The new Flam3 2.8 Beta2 release is actually available for testing.

There’s a great bunch of new features in this release!

First of all Flam3 2.8 runs faster than 2.7, averaging about 20-30% or more depending on variations, due to a significant speed optimization.

New supported Variations:
bipolar, boarders, butterfly, cell, cpow, curve, edisc, elliptic, escher, foci, lazysusan, loonie, pre_blur, modulus, oscilloscope, polar2, popcorn2, scry, separation, split, splits, stripes, wedge, wedge_julia, wedge_sph, whorl, waves2
They’re available as Apophysis plugins downloading the apo-plugins.bin.80810.zip archive.

earlyclip – env var
First, setting the env var ‘earlyclip’ to 1 on the command line changes the order of operations in the spatial filtering stage of the render, which improves the antialiasing of bright features in images. You may have noticed that even if you use very high quality and supersample=3, bright areas continue to have some jagged edges – this setting will take care of that issue. What you will see when using earlyclip is the same thing that you would see if you rendered the image three times bigger and resized it in an external program.

chaos – Flame tag
Apophysis chaos and solo xform/plotmode features have been implemented. Solo/Plotmode are promoted to floating point ‘visibility’. visibility and chaos are both interpolatable.

highlight_power – Flame tag
Setting highlight_power to -1 (the default) results in 2.7 functionality.
Setting it to values >= 0 enables the new functionality; a value of 0 means that there will be no trending towards white, that is, no highlights at all. The larger the value, the faster dense areas will become white as density increases. Start with values around .5 or 1 and adjust from there.
It has always bothered me that there is a tendency for the 6 pri/sec colors to be present in renders (RGBCMY). While investigating why that is, I discovered a subtle bug in how the output color is calculated, where very dense areas would regularly have a color shift as they became saturated in the image. For a given pixel, in bright areas, the RGB values were clipped at 255 INDEPENDENTLY for each channel, meaning that the RGB direction could (and does) change as things get brighter. This new feature clips the RGB color at max Value (in HSV space), and then the color will trend towards white as the density increases. To control this, there’s a new attribute, highlight_power.

color_speed and animate – Flame tags
The symmetry attribute of xforms is still supported, but you can now separately control the effect on color and motion by using two new attributes: color_speed and animate. the senses of these is currently exactly the same as symmetry which is confusing (ie symmetry=0 is the same as color_speed=0 and animate=0 even though color_speed=0 means the color moves and animate=0 means the xform rotates as a sheep).
This will be fixed in an upcoming release.

motion – Flame tag
Motion tag now available for xforms: allows cyclic variation of any regular xform parameter/coef/post.
It’s very powerful but no editors can support it at this point, and it really requires an editor.

flam27 – env var
If you set the env var ‘flam27′ then output genomes will be backwards compatible.

Passes the consistency test where rendering an image at double size and then filtering it down produces identical results modulo quality (ie changing the size does not change the brightness).

Download it here:
flam3-2.8-beta2.zip – 32-bit Windows for 1-2 core machines
flam3-2.8-beta2-atomic.zip – 32-bit Windows for 3+ core machines

Supported Variations  – complete list:
linear, sinusoidal, spherical, swirl, horseshoe, polar, handkerchief, heart, disc, spiral, hyperbolic, diamond, ex, julia, bent, waves, fisheye, popcorn, exponential, power, cosine, rings, fan, blob, pdj, fan2, rings2, eyefish, bubble, cylinder, perspective, noise, julian, juliascope, blur, gaussian_blur, radial_blur, pie, ngon, curl, rectangles, arch, tangent, square, rays, blade, secant2, twintrian, cross, disc2, super_shape, flower, conic, parabola, bent2, bipolar, boarders, butterfly, cell, cpow, curve, edisc, elliptic, escher, foci, lazysusan, loonie, pre_blur, modulus, oscilloscope, polar2, popcorn2, scry, separation, split, splits, stripes, wedge, wedge_julia, wedge_sph, whorl, waves2