v2.0.0
wxChaos 2.0.0
Version 2.0.0 is a major rewrite of wxChaos. It includes a redesigned interface, a standardized rendering system, new precision and coloring options, expanded documentation and scripting support, and Windows and Linux packages.
What's new
- A completely redesigned interface with light, dark, and system themes, plus English, Spanish, and Japanese localization.
- Smoother exploration with mouse-wheel zooming, panning, animated zoom history, viewport tools, point inspection, orbit display, and improved Julia previews.
- A unified rendering architecture that brings smooth coloring, orbit traps, Gaussian-integer, escape-angle, and triangle-inequality rendering to more compatible fractals.
- New palettes and color-mapping controls, supersampling anti-aliasing, automatic iteration limits, and improved multithreaded performance.
- Arbitrary-precision rendering for deep zooms, with fast perturbation rendering for Mandelbrot and Julia sets.
- Dedicated illustrated documentation for every built-in fractal, including interactive labs and links that can control the application.
- Expanded formula and AngelScript tools, including user-defined Newton–Raphson fractals, script options, orbit drawing, samples, validation, and live previews.
- New vector fractals, an improved Dimension Calculator, and a more precise Zoom Recorder with native video export.
- Numerous crash fixes, rendering corrections, cross-platform improvements, and a substantially expanded automated test suite.
Downloads
Choose the appropriate asset attached to this release:
- Windows 64-bit installer:
wxChaos-2.0.0-windows-x64-setup.exe - Windows 64-bit portable:
wxChaos-2.0.0-windows-x64-portable.exe - Linux x86-64 AppImage:
wxChaos-2.0.0-x86_64.AppImage - Source code: use GitHub's source archives below or follow Build.md.
The Windows installer is currently unsigned, so Windows may display a SmartScreen warning. If you use the portable Windows edition, install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for x64 first; the regular installer already includes it.
On Linux, make the AppImage executable before launching it:
chmod +x wxChaos-2.0.0-x86_64.AppImage
./wxChaos-2.0.0-x86_64.AppImageSome newer distributions also require the FUSE 2 compatibility library. Install libfuse2, or libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04 and newer. See the AppImage FUSE guide for distribution-specific instructions.
Upgrading from 1.x
The Windows installer migrates legacy settings and editable scripts to the current user's data directory when possible. Because the scripting interface has evolved substantially, older scripts may require changes; the bundled scripting guide and samples document the current API.
Thank you
wxChaos started as a learning project and has grown into a much more ambitious open-source fractal laboratory. Thank you to everyone who tested builds, reported problems, contributed ideas, or simply spent time exploring the images it creates.