The Official JWildfire Blog

Just released JWildfire V1.10. It is loaded with so much new stuff, that it made it from V1.04 directly to 1.10. Or in other words, it is a really striking new version 🙂

In this version there you can find a whole new concept called “layerz“. Layerz allow you to combine different flames into one. They are called layerz because flames in JWildfire are not flat and layerz also respect this.
Layerz are really powerful, but they are introduced in a way, that you have not to deal with them, if you dont need them. So, if you are just satisfied with the way you know how to create fractals, the new version will not bother you to change your skills. But if you want to create some really new stuff, the new version invites you warmly 🙂
All modules were enhanced to work with layerz, but there may be space for future enhancements, But the current degree of support is very high, you may animate any property of any layer in the Dancing flames module or create flames with layerz byusing scripts, for example.

But, there is also some minor drawback, you may not resume renders from old versions and are not able to load dancing-flames-projects from older projects. So, if you work with this kind of stuff, please keep your old JWildfire version and finish this stuff. Of course, you can install the new version (parallel), but it will not “understand” (accept) the old files.

To get started with layerz, please read the official tutorial. It explains the backgrounds about layerz and shows how to use them.

But, layerz is not the only striking new feature, there is also a improvement of the performance of the editor and even a native launcher for Windows-users, for example.

And, I collaborated with few artists to turn this release into a Xmas-edition. I hope you will enjoy this Xmas-gift as we did while creating it 🙂 I wish you all some nice hollidays 🙂

Complete list of changes:

• finished support for “layerz” in all modules. Layerz allow you to combine different flames into one. They are called layerz because flames in JWildfire are not flat and layerz also respect this.
• new “Gnarl3D”, “Brokat3D” and “Layerz”-random-flame-generators
• simple native laucher (JWildfire.exe) for the launcher for Windows
• improved the speed of the editor for various operations
• new “flatten”-variation known from recent Apophysis-releases
• new Preferences options “Preserve Free CPU’s” where you can specify how many cores/cpus should be left free during renderin. May help to get a smoother behaviour at some systems (or enable to do other things while rendering)
• use slightly “brighter” colors in randomly generated flames
• improved the “subflame”-random-generator to produce more interesting results
• optimized some parameters of random-flame-generation to work much faster now
• support for “blacklisting” of certain variations inside the MutaGen-module (those which may cause “endless” calculations like “truchet”)
• new option in the launcher to reset launcher-options (and to rescan available JDK’s)

Just click the “Random flames” button or launch the updated j-wildfire-applet.jar to start playing around and have fun 🙂