Chaotica 0.5 beta

Download Chaotica 0.5 beta 4 for Windows: chaoticafractals.com/chaotica_…

Indigo Renderer 3.4 release: www.indigorenderer.com/threepo…

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Hi guys, sorry it's been aaaages since the last update I've been extremely busy working on the recent Indigo Renderer 3.4 release!

Although there hasn't been an "official" update to Chaotica since version 0.48, I've been quietly hacking away on it and offering beta versions in the #Aposhack chat channel, the latest version of which is linked above for downloading. Thanks very much to you guys for all the help and encouragement, it's really really appreciated!

Saving images with alpha channel is now supported, and alpha has its own response curve. Besides the performance and accuracy improvements, the other major additions are the licensing system and the diagnostics window, which I'd like to quickly talk about here:

Licensing system

Chaotica now uses the same licensing system used in Indigo Renderer, which means there are no separate commercial and noncommercial versions anymore. When you buy a Chaotica licence for commercial use, you get private page on the Glare Technologies Store where you can enter a hardware key identifying your computer, for which you get a licence key to unlock the commercial rendering features for that computer. Each Chaotica licence comes with 2 "render node" licences; these are intended to be used with network rendering, however this is not implemented yet, so these node licences will function as full master licences for the time being.

Here's the Indigo manual page about the licensing system: www.indigorenderer.com/documen…

If you want to purchase a commercial Chaotica licence, you can do so here: Buy in Euros or Buy in US Dollars

Finally, please note that all Indigo licences are valid for use with Chaotica! You can simply paste any valid Indigo licence key into Chaotica to unlock it.

Diagnostics window

The other major addition in this build is the diagnostics window, which fixes a long-standing problem with Chaotica: when you load up some parameters and they fail to work for some reason, it would do so silently and not give any hint as to why, either crashing or displaying a black rendered image. No more!

Now, when you load parameters with 3D camera settings, it will warn about this incompatibility, likewise if it encounters any variations it doesn't recognise. If there were no problems detected, it will tell you that it's 64bit compatible; this is a huge time saver, and should hopefully help a lot of new users get going.

Etc

Finally, some words about the future... I've been working on Chaotica really hard recently, making a lot of "behind the scenes" changes that will enable the really exciting features to come. Among these are a high-powered editor, which will finally show the true power and inner workings of Chaotica's IFS engine. I am very fortunate to have the consent and support of my parent company, Glare, to use many of the required technologies in Indigo I get to re-use a lot of code, and in general there is great cross-pollination going on! The future seems very bright for Chaotica, and I'm really excited to finally be doing what I've wanted to do since about 2003, when I first started coding fractal renderers.

Anyway, please let me know if you encounter any issues with this beta release, and hopefully we'll see the proper version 0.5 release soon! Thanks again for your time and support  

Changelog

0.5:
* Commercial licences are now available at the Glare Store: store.glaretechnologies.com/ch…
* Added alpha channel support in PNG saving
* Added diagnostic window, to warn about unrecognised variations/paramerers, and to list plugins used (if not 64bit compatible)
* Added silent mode via -silent commandline option, launches Chaotica without user interface (console only),
 use with -haltsl to set halting SL, -o to set output path, eg. chaotica.exe example.flame -silent -haltsl 5 -o out.png
* Made node licences act as master licences, until network rendering is implemented
* Various optimisations and bugfixes, code cleanups
* Fixed bug in flux spread param (thanks to FarDareisMai and piethein21)

0.49:
* Using double precision iteration, resulting in much more accurate images (minor performance impact if any)
* Faster / lower latency realtime mode
* Resuming from state files now works correctly (was broken in 0.47 beta)
* Fixed crash when loading state files without params loaded
* Added reporting of state file dimensions during loading when mismatch detected
* Added realtime rotation (alt + left and right mouse button drag)
* Improved status text, now shows rendering time elapsed