemed potentially confusing
• The Star scrollbar initializes correctly, with the star panel not publishing its scrollbar geometry, starting in the wrong state. Now its set up to be closer to the other panels
• Dragging a planet no longer snaps it into a binary with a sibling planet. While dragging, a planet re-homes to whichever body's Hill sphere it enters, falling back to the top-level host when it is out in the open, but that top-level host (the star, or the barycenter of a close two-star pair) was missing from the drop-target list for close-binary and single-star systems, so the only candidates left were the sibling planets and a drag would jump the planet onto the widest one. The star or barycenter is now always offered as an unbounded fallback, so a planet dragged in open space stays put; it only binds to another body when you actually drag it inside that body's Hill sphere.
• Layered atmosphere shells no longer come apart at the seams, and sit exactly on the boundary of the one below it, and no longer delaminate.
• The Stagnant lid regime label is no longer its steel-gray color as it was kinda indistinguishable from normal text. So now its a brown instead to keep the readout readable at a glace.
• The Tectonics "?" tooltip now describes the seafloor beneath a cryosphere instead of just the headline regime.
• A tidally molten body (like Io) now report the correct tidal love number.