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after many years of working on ad hoc flame fractal renderers, i've developed one with flam3/apophysis compatibility  

a 32bit windows distribution can be found here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3038174/chaotica_0.1_32.zip


it aims to be faster and more efficient than flam3/apophysis, delivering much higher quality images with less noise in less time. for an idea of what's possible with this renderer, check out this 1920x1200 1:1 crop of platinus' opioid or this render of meckie's aphasic.

bug reports are appreciated, thanks

I cannot load any of my apophysis flame files.  The test file included seems to work correctly, however when I try to load mine it encounters a problem and closes the window.  Beyond that I think it could be a very good program.

Edit:  I found the problem and the program is working fine, sorry for the false alarm.

Thanks for trying it out Paul

You're correct that BMP is currently the only output format because it doesn't require the use of external libraries; I've had the request to support PNG before, this is something I'd like to add quite soon. In the mean time though, I would suggest using the excellent IrfanView to convert from BMP to other formats - it does an exceptional job of JPEG compression since you can tell it not to destroy the colour information via subsampling (which is notably lacking in most other such software). I figured since this conversion would usually happen anyway (even PNG can produce quite large files as it is lossless), and so left it at that.

I'm reluctant to add JPEG output though, since it would probably be the option selected by a casual user not aware of the potential for image degradation through repeated JPEG'ing. Chaotica is all about delivering the highest possible quality fractal renders

It would be nice if it ran on Macs.

YEAH!