Chaotica 0.666 (all platforms)

Download links

Download for 64bit Windows: chaoticafractals.com/dist/chao…
Download for 32bit Windows: chaoticafractals.com/dist/chao…

Download for Mac OS: chaoticafractals.com/dist/chao…

Download for 64bit Linux: chaoticafractals.com/dist/chao…
Download for 32bit Linux: chaoticafractals.com/dist/chao…

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After numerous delays, an homage to the old days of Doom v1.666

The major bit of news is that, from now on, all releases will happen on Windows, Mac and Linux in parallel. My colleagues at Glare have helped me tremendously in getting Chaotica set up to build right next to Indigo Renderer using a fully automated build system on all platforms, so the days of some platform releases lagging behind are over! A lot of code cleanup and bugfixing (notably saving/loading of final transforms in .chaos format) has gone on between this and the last release, and I'm happy to say that the Chaotica codebase is looking extremely healthy. Progress is happening really quickly now, especially on the editor and associated features.

As part of this, specifically using HSV palette splines, Chaotica now starts up with randomised Moebius IFS parameters instead of just a blank workspace; as a fun extra, the randomisation can be done partially, i.e. only the palette (Ctrl+P), transformations (Ctrl+U), shaders (Ctrl+I) and selectors (Ctrl+O). This kind of setup is how I did much of my fractal art back in ~2006-2007, and while it's still a bit rough, I look forward to making this feature "smarter", and of course releasing the editor which will allow for complete control

Also worth mentioning is that the brightness better matches the result in Apophysis/flam3 now, but it's still not quite the same and still needs a little adjusting usually. The realtime camera controls are back, having been AWOL since Chaotica 0.49, and can be used by holding Alt and dragging with the left mouse button (pan), right mouse button (zoom) and both buttons (rotate).

Over the next few days I'll be working on the new Forum and website, so stay tuned for this! If you're a Linux or Mac user looking for really fast, high resolution+quality flame fractal rendering, now is a great time to get a Chaotica 1.0 licence on pre-sale On that note, if anyone does a comparison of Chaotica to other fractal software on these platforms, I am really interested to see it

I'm indebted as ever to the friendly and helpful people here in the dA fractal art community for their motivation and help, particularly my "right hand man" FarDareisMai!

As usual, please let me know if you encounter any bugs or other issues, thanks!

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Changelog

0.666:
* Windows, Mac and Linux builds done concurrently in all releases from now on
* Fixed saving / loading of final transforms in .chaos format
* Better matching of brightness with flam3/Apophysis parameters
* Added randomised Moebius fractals on startup, partial randomisation controls (see tooltips for shortcut keys)
* Fixed memory leaks, lots of code cleanup