I put a short roadmap to show you what will be in next version and what is scheduled for future.

Please look at Gallery of Experiments. These pictures are generated from just few existing 0.6 plants, without using any external software. Pure Magic Garden.

I've added fivestar module to Magic Garden website. It means that now you can rate each image. Go to the gallery and give stars to your favourite plants.

I wrote short tutorial for you to start with Magic Garden. It's based on version 0.6 and it shows how to create plant in few steps. Read it if you want to create.

I finally decided to release version 0.6.

Everything should work much faster now. Thanks to performance boost you can now use much bigger genotypes and thanks to multithreading support, you don't need to wait for generation of genotype anymore.

User interface should be less complex. Everything is in lists, now. Number of sliders has been decreased from 11 to 2.

I also fixed some bugs, including annoying problem with PNG file produced by Render.

This is last version compatible with old ones.

I am going to add definable symbols soon. Currently plants are constructed from straight lines only ("F"), in future it will be also possible to add circles or triangles.

You can only define angles/sizes for the first four levels of plant, now. That's not enough and it will be redesigned.

I am also going to add randomization to LSystem. Currently randomization is implemented only by adding chaos to angles/sizes.

And last but not least - expect biomorphs soon.

OpenGL, animations and garden compositions will be added in further future. The biggest problem with OpenGL is not how to implement it, but how to easily install pyOpenGL on each system (read: Windows).

Please enjoy gallery of plants distributed with new release.

I put together collection of many L-System related links, enjoy.

New gallery has been created.

Michael Soibelman send me his Magic Garden work.

Please look what can be achieved with Gimp.

PS. I needed to convert png to jpg, because I have problem with big (in bytes) pictures in Drupal on SourceForge (only 16MB of memory for php is allowed).

Three steps installation for (Microsoft) Windows users:

1. Download Python,
   install it (ok, next, next, next, etc...)
2. Download wxPython,
   install it (ok, next, next, next, etc... it will take some time)
3. Download Magic Garden 0.6,
   unpack it (extract winzip), and that's all!

Three steps instalation for (GNU) Linux users:

1. You don't have to install Python, because each mature distribution has Python already installed.
2. You probably don't have to install wxPython, but in case you don't have it installed you should use your package manager. In my distribution (Arch Linux) it works this way:
   pacman -S wxpython
   And that's all you need to do.
3. Download Magic Garden 0.6,
   unpack it (tar zxvf magicgarden-0.6.tar.gz), and that's all!

Of course you need to perform steps 1 and 2 only once. You don't have to repeat them when upgrading to new version of Magic Garden.

Running:

• from windows explorer - double click on magic_garden.py
• from total commander or similiar file manager - move cursor on magic_garden.py and press ENTER

I just created gallery of plants distributed with Magic Garden 0.4.