picogen 0.3 release + what next?

(see UPDATE below)

Freshmeat: OpenEXR support has been added (QtPfsGui is suggested for those now). picogen-pure, a mostly CLI renderer that could also be used for batch rendering, is included. Some severe bugs have been detected and squashed.

Full changelog: picogen.org/changelog

Nice-to-haves for 0.3.x-series: Realtime 3d preview, integration of visual Sun-Sky-Editor into SimplexGui.

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Download: code.google.com/p/picogen/down…
Complains and support at: picogen.org/forum/
And if you want to help with documentation: picogen.org/wiki/

Any help and feedback is much appreciated.

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Sorry for not providing a 64bit Windows build, but I am lacking licenses.

Linux-Sidenote: If you can't use the .deb-packages or can't install the right packages for the tar.gz's, it might be worth trying the windows versions through wine. This perfectly functioned for me!

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What next?

IRTC (irtc.org) has running a rendering contest (www.irtc.org/irtc/irtc?_n&pg=C…) with this topic:
Plants - Renderings of flowers, trees, foliage, seeds, or anything to do with plants, either real or imagined, on earth or elsewhere.

I took this as a motivation to start implementing L-Systems into picogen. Only 33 days left to implement an L-System-Compiler, an interpreter, and proper acceleration structures for the rendition of millions of plants? Challenge accepted. Plants will therefore be featured in the 0.4 series

More about L-Systems:
* commercial L-System implementation: xfrog.com/ (xfrog.com/ ) (you'll recognize the potential)
* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsystem (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsystem) (introduction for geeks)
* algorithmicbotany.org/papers/a… (low quality, other versions at algorithmicbotany.org ; handy for writers and implementors of L-Systems)


UPDATE: 29 days and 18 hours left, and the L-System compiler+virtual machine are done, with the following features:

* context sensitive
* parametric
* conditional
* stochastic
* bracketed

I thin,k those are all general purpose features that exist. Other features (e.g. loops) are, to my knowledege, only used in exotic applications, e.g. city generation (uhm, yes, that's another plan for a later version picogen) and architecture.

Feature wise, this is a complete implementation of chapter 1 of "The algorithmic beauty of plants" (the book is free as in beer and can be obtained via algorithmicbotany.org ), except for the turtle interpretation (that is: drawing is not implemented yet).

But well, 29 days left