It’s been some time in the making, but I believe it’s ready for a first appearance: the new strange symmetry renderer. But wait, don’t go just yet. There are a few caveats.

The online version and the featured code are not complete. I’ve had to cut out some features to get the memory usage down to a browser friendly version. Basically I had two options: reduce the resolution or limit the stored information. I went for the latter. Personally I’d hate to lose the fine structure of the featured attractors. This would have defeated the whole purpose of the code.

Limiting the stored information has one major impact on appearance, there’s no color in this version. Right back to plain old black and white…

The applet operates in 5 modes: (1) the initial explorer, (2) active render and display, (3) geometry and attractor controls, (4) brightness control and (5) stealth mode for fast updates. Switch modes by pressing the appropriate number (where applicable). Press ‘1’ in the initial explorer to generate a new set. After initial tweaking, I recommend running the construct in stealth mode to get the fastest results. While in stealth mode the display is not automatically updated. Click to update the render.

You can save the generated image in modes (2) and (4), the only modes that show the actual image. Saving freezes the applet and opens the image in a new window. On some systems this may take some time.

The code randomly generates the parameters p1 to p8 (between –2 and 2) and p0 (between 0 and 1). Most results are not very special but an occasional gem shows up. There are ways of automatically eliminating many of the less interesting cases. These not only take time but inevitably remove some nice constructs. So I left out any preselection. Think of it as searching the beach for a rare shell…

Feel free to explore the 9 parameter universe with this online version. It is very unlikely that the picture that’s forming on your screen will ever be generated exactly the same on any other machine. Since every plot is unique it’s hard to get the correct scale and position, so you’ll have to do it yourself. Zoom in and out with ‘+’ and ‘-’. Move the construct with the arrow keys. The movement is a bit chunky because the image has to redraw every time the construct moves. Pressing ‘c’ cycles through several color palettes using the particle density, velocity and acceleration in different ways. Most importantly, pressing space saves the image to the user gallery. Nothing will appear to happen for a while but give it some time to finish. Since I intentionally neglected to provide a way of storing the 9 parameters, you can never recover a lost image which hasn’t been saved. The choice is yours, share the image and lose its uniqueness or keep it to yourself and lose it forever… Oh, any other key randomly generates a new construct.

Update : I’ve improved the interface a bit. Zooming now properly respects the centering. You can also move the construct by clicking and dragging the mouse. Pressing ‘r’ will center the image on the current mouse position.