Comments
Depending on how much work it took to find your fractal it can be that your fractal is some kind of “art”. Well, people are discussing about whether fractals are always copyrighted or not. In order to let you preserve your rights ChaosPro supports comments by use of comment templates and a so called “credit list”, i.e. a complete list of all people who subsequently worked on a fractal (i.e. tweaked the fractal from another one).
Comment Text
ChaosPro lets you define a text as a comment for your fractals. In this text you can place some special variables, which will be replaced by their values. For example, the variable [creationdate] contains the date at which the fractal was originally created. So you can write a comment like:
This fractal has been created on [creationdate] by [author].
This comment will be expanded to:
This fractal has been created on Feb 20, 2001 by Juan Pablo Terzien.
For this to work you need to specify a so called “template” (see image at the right side), which contains the text and the variables in its raw form. If you save a fractal, the template will be saved as well. So the comment will be upto date according to the variables every time you look at it in ChaosPro. ChaosPro lets you define a default comment template, which all new fractals inherit. In order to copy the default comment template to the comment window, press the button at the right side of the comment window. |
After having specified the template for your comment you would like to switch to the comment text. You do this by simple selecting the proper tab (see image at the right side). The text shown here is based on the template defined for this fractal: All variables defined in the template are expanded. If you save a fractal, the comment text will be saved. |
If a parameter file entry contains some comment then that text will be shown in this window. If you change it and save the fractal, then of course that comment gets saved in the parameter file. The way comments are implemented in ChaosPro is compatible to FractInt, i.e. comments created with FractInt are loaded into ChaosPro and vice versa.
On loading a parameter file each entry is scanned for comments. These comments get collected and are displayed in this window. Normally comments contain the author and copyright stuff, so comments should be preserved. On saving a parameter file the comments associated with a fractal are saved.
The following variables exist:
| Variable | Meaning |
|---|---|
| [calctime] | contains the time which was needed to calculate the fractal. |
| [year] | year of latest save time |
| [month] | month of latest save time |
| [day] | day of latest save time |
| [hour] | hour of latest save time |
| [min] | minute of latest save time |
| [sec] | seconds of latest save time |
| [date] | date of latest save time, for example “Feb 20, 1998″ |
| [time] | time of latest save time, for example “22:17:45″ |
| [creationyear] | year of creation time |
| [creationmonth] | month of creation time |
| [creationday] | day of creation time |
| [creationhour] | hour of creation time |
| [creationmin] | minute of creation time |
| [creationsec] | second of creation time |
| [creationdate] | date of creation time, for example “May 19, 1997″ |
| [creationtime] | time of creation time, for example “23:57:02″ |
| [xdots] | Width of fractal (in pixels) |
| [ydots] | Height of fractal (in pixels) |
| [version] | Version of ChaosPro, for example “3.1″ |
| [author] | Original creator of the fractal |
| [modified_by] | Latest person who modified the fractal. |
Credit List
Often people share their parameter sets with other fractal enthusiasts so that they can modify the original fractal in order to create tweaks or enhance it. After some time it is difficult to keep track of the persons who were involved in creating the fractal. Thus giving proper credit is quite difficult. Due to that ChaosPro keeps track of all authors who modified a fractal. As soon as you modify a fractal from another person a new entry in the credit list will be created.