http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:Lu-Kout&section=today deviantART RSS for by:Lu-Kout en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:52:37 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://Lu-Kout.deviantart.com/journal/23721961/ http://Lu-Kout.deviantart.com/journal/23721961/ Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:42:40 PDT Apophysis 2.08 JK
Jed Kelsey (~Lu-Kout)
March 15, 2009
Updated March 17, 2009

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[EDIT 2009/03/17]: Apophysis 2.08 JK (Release 090317) update now available for download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/apo-mods-jk/.
New features include:
+ Added capability to take "snapshots" of the current render in progress, so you can pause a render, preview the incomplete render (write it to file) and then resume the render.
+ Option to "collapse" view for variables tab in Editor is now enabled by default.
+ Option to embed flame parameters in rendered image is now enabled by default.
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`DragonWinter has suggested for a long time that I post some of my Apo modifications somewhere, so I finally got around to collecting a few of the more interesting (in my opinion) modifications in one custom-built Apophysis version and created a project on sourceforge.net to host the source code and executables.

A list of the major new features is included at the bottom of this journal article. A couple examples of renders using some of the new features include `DragonWinter's Julia in the Jungle, Frostbite, and tarnished.

The purpose of this project is not to replace the official Apophysis or its 3D counterpart, but rather to encourage development, testing, and feedback for new/experimental modifications to Apo. Who knows, maybe some of my other mods will show up in the official Apo version also -- after all, the plugin interface (with some great enhancements by `JoelFaber) is still around!

You can find Apophysis 2.08 JK (both compiled application and source code) at http://sourceforge.net/projects/apo-mods-jk. I've also created an SVN repository there for the code, which will be updated much more often than the release builds. I'm not putting an explicit link to the release here, as it will likely be out of date almost as soon as anyone sees this journal. In fact, it's already out of date since I need to build another release with the "save while rendering" feature noted below...

Please feel free to download and try out the new versions, and let me know what you think. I'll try to keep this journal updated with major releases, as well as the (currently unimplemented) project web page, but feel free to check the Sourceforge site for more frequent changes, bug fixes, and new feature implementations.

(At time of writing this journal, there have already been 23 downloads of two "releases", and I haven't even advertised the existence of the project yet!)

The Apophysis 2.08 JK code is based on the most recent Apo 2.08 source code in the official Apophysis Sourceforge CVS repository (referred to in the Apophysis CVS repository as 2.10).

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Extended Plugin support

While most of the new Apo features will work with any flame and any (stable) existing plugin, only plugins built with support for those features can take advantage of some of them (plugin-directed colorization support, queries for plugin description or other information, etc.).

I've posted source code for an example plugin (mandel2) to the project's SVN code repository that takes advantage of some of these new features. The example is based on the good ol' Mandelbrot escape-time fractal plugin I made quite a while ago, so expect some slower renders than you might be used to with "normal" IFS fractal transforms. Some of the features I've added recently have also slowed things down slightly, and have cluttered up the code significantly, but it's still much more responsive (and nicer looking, particularly with plugin-directed colorization!) than the old Mandelbrot plugin was.

I'll put up a description and compiled version of that plugin later on (not that the sources in SVN are... ]]> ~Lu-Kout