February 09, 2006
Oxidizer
Oxidizer is a brand-new GUI for
designing
Sheep and
FLAM3 genetic codes and rendering them.
It's a native Mac OSX application by
David Burnett.
update: more info on David's blog.
update 2: a tutorial.
Posted by spot at February 9, 2006 04:34 PM
unfortunately, it crashes on my machine when ni click on "render".
[Mac OS X, 10.4.4, Powerbook, 1GB]
gab.
I tried Oxidizer, and it crashes on the Render
action. iMac Core Duo 2Ghz.
I also tried to rebuild from the source code,
same result...
I figured out how to use Oxidizer.
It's cool! still far from being a real
Apophysis competitor though...
I noticed a big speed penalty, when compared to
the flam3-render engine that I compiled to
run natively on intel macs. perhaps some bizarre
loop, or is that really all that cocoa thing?
A nice feature would be to add multithreading
and support for multi-cpu. I'm looking into it.
Thanks for your efforts and congrats!!
@Nicola.
It should not be to much slower as it uses the flam3 library code. It does however only have the minimal optimizer flags set, -Os, did you use different flags ?
@Gabriel
The crash on render bug should be gone, fixed in the last release.
Dave
David: yes, I used the -O2 flags, so it should use the SSE2 vector
unit to execute scalar operations when it can. I also defined _SSE2_
just to be sure, although it should not be necessary. I believe there
is a 2X speed difference (flam3-2.7b4 as reference).
If we could port the flam3_iterate, at least,
to a vector based implementation, we could see huge speed
improvements. Unfortunately I am not really a proficient programmer, although
I looked at the Windows port of StarfishX, that uses SSE2, and that
could be a "source of inspiration"... :-)
Starfish was originally available as an Altivec optimized application
under OSX, and ported to Win32 w/SSE2.
@Nicola, if you're still monitoring this.
The last release (20th March) had more aggressive optimizer flags switched on.
I'm interested, where do I get the march 20th release?
the one at sourceforge still says march 18th..
Nicola
Mac OSX 10.4.6, single 1.8ghz G5, Oxidizer from 5/1/06.
still crashing with the 'render' and 'animate' buttons.
brett,
I've replied via e-mail, I though I say so here in case it gets caught in some anti-spam filter. I've had a quick play with the download here but no crashes so I'm guessing it's something to do with your flame or some combination of settings that I have not hit yet.
The email has a few questions for you, so let me know if you don't get it.
Dave
Really interested in the software - can anyone point me in the direction of a FAQ or other literature?
Cheers
Oxidizer is too new to have a FAQ not enough people have asked questions yet.
For info the best place to look for info is my blog at http://www.vargolsoft.net.
As for what it can produce, well its supposed to be capable of rendering flam3 flames so I'd say Spot's flam3 website would be a good reference. http://flam3.com/
Dave
Cheers for that - I'll be watching with interest and playing with it when I have the time. Thanks for the software!
When I try to cvs into the server the terminal tells me "connection refused" ... ... ... *grumble*
Sourcesafe changed the cvs servers.
The new source download has the new instructions in, as does my blog and I'll put them here although the formatting will get screwed up.
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@oxidizer.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/oxidizer login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@oxidizer.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/oxidizer co -P modulename
Dave
Time for a new oxidizer release me thinks.
This release is due to a fairly useful bug fix. When you deleted XForms they where not actually deleted even though they where removed from the table. Now they get deleted.
The other changes are :-
You can save Genomes as flam3 xml.
Breeder Window, allows for mutation of genones and cross breeding.
Improved random genome when adding a new one.
Available from http://oxidizer.sf.net .
Remeber its still in alpha, so expect bugs and rough edges.
Wow! Just when I was starting to get the hang of doing the command line thing and writing some useful scripts, a Mac version pops up. Awesome, thanks a million! And me definitely likes the breeder :) (only tested on a PBG4 yet, but seeing no bugs so far)
This is really cool but it always crashes when I click on animate :'( This is only when I change the size scale but it exists and I think this shouldn't be. Also I am at the moment not able to produce anything my electricsheep likes.
Oxidizer is da best thing!
I'll be watching with interest and playing with it when I have the time. Thanks for the software!
I downloaded Oxidizer and i like it but i do not have a clue how the thing works. if any one wants to email me a guide that would be great.
Looks neat, but it crashes when I try to render. This is the 0.4.1 release.
Just as the problem with Katsuko's, mine crashes evertime I attempt to either render or animate. Any ideas?
@ Yes, try version 0.4.2 it has a flam3 fix that can fix some rendering crashes.
The other thing I can suggest is that you save a flam3 that crashes and send it to me, you can dig them out of Console.app.
Either in the console.log (on the same day) or if you click on the Logs toolbar option and follow...
> /Libray/Logs
> 501
You'll find the console logs for the last 10 days.
Copy the xml and send that to me along with your Oxidizer Environment Settings (the settings on the main window, so that's Quality Scale, Size scale etc) and which version of OSX you're using and Intel or PPC via the Oxidizer Community website at Rampant-Mac (the link in the comment)
Hey, Dave, forget what I said. I figured out my problem - let's call it a dumb mistake I was making and leave it at that.
Now that I've figured out some of the basics of the program, I have to give you praise. The program, even in this Alpha/Beta stage (I'm not entirely sure which one) is entirely user friendly and intuitive. It makes it incredibly easy to make some absolutely stunning fractal renders.
I adore this project, keep up the excellent work!
Oxidizer is a wonderful software. But after the last update the main window keeps freezing. You cannot render or animate. It also forbids editing. I use an Intel-based mac. I ran simultaneously the console log window and the Oxidizer. I always get the same result:
'NSInvalidArgumentException' (reason '*** -whiteComponent not defined for the NSColor NSCalibratedRGBColorSpace 0.601911 0.601911 0.601911 1; need to first convert colorspace.') was raised during a dragging session.
I hope David could come into a conclusion soon. His software is excellent!
Very cool app - love its simplicity and great results. Will you be adding a resizable edit window? The current one is too small to see edit results clearly. Also a pause/stop render feature and a render progress bar would be great. But I still love it - Thanks!