I played around a bit with different textures – inspired by the new positioning widget. The result is not totally shitty so I upped it to the theme pool. Perhaps it gets adult one day…

I believe it’s treatable.

Version 2.2.0:
* Heavy rewrite of the GUI:
    - Way more consistency between tabs (paddings, sizes, ...)
    - Stripped the view settings from the settings tab and put them to a new one
    - summed all display related options
    - Preview widget now shows more (pseudo) realistic preview of the earth
      (with corona, clouds, specular, post f/x and stars; it's not latest state
      of the art but at least gives a clue about what u are doing)
    - Preview widget got better positioning grid with some values
      (state of the marker button is saved now and it got a new icon)
    - Position widget was pimped with colour, a grid and micro numbering
    - Language went back to settings again
    - Consistent save, refresh and close buttons
    - New function: button to center the earth on the screen
    - Splash screen
    - New application icon
    - stripped theme and style names from thumbview
* Consistent BLURFACTOR depending on screen resolution and earth size
  (all blurs should appear the same in every resolution and with every earth
  size)
* Stars have a nicer corona in h/q mode
* New feature: seamless corona size (old values are recalculated automatically)
* New setting: corona blurriness editable
* New setting: starfield can be zoomed
* Added some more shadows (contrast curve on shadow layer decreased)
* Shadows blur slightly depends on distance of clouds now
* Overall render time decreased about 10% due to the following modifications:
    - Changed overall rendering queue from bottom (background) to top (post)
    - Stars get edited and composed in one step
    - Corona gets rendered on a small square and is blurred, repaged and
      composited in one step
    - Shadows beneath clouds are modified and composited in one step
    - Moon mask gets negated and applied to shadows in one step
* New feature: call a script _before_ the render cycle
* Added orbit setup to CLI --setup interface (oops .)
* Added checks for new values in --setup (backward compat)
* Changed the color of the corona a bit (updates all templates)
* Bug in some templates: set magnify=0 for [moon] in xplanet-clouds
  (moon was rendered in cloud overlay)
* Changed japanese localization name to 日本語
* Changed czech locaisation name to Česky
* Changed french localization name to Français
* Added wrapper functions for drawing contrast icons
* Cleanup in program folder: all icons and images went in subfolders
* Added preinst to clean up icons in program folder
* Added postrm to remove everything related to xplanetFX (except users folder)
* Bug in on_togglebuttonDate_toggled and on_togglebuttonOrbit_toggled:
  they are depending. Either date or orbit.
* Extensive resorting in create_widget_objects and save_config
* no widget writes directly to config, gets collected on save (made problems
  with instant saving of language, autostart and marker state)
* Bug in draw_preview: preview size must always be smaller than canvas size
* Bug in flipview: marker frame didn't respect the alpha part of marker color

The nerd fraction demanded the original star field as the background behind the earth – here it is folks, together with a new theme using this feature by default. Nearly every other theme has an update now, I added the option to disable this feature by default in all themes with overlays and non-spacey backgrounds.

This version comes with a massive cleanup in the home folder – the backgrounds folder is cleaned up on every theme change. Having all themes installed and activated once this could mean about 120 MB of disk space free for more pr0n.

To gain some space for the new feature in the GUI I spent some more graphical stuff with changing icons.

Tipp: test the new feature with the dragon theme.

Version 2.1.0:
* Added new function to render real star maps on the background
  (if post f/x enabled, a little glow is added)
* Added python script to generate contrast-enriched star map from original
  bright stars map @ http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/Cat?V/50
* Added cleanup: backgrounds folder is cleaned on every theme change
  (saves up to 120 MB disk space)
* Theme change speedup: only neccessary backgrounds and overlays are copied
  (saves some disk space, too)
* Special f/x buttons have icons now (needed space for stars button)
* Little speedup in post f/x: blurring and composing in one step
* Added SEARCHMAPURL to default config file
* Set LOGGING=1 in default config

…and more of this outer-space-science-fiction-star-wars-obi-wan-beaming-shit…

Tim, the translator of the dutch language file, tipped me over to a fantastic milky way image on wikimedia.org. Thank you a bunch bro! So there’s new fodder for the space style enthusiasts available on the website and in the themepool inside xplanetFX.

Version 2.0.22:
* Added dutch language file - thanks to Tim van der Kodde!
* Added czech language file - thanks to Martin Pavlík!

Version 2.0.21:
* Daemon renders to a interim file in the cache first which is copied to the
  final destination afterwards (instead of working on the final image. Looks
  better when xplanetFX got killed while rendering and hopefully ends the bug
  'black wallpaper on first start')
* Names of final images in ./output changed to xplanetFXn.png
* changed default configuration to lon:0, lat:0, showorbit:1, orbit:-60
* Bug in default configuration of GUI: SEARCHMAPURL was missing in dictionary
  _DEFAULT_SETTINGS
* Bug in dameon: render to file failed after cleanup in 2.0.20

Version 2.0.18:
* Switched from built-in 'follow sun' to own position correction depending on
  local time (former functions latitude was bound to the suns position) This
  inverts users orbit setting - 0 degrees doesn't look in the sun any more but
  from its direction to the earth (fader feels more natural now, too)
* Implemented Coral network to download_clouds.pl, after 5 tries fallback on
  existing server list (will be switched in 2.0.19)

Jawoll. Mit den abertausenden Tweets, Blogeinträgen und Facebooklinks kommen dann auch wieder die total Kaputten aus ihren Public-Relations-Headoffices Erdlöchern gehumpelt. Pack. Geh wek.

Ansonsten ist die Umstellung aller Downloads bzgl. xplanetFX, traGtor und Guess (und den Themes) seit gestern endlich mal vollzogen, auch die Pakete, Versionslisten, Themelisten etc. auf den Webseiten kommen jetzt aus dem PIKE Repository – cremig als Flatfiles. Nochmal ein dickes Danke an John, ohne ihn und seine Wunschmaschine hättet Ihr die letzten 10 Tage keine 492.956.902 Kilobytes (laut Webalizer) aus meiner Mühle gekriegt. Ab jetzt sollte das meinem Treteimer aber nicht mal mehr ein müdes Grinsen abringen

bigriver9 hat ein japanisches Sprachfile für xplanetFX reingereicht, ich wäre dann mal über Meldungen dankbar, ob es sich dabei jetzt um die Wikipedia-Liste der kurzgekochten Samuraitees oder um die Bedienungsanleitung für einen rosa Multichannel-Dildo handelt…

Also.. ich würd’s so machen ^^

Nee mal ernsthaft: wie total geil ist das denn?! Japanisch! Dickes Danke geht raus an bigriver9 für die Arbeit!!

Version 2.0.16:
* Changed the no preview thumbnail to fit the flipview
* Added a test on gconftool-2 with fallback to gconftool (Fedora has gconftool-2
installed as default)
* Added yum and yast to the --setup option
* Let yast and rpm use su instead of sudo
* Added perl-ImageMagick (and similar) to --setup
* Bug in get_pool_thumb: if 0 byte file download again (theme pool list got
stuck on corrupt image)


There were some voices for a pure style with no bling-bling in the background and no moon orbit around the earth – here it is, containing two styles, default and (slightly) colored.

Version 2.0.15:
* Added italian language file - thanks to Lino Fantasia!
* Switched position of themepool and execute button (since execute needed a
  bigger landing zone and the themepool is more kind of another theme view
  than a theme action)