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Juggalo5 — Apo-Missing Plugins Tutorial by-sa

Published: 2010-07-07 09:53:15 +0000 UTC; Views: 2035; Favourites: 19; Downloads: 0
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Description It's all text, so I figured I'd just put the tutorial in the comments, copy pasted from my journal entry here: [link]

I know that one large issue when using anyone else's flamepack is coming to find out that they used plugins that you don't have installed. I remember hearing of a way to auto-detect missing plugins, I think with Apo7x10, but I haven't figured out how to do it.

There is another way, however, to find missing plugins in a flamepack. It's fairly simple and I'm surprised I hadn't come across it sooner. I'd been talking about the issue in #Aposhack, and someone there, although their name eludes me at the moment(darnit), mentioned opening .flame files in notepad. If you open them this way, you'll see all the included flames in a readable format, displaying all the variables involved. For the sake of example, I'll grab a snipped from my fractal "Down Below":



^This is the line that tells you it's the start of an individual flame in a file. All you're really looking for is

Each of these tags represent the triangles in the flame. For every triangle there will be a complete tag. What you're looking for to determine your missing plugins is immediately following "color" or "symmetry"(symmetry won'tt be in all xforms), and immediately before "coefs". So, in this example, the two plugins used were "zcone(which is in Apophysis by default), and "foci"(which is a plugin I have installed).

So, if you look at all of the in a particular flame, you can fairly easily determine which plugins you're missing for that flame to become usable. After determining which plugins are missing, it's simple a matter of gathering and installing them, of course

Hopefully this will help anyone else who, like me, didn't think of this on their own.
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Comments: 8

PhoenixArisen [2010-07-08 02:44:08 +0000 UTC]

You bring up something that has been bugging me as well. Whenever I run across params, there is two parts of the whole thing that still have me stumped. Using your example for easy reference, I don't know where to put the center coordinates (i.e. center="-0.0188450762009088 0.0927476898429516"). I believe the first is for the X coordinate field in the camera and the second is the Y field. If this is correct or even if it is not, I would love to hear where that is. Second, in the xform example, the coefs have been confusing me. You have 6 coordinates there from 1.38107 to 0 and I am wondering if those go into the Transform tab or if they go into the triangle tab since either one will produce vastly different flames? Great example and I am learning about params a lot more now that I am in a competition. I even know how to copy/ paste my params now since my default program outside of Apo is notepad so that I can see the details of the fractals I make.

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FracFx In reply to PhoenixArisen [2010-07-08 08:48:22 +0000 UTC]

yes the x and y coordinates there are for the camera position, in that example it's barely off-center.

The coefs refer to the triangle/transform placement positions of the x,y, and o locations.

In a script it would be like this for the example shown:
transform.coefs[0,0] := 1.38107 //x0
transform.coefs[0,1] := 1.381068 //x1
transform.coefs[1,0] := -1.381068 //y0
transform.coefs[1,1] := 1.381068 //y1
transform.coefs[2,0] := 0 //o0
transform.coefs[2,1] := 0 //o1

x0 would be the first x box in the transform tab, x1 would be the second box, etc. (the 6 coordinates).

You don't really need to know that if you're just copying/pasting parameters. The triangle and transform tabs would/should be the same values

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PhoenixArisen In reply to FracFx [2010-07-08 15:17:36 +0000 UTC]

Thank you so much. That really helped me understand a lot better. I am still learning how to use params and your explanation has really helped me to understand that concept much better.

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Juggalo5 In reply to PhoenixArisen [2010-07-08 04:26:30 +0000 UTC]

These parameters are to be loaded in Apophysis, and nothing more. You don't input anything yourself once the .flame is loaded

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Juggalo5 In reply to Juggalo5 [2010-07-08 04:28:15 +0000 UTC]

Also, when you see someone post a flame as text(XML), you copy the entire text portion, and then go into Apophysis and paste it directly. The flame comes up that way as well.

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IDeviant [2010-07-07 19:26:20 +0000 UTC]

Ha! I just explained this to someone, so I reckon this should be most welcome I actually use Notepad++ to view the raw XML as its markup highlights stuff better than plain text editors, and allows easy collapse by levels: [link]

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Juggalo5 In reply to IDeviant [2010-07-07 20:20:19 +0000 UTC]

Yeah, I was actually thinking about seeing if it was easier to read through with highlighting.

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Nikolaslimao [2010-07-07 12:33:41 +0000 UTC]

I already knew about that trick but that's nice sharing with other that don't know how to find the missing plugins

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