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Oh dear...

I was about to send a friend a link to the Chaoscope website, but when doing my usual check to confirm the web address, I got a Laughing Squid Web Hosting page and the entire site at http://www.chaoscope.org seems to be gone!

I hope it's not gone forever.

That would be a real loss to the fractal community.

Does anybody know what happened, or how long it's been gone?  Was this mentioned someplace, and I just missed it?  Did it just move someplace newer and better?

I did find this link for anybody still wanting to download this fantastic Strange Attractor program - http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Others/Chaoscope.shtml

But the original site was much better ; with downloads to a user guide, different language interfaces, and even Ani4Chaoscope - a 3rd party tool that allowed Chaoscope Animations to be rendered!

If the creator would allow it, I would imagine those things could be re-hosted here as has been done for other software.  At least I would hope so.

The Internet Archive - Wayback Machine is sometimes useful for sites that go offline
If it doesn't come back you can try here.

http://web.archive.org/web/20120125092631/http://www.chaoscope.org/download.htm

That's great!

The Wayback is hit or miss with hosted files.  They are not always archived, sometimes it's just dead links.  Maybe it's file size related?  I never had call to pay too close attention.  But thanks, and let's hope Chaoscope finds a new home on the web. 

I still use the program a lot.   O0

hmm, good to know, i as well believe that chaoscope is a "must be there" program, perhaps we can try extracting a contact adress from the programm...

I believe it has been down for several months now.  Nicolas Desprez did not really have the time to devote to this any longer, and I think his heart was no longer into it as well.


I have all the versions from 0.1.0 up through 0.3.1.51, and the CSP command line versions up through 0.3.7.  I may create a directory on my Software download page and add something there for Chaoscope.


The Ani4-Chaoscope was something offered by François (axoneman) and the Chaoscope.org site only had links to those downloads.
 

That's a shame.  Chaoscope had one of the best render engines out there!

He did say the source code would become Public Domain after Version 1.0 was released.  I wonder if he could be convinced to offer it up before then if he really gave up on the project.


I hope he just needs a break and will return someday.  I always wanted to get him to collaborate with one of the creators of Xenodream or Incendia to find a way to export his point clouds as obj or stl files.  Even Voxel Stacks...

I asked before, in the Incendia section, if anybody knew a decent procedure to take the Julia Values from a Chaoscope Project and enter them in one of Incendia's Julia variations to get a reasonably close file.  I have a single Chaoscope Julia file I have wanted to convert to a 3D Model since 2006!

Maybe he will.   :)   But for those that wish to take advantage of past information, including parameter files shared by some of the Users, they can still access the old e-mail list online, which has just about every posting from March 2003 up through this year (the latter ones are nothing more than SPAM):

        http://www.freelists.org/archive/chaoscope/ (http://www.freelists.org/archive/chaoscope/)


I sent him an email in the past, but have yet to ever hear back from him.  Not even sure he is still living at the same physical address that I have on file.


If you wish to share the parameter file, then I can see what I can do with it for you.     :D
 

That's a kind offer!

I'll dig it out and get it to you   :D

I may need a day or two, I've gone through a few computers since then and need to search back up drives...   :headbatting:

I found a copy of the image, but the parameters will take a little longer...

(http://i106.photobucket.com/albums/m278/sockratease/topsyturvy2.jpg) (http://s106.photobucket.com/user/sockratease/media/topsyturvy2.jpg.html)

I really want to animate those little winged ballly things flying through those hoops in 3D!

Found 'em!

I attached the csproj file to this post.

Any help you, or anybody else, can give would be most appreciated.

Incendia has so many Julia variants I had troubles getting one to come close.  Plus, I can't get Incendia to accept keyboard input for parameters and sliders are touchy.

Thanks again, and I look forward to whatever you can come up with   O0

It will probably take me longer to come up with an .OBJ file than it took you to find the parameters.
 

Hi All - I was aware some weeks ago that the Chaoscope site no longer existed...and if I may, here is some extra info on deviantART from a pal who I feel sure won't mind if I pass it along. What amazes me most is that some people actually DO still use Chaoscope...this talented gentleman uses it all the time with wonderful results... Personally I'm trying to get back into it, I was always comfortable with it but got away from it while trying (with dubious success) to use MB3D... anyway here is the link from dA:

http://lecristal.deviantart.com/journal/I-m-speechless-399526320#comments

Chaoscope had many more users when it was being actively developed a few years ago.  And there are still quite a few people that have fun playing around with it today.  But I am afraid that if Nicholas does not do anything with it again, nor make it publicly available, then it will go by the wayside like so many other applications.
 

That's very kind of you to offer.  I'd be thrilled just to get those parameters into Incendia though.  That would save lots of effort and the hassle of sending large obj files through the interwebs.

I really appreciate you even giving it a shot   O0

I tried often, but couldn't make it happen...

It's a plain Quaternion Julia, power 2, with only the first two parameters non-zero, so it is approximately possible in XD, Incendia and others. However, Chaoscope does the Julia differently, with depth limiting, which you have set to 8, which is why it's smooth and rounded. Incendia and XD don't do that so they could only give a more detailed object. It should be possible to get that by using one of the raymarching programs with depth limiting, and voxel stacks for export.

Thanks!  I knew there was something different about the way Chaoscope was rendering Julias because I could never reproduce that  (or even get a good approximation in other software.  I actually never heard it called "Depth Limiting" before and that may have been causing me to miss some options - I'll have to re-check and try again.

And I only mentioned Incendia because of my budget  :(  It's free version makes better obj files than the free version of Xenodream  (which I still can't fit into the overly tight budget around here).  But if you can approximate that in Xenodream, feel free to post the xep file and I'll be sure to post something made from it using those fancy 3D programs I love so much   O0

The Level control sets the iteration level for depth first ray casting, according to the manual.
In Chaoscope, just set the Level control to 15 (press Enter after editing numbers) to see roughly what it would look like in XD. There seems to be a bug with level 16 or higher, as it changes scale. Also, the sign of Ci seems to be reversed. It doesn't look nearly as good for exporting as the smoother version.

This post takes me down memory lane and it was cool to revisit my forgotten chaoscope images ( Chaoscope being my first fractal experience).
Now for my first experiment of using "Attach".