I’m glad to announce that the latest version of Fr0st has just been released!
A lot of work happened behind the scenes in this release. Stuff got cleaned out and fixed. For the next version, I’ll be focused on adding more features and improving the existing GUI elements. Anyway, here’s the changelog, listing some of the bigger items:
GUI:
-Variation preview now has layers of different depths, to better show off what each xform is actually doing.
-Highlight triangle corners when hovering over them with mouse.
-Small preview now uses multiple threads on systems with more than 2 cores.
Bugfixes:
-Allow unicode paths for favorite scripts.
-Fixed several bugs that occurred when manipulating flames with non-black backgrounds.
-Small alpha values in palette produced by smooth interpolation (due to rounding errors) are now ignored.
-Fixed bug where some error messages were being cut short.
-Fixed bug where starting a script while the canvas was being manipulated led to an inconsistent program state.
The Fr0st Blog 
Works ok on Win7x64 🙂 Nice and fast responsive. My first, hot thought was: “when you open a script, editor window should be open” 😉 Good job!
hey Frost ! really kewl piece of software !…
i’m an apophysis user ! and really think i’ll switch to your soft !! impressive and a very kewl integration of flame4 … need a little more work on the gui, for improving the workflow ! i hope yu’ll continue to make this work evolving… great job 🙂
i badly wanted to try fr0st, but couldn’t run it at all. on starting up it immediately terminates without an error message. i tried both, the standalone and install version. my system: win 7 64bit, q6600 quad core, 6 gigs ram, gtx 570
Hmm… could you try running it in from a command line to see if you get any error message there?
ok i tried that, but no exception raises. the process just terminates on startup.
Unfortunately, that’s very little info to start digging into the issue :-(. I assume you’re running the regular 1.4 download, not from source or anything?
“You could try deleting your config file (“…\Documents\fr0st\config.cfg”) and see if that fixes the problem.”
lol, that does the trick for me. sorry for trolling around.
Don’t worry, I’m glad you could get it up and running!
Thanks for the update. 🙂
I’m just getting it, I’ll let you know how it goes.
I come across this wonderful program a week after I try Apophysis, but then I never try Apophysis any more.
FrOst is an absolutely user friendly fractal program.
But I lost my files many times after saving.
Maybe frost doesn’t like wine in Puppy Linux.
And the gradient, gamma, highlight etc. does not work properly.
Anyway I had already rendered a lot of beautiful fractal from FrOst.
Thank you very much for this great fractal program.
By the way, why the “o” is capital?
Why are you running it under wine? it should work natively under all linux flavors as long as you have all the dependencies (wxpython etc). Is there something specific that prevents fr0st from working under puppy?
The o in fr0st is actually a zero, and it’s there to acknowledge that it’s built on top of flam3 😉
Thank you very much for your advice.
But then I have to find how it will run under Linux.
Another request for the new version, is it possible to have animation control for each form. Sometimes I got 2 forms cycling together. And very rarely I got 3 forms cycling together!!!
What do you mean by each form? What exactly are you trying to do?
Form is the triangle in the main editing window.
When I click animation, mostly one form will cycling, making the x,y move around the O center.
And sometimes 2 forms cycling and rarely 3 forms cycling.
And now I ‘ve just find no form cycling after I delete the only form that cycling.
ah, what you want exists, it’s the animate checkbox (which is in the color tab on the right hand side for historical reasons)
Thank you for your answer.
But I don’t see that animate checkbox. Perhaps wine doesn’t show it.
I have to check again.
And one more request is it possible to have grouping, so two or more forms can be moved or copy and paste simultanously?
can i somehow render the fractal with transparent background?
Yes, just check the PNG transparency box in the render dialog 😉
ah cool thanks didnt see that 😀
It doesn’t want to run for me – I’m on a Mac, running Leopard. I’m not exactly brilliant when it comes to working in the terminal, so I don’t know how to fix this – here’s what it says when I try:
/Users/shannyk/Desktop/fr0st-1.4-src/fr0stlib/__init__.py:876: Warning: ‘with’ will become a reserved keyword in Python 2.6
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “./fr0st.py”, line 23, in
from fr0stlib.gui import Fr0stApp
File “/Users/shannyk/Desktop/fr0st-1.4-src/fr0stlib/__init__.py”, line 876
with open(path, “w”) as f:
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
What’s going wrong here?
It looks like you’re on python 2.5, but fr0st requires python 2.6 or 2.7 to run
After a frustrating round of trying to get a post-mirror plugin to work on Apophysis 7x and 2.09 in Wine, I found a stronger resolve to give up on them and keep working in fr0st. My intuition told me that there might be an update, and sure enough… great to see you still developing this little gem ! Your software continues to be an invaluable tool in SpaceCraft Engineering, feel free to check out the new web page here: http://cosmic-spacecrafts.net.
Any tips on how I could implement a simple vertical mirror plugin with python ?
Whoops, I just noticed there’s a bilateral symmetry plugin already there, silly me 😛
Yeah was just gonna mention that… glad to know you keep using and enjoying fr0st!
I don’t know what I could possibly be doing wrong, but I’m not able to render in Fractal Fr0st. The file name appears in the folder I render to, but when I open it, it’s blank. My OS is Win 7 Home Edition, I believe it’s 32 bit with dual core CPU
Ok….upon doing further searches, I found the tutorial saying fractals in Fractal Fr0st can be copied and pasted into another program. I tried it in Apophysis and was able to render my fractal with that program
Hi Vitor;
The animate tab you mentioned has many choices for linear, log, smooth etc. But I can’t get any effect after I selected it. I try all the combination and nothing changed.
Cheer.
Those values only mean something when used in conjunction with an animation script.
I am trying to get Fr0st alpha on my mac(10.7.1). I found it here:
http://draves.org/blog/archives/000701.html
I have followed the instructions and got this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “./fr0st.py”, line 23, in
from fr0stlib.gui import Fr0stApp
File “/Users/Sam/Desktop/fr0st-1.4-src/fr0stlib/gui/__init__.py”, line 22, in
import imp, os, sys, wx, time, shutil, copy, cPickle as Pickle, itertools, \
ImportError: No module named wx
I don’t know what this means. Please help me.
Thanks
Hi,
It means the wxpython library isn’t installed on your system.
Is there a port for Python3?
No, I’m sticking to python2 for this project.
Thats sad, because python2 will disappear someday. There is already wxpython for python3. You think its a lot work for the port?
Well, it’s probably manageable, but one big problem would be the scripts, which are run in the same interpreter and therefore wouldn’t be compatible with a py3 version of fr0st.
Hi vitor ! it’s a long time that 1.4 is out now ! any news regarding F.Fr0st 1.5 ? 😀
Unfortunately I’m very busy with my studies right now, so don’t expect a new release anytime soon. I do plan on taking up development of fr0st again at some point!
Thank you for this great job. Is a very great software. Is fast for render Fr0st fractal archives and Apophysis fractal archives. The problem is low memory use in this 32 Bits software.
Request improves for next Verssions:
1) Support For Gpu Render, Cuda or OpenCl.
2) Complete and better fast, 64 Bits version. For user large among Ram. In this compute I have for example, 16Gb Ram. For More Large size fractals. Very limited Fractal archive size, for Low use memory Ram in this 32 Bits Fractal Fr0st Verssion.
3) Complete Real support for Multicore Computer Systems. (No hiperthreading. Complete Support for Real Multicore processors without hiperthreading).
Example: Friend, have a Xeon Dual Motherboard with 2 x Quadcore Proccesors X5460, ( Total 8 real Cores at 3166Mhz). for more fast render time. This proccesor not support Hiperthreading, but are 8 real Core processors.
4) Suppor for other Os. Example: Mac Osx Snow leopard or Lion .
Thanks and Greetings for your attention
I’d love to see a 64bit version and maybe also support for some of the newer Apo plugins (i.e. 3d plugins).
I would love to see the addition of Distributed Rendering, eg. being able to set up an array of slave server to render these fractals.
You can spin up fr0st instances on the command line, so a script that ssh’s into another box, uploads some params and then tells fr0st to render them is definitely possible.
But that is for a whole fractal. I have fractals that take weeks to render and it would be nice to split that load across the rack of servers I have for a single fractal.
Well, I wrote a little script for that use case, it’s stil la bit of manual work, but this will split your flame into strips which you can render separately:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2173295/fr0st/slice_rendering.zip
I appologize if this is the wrong place to post a bug report, but I am not sure where to post one.
These following settings cause fractals to render immediately and blanked out (empty):
Quality: 5000
Radius: 0.4
Width: 3840
Height: 2160
Buffer Depth: 32-bit float
Threads: 7
Are you sure you have enough memory for a render of that size? Does lowering the size make the image render correctly? what renderer are you using, flam3 or flam4?
I have 16gb of physical memory, 12gb virtual, and I am running a 64bit version of windows 7. This render only requires around 2.6gb of memory (says your calculator that’s built in). Also, yes, lowering the size (width) does allow it to render correctly. I am unsure how to tell if I am using flam3 or flam4. But I am importing a flame from “Apophysis 7x Version 15C.9”. Thank you.
Are you still developing Fr0st (or have any plans to)? The world needs it!
I would like to do so, but my time is taken up by many other things at the moment.
Understandable of course 🙂
Hope you find the time some day! Many thanks too btw, I still use Fr0st ocasionally.