Repository navigation
Releases
Parsec 0.8.9 (Beta)
Parsec 0.8.9 brings a major rendering-quality overhaul, a batch of correctness fixes from a full engine code review, and three new artist-facing lighting features.
✨ New features
Placeable orb lights — click + Orb to drop a luminous orb into the scene in front of the camera. Each orb is a visible glowing sphere and a point light with physically-based inverse-square falloff, casting soft shadows in hero renders and showing up in reflections. Up to 8 orbs, each with X/Y/Z position, size, luminosity, and full RGB color controls — all keyframeable in the animation timeline, so orbs can drift, pulse, and shift hue across an animation.
Depth of field — thin-lens DOF with focus-distance and aperture controls, also keyframeable (animated focus pulls!). Blur resolves in hero and animation renders at 4×/9×/16× AA; the interactive preview stays sharp. Aperture 0 = off.
🎨 Renders are dramatically brighter and more color-faithful
The engine previously wrote linear-light values straight to 8-bit output with no sRGB encoding, crushing every midtone — the root cause of chronically dark renders. Shading now happens in proper linear light with sRGB encoding at output, ambient occlusion no longer double-darkens key-lit surfaces, the lighting pipeline is HDR end-to-end (light intensity above 1.0 has real headroom instead of clamping), and the light-intensity slider now genuinely reaches zero. Existing scenes will render brighter and richer than before — palettes tuned around the old dark output may deserve a revisit.
🐛 Fixes
- Affine-IFS GPU renders revived — the Sierpinski tetrahedron, trefoil knot, and twisted-tetrahedron render family had stopped compiling entirely; it's been ported onto the shared render pipeline and picked up orbit-trap palette coloring in the process.
- Timeline: starting playback from an empty keyframe slot no longer interpolates every parameter from zero (black-flash frames); palette-phase keyframes now wrap the short way around the color cycle.
- Camera: straight top-down/bottom-up shots no longer render blank (degenerate camera basis produced NaN rays).
- IFS math: the contraction-factor (spectral norm) computation could silently underestimate on rotated anisotropic maps — the unsafe direction for a distance estimator (surface holes). Replaced with an exact closed form.
- Shadows/AO now march with the same DE fudge factor as primary rays, fixing light leaks through fine filigree on several fractal types.
- Kleinian foam no longer tunnels rays through gaps between spheres (unbounded DE steps near potential saddles).
- PNG output no longer leaves stale trailing bytes when overwriting a larger file; half-cut plane controls no longer NaN-poison the render when the plane normal is unset; plus assorted robustness fixes across the GPU plumbing.
📦 Downloads
Parsec-0.8.9-win-x64.zip — self-contained Windows x64 build, no .NET install required. Unzip and run parsec-app.exe. Requires a GPU with OpenGL 4.3 compute support.