I can hardly wait Betty...

As its been a while since I blogged I though I'd bring everyone up to date.

There are two things going on in Oxidizer at the mo'.

The first is a simple way to cross breed or mutate genomes.
This is mostly GUI work and code used from the flam3-genome program, so its going quite well. As part of this I've improved the code to add random flames, its slower but the results are better.

Here's a shot...the result of breeding the two selected flames is the image in the bottom middle.


The second is changes to the way movies are rendered.
At the moment use give a genome a 'time' setting say 1 to 100, then you render a movie, chose 25 frames a second. The movie you get is 25 frames a second but it's not 4 seconds long.

The way quicktime works is you add a 'sample' for a duration. I've got a 20th of a second my development version of Oxidizer. So each Oxidizer time unit is a 20th of a second.

The movie is then saved to file extrapolating / interpolating the movie until you get your chosen frame rate for the same duration as the intermediate movie ie sample count * sample duration.

Try it ? set the frame rate to 1 fps. You wont get a 100 second movie, you'll get a 5 frame, five second movie instead.

Now I wanted to change that, as it does not lead to great movie quality. The trouble is every way I've tried a get the frame rate from the Movie export component has failed, a my plea for help on Apple Quicktime mailing list fell of deaf ear's.

Once I've got that working I'll be a week away or so from a new release :-)