The new Apophysis 2.08 beta is finally there!

And this time it's not about any new variations... this time, you will have the power to control CHAOS itself!

You might have heard that Apophysis fractals are created with so called "Chaos Game". The idea of chaos game is that in each iteration we:
1. randomly choose one transform
2. then apply it to the point
3. and then plot the point on "canvas".

All this time in Apophysis we controlled only the (2)nd step - we changed variation functions to apply on the fractal points. Now, in the version 2.08 we have control on:
(1) how the next transform is chosen - "Xaos" tab of the transform editor
(3) is the point plotted or not - "Invisible" checkbox in the "Colors" tab
Let's talk about them in detail...


First of all, the word "Xaos" is an alternative spelling of "Chaos", sometimes used to designate controlled chaos - and that's just the type of chaos we have in Apo 2.08

Each fractal in Apophysis 2.08 has a special "chaos table", that is used when choosing the next transform in each iteration. The table holds probability (a.k.a. weight) modifier values for all combinations of transitions from one xform to any other, that is, if we have N trasnforms, the chaos table will have N*N values.
I call them "weight modifiers" because in each iteration when Apo chooses next transform, it uses not just transform weights, but weight multiplied by the modifier values. This way, some "modified" weights can even be zero - excluding the corresponding transform from appearing on the next iteration.

In the Xaos tab of the transform editor, you can view and edit values related to the selected transform. The Xaos tab has two modes (selectable from the right-click popup menu), let's call them "to" mode, and "from" mode.
- In the "to" mode you can control how the next transform is chosen after the selected one is applied.
- In the "from" mode you can control how the selected transform is chosen after all other transforms
You will notice that weight modifier from the selected xform to itself is the same in the both modes - that's right, in both modes you're just working with "rows" or "columns" of the same table
The default weight modifier value is 1 - that is, multiplying weights by 1 does not modify anything - but it can be any non-negative number. Normally you will use "1" or "0" most of the time, you can double-click to toggle them, just like in variations.

Well, I hope now you have a clue about what the "Xaos" tab is So, let's move to...


One of my previous experiments proved to be very useful combined with the new chaos control feature. What if we go to the Xaos tab, and set all weight modifiers except one to zero? Oh yes, we will have only one specific transform chosen every time after the selected one, making it a "real" post-transform. The only problem is, that the original transformed points are still plotted so we need to make them invisible.
So, there are two new checkboxes in the "Colors" tab:
"Invisible" - makes selected transform invisible, obviously
"Solo" - just the opposite: makes all other transforms invisible, which is mostly useful if you want to check which xform is responsible for what shape(s) on the fractal image.

Just remember when using invisible xforms, that points that are not plotted still take time to calculate, and still are counted as iterations - which means that, if you set too many heavy-weight transforms to invisible, less points will be plotted and your final image quality will decrease.

Oh, and by the way, there is a menu command "Add linked xform" in the Xaos tab for creating post-transforms automatically. Be aware of one thing though: if you delete an automatically created post-transform, or manually set all "to" modifiers to zero on one of the xforms - the program wont't be able to continue Chaos Game after this xform, and the result will be the same as with divide-by-zero or some other math error - the image won't be rendered correctly... or won't be rendered at all

P.S. If the new version doesn't want to run on you system ("Access violation bla-bla-bla etc." ), check your plugins folder. Some older plugins don't like Apo 2.08, just add/remove them one by one until you find who is crashing the program.