Changes for Version 2.0 

New and Improved Features  ================

1. New Big Feature: Cross-Breeder editor allows you to breed two fractals and create video animations of the cross breeding.

2. New Big Feature: New OpenCL based renderer. Intel CPU based rendering supported on all Intel Macs.

On Lion, GPU accelerated rendering is available for Macs with recent Nvidia & ATI GPUs. (Older GPUs [2008 and earlier] may not be capable of OpenCL acceleration, see http://www.apple.com/macosx/specs.html).

3.  New Big Feature: Basic animation & animation video creation. You can animate and create videos by:

• Rotating a specific triangle
• Rotating multiple triangles (those that whose Rotates setting is checked in the Transform list) (Flam3-like animation of multiple triangles.)
• Enlarging/Shrinking a specific triangle
• Moving a specific triangle up, down, left, or right.
• Cross breeding two fractals.
• Changing flame parameters: transform weight, color index, color speed, opacity,  hue, viewport x&y, viewport scale, zoom, & rotation
• Changing Variation weights & variation parameter values

You can animate by dragging a slider, showing 2 – 30 thumbnails, show a little video using those thumbnails, OR create a high quality video of the animation (to be saved to a file).

4. Improved workflow: Button bar allowing easy access to fractal editing features. Easy switching between the various editor windows.

5. Fractal Architect is Flam3-free. Flam3 is no longer bundled . Snow Leopard users can install their own copy of the Flam3 render and have FA use it. Lion users can right now install Flam3, but the upcoming Sandbox requirement for Lion Mac App Store apps, may remove that capability. (When FA is sandboxed in the near future, we will know the answer then.)

Minor Features =========

1. Print Progress bar now shows printing progress. Default printing orientation is now Landscape.

2. Fractal Architect is now a 64 bit application.

3. Triangle editor now has a detachable fractal preview. When detached, you can move it around and resize it as you like.

4. You can resize thumbnails on the HomePage and Variants editor with a slider and re-render the thumbnails for the new size.

Bug Fixes =========

1. Better handling of miscellaneous Flam3 specific rendering parameters.

2. Secant2 variation now properly handled (secant variation dropped). Modulus & oscilloscope variations are fixed.

3. Color palettes with less than 256 color nodes are now properly rendered on Flam3. (flam3 compatibility)

4. Flam4 CUDA renderer is now more compatible with flam3 renderer.

Issues (Bring Your Own Flam3) ========

1. flam3-palettes.xml, the file holding the standard Flam3 palette collection is no longer shipped with the app. You can provide your own copy and FA will use it.

2. Flam3 renderer and standard color palettes are not bundled with Fractal Architect. You may provide your own copy of Flam3 and FA will use it.

(copy flam3-render and flam3-palettes.xml into the ~/Library/Application Support/FractalArchitect/flam3 directory.)

Possible Issue for those using other Flame Fractal apps =====

1. Animations are added to the end of the Fractal’s .flame file. You may need to copy the file and remove the animation portion if you want to use the file outside of Fractal Architect.

Limitations

1. Motion blur is not added to animations (yet).

2. The OpenCL renderer and Flam4CUDA renderer do not yet support Xaos. You must use the Flam3 renderer to see the Xaos effects.

3. On Snow Leopard, OpeCL GPU acceleration is not available (it is on Lion) – This is due to big bugs in Apple’s OpenCL implementation that have never been fixed on Snow Leopard.   Note: Flam4CUDA can be used in place of OpenCL for Nvidia GPUs.

4. OpenCL GPU renderer only uses the first GPU device seen. Extra GPU’s are not used (i.e. Mac Pro’s with multiple video cards).

Some Feature Omissions to be Revisited in Later Point Releases ======

1. Add Basic Animation capability (morph/rotate animations) to the Keyframes view (accessed with Frames button on Preview window).

2. Revisit Snow Leopard OpenCL GPU renderers and see if it is possible to workaround the serious bugs seen.

3. Add Xaos support to the OpenCL renderer and (maybe) to Flam4CUDA

4. Add support for multiple GPUs or GPU+CPU to the OpenCL renderer.

5. Add motion blur to animations with the OpenCL renderer.

Flam4CUDA GPU accelerated renderer (Nvidia GPU’s only) =========

This renderer is now deprecated and will be removed when Snow Leopard support is dropped at some point in the future (couple of years in the future).