EVOLVOTRON(1)

🌸 EVOLVOTRON 🌸

okay bestie, welcome to evolvotron(1) — it's in section 1 of the manual, and it's literally the most iconic generative art situation you're ever gonna meet. ✨

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✨ NAME ✨

evolvotron — Creates generative art by an interactive evolutionary process. 💅

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

evolvotron [Qt options] [options]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

evolvotron is interactive "generative art" software that evolves images/textures/patterns through an iterative process of random mutation and user-selection driven evolution. Like, literally evolution but make it art. 🧚

Basically it displays a grid of random images; you click on one you like and the rest of the grid is refilled with variants of the one you picked. That's it. That's the whole vibe. You're the selection pressure. Darwin could never. 👑

real talk though: this man page describes only the command line options. A more complete manual fully describing usage via the application's GUI is accessible from the application's "Help" menu once it is running. so like, go look there for the GUI tea 🫖

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🎀 GENERAL OPTIONS 🎀

• -a, --autocool — Enable autocooling by default. set it and forget it, queen 💅
• -F, --fullscreen — Start in "fullscreen" mode (window manager permitting). [Press "Esc" key to revert to normal windowed mode]. main character energy, full screen, no distractions ✨
• -g, --grid colsxrows — Number of columns in image display grid (defaults to 5x6).
• -h, --help — Display a summary of command-line options and exit. the classic "help me bestie" move 🫶
• -j, --jitter — Enable sample jittering.
• -m, --multisample multisample — Enables antialiased rendering. Valid values are 1,2,3,4. This specifies the size of the sub-pixel sampling grid, so 1 provides the default one-sample-per-pixel behaviour, while 4 provides 16 samples per pixel on a 4x4 grid. smooth like butter no cap 🧈
• -M, --menuhide — Start with menu and status bars suppressed. [Press "Esc" key to display them]. minimalist era 🌸
• -p, -spheremap — Create spheremaps instead of planar textures. NB The middle-mouse adjustments will not behave as expected in this mode. so like, be aware bestie 😭
• -S, --startup filename — Specify a function file to be loaded on startup. This option can be used multiple times, and any positional arguments will also be interpreted as such. Loaded functions are placed on the grid from left to right, top to bottom; if multiple functions in excess of what is needed to fill the grid cells are provided, the extras will be ignored. If the grid is not fully filled with startup functions, the remaining cells are filled at random normally. Note that resetting the application will reload the specified function files again. Also note that using this option multiple times has the potential to generate a lot of loading error dialogs if e.g the path to all the files is wrong. 🙈 (fr fr, double-check those paths)
• -U, --shuffle — Use in conjunction with -S / --startup options, randomly shuffles the order the specified startup images are displayed in. A fresh shuffle will be also be used when the application is reset. 🔀

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🌈 ANIMATION OPTIONS 🌈

• -f, --frames frames — Number of frames to animate (defaults to 1 i.e no animaton)
• -l, --linear — Vary z linearly with time rather than sinusoidally over animation period.
• -s, --fps framerate — Specify rate at which animations are displayed (as an integer number of frames per second). Defaults to 8.

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🔥 POWER-USER / DEBUG OPTIONS 🔥

• -D, --debug — Debug mode. Currently simply sets function weightings so virtually all function nodes are FunctionNoiseOneChannel. This is really only useful to developers in conjunction with the -F/-u options.
• -E, --enlarement-threadpool — Use a separate thread pool for computing enlargements. Using this option ensures computation of enlargements continue to make some progress even while the main grid is being actively worked on. However, this will be at the expense of main grid rendering performance. Without this option, enlargements' final high-resolution renderings are invariably lower priority than computation for images in the main grid. See also the -N option to control the priority of threads in this pool. it's giving multitasking 💅
• -n, --nice niceness — Niceness of compute threads relative to the main application thread (defaults to 4).
• -N, --Nice niceness — Niceness (relative to the main application thread) of compute threads dealing with enlargements (defaults to 8). Only effective in conjunction with a separate enlargement threadool (--E option). (yes bestie, capital N and lowercase n are two whole different options, don't mix them up 😭)
• QtOptions — The Qt GUI system recognizes an number of additional options (for example, standard X11 things like -geometry <width>x<height>; consult the Qt documentation for more information). Note that these don't use the Gnu "double minus" option style used for evolvotron options.
• -t, --threads threads — Number of compute threads in a thread pool (defaults to number of CPUs) 👑
• -u, --unwrapped — Use with the -F option to stop the specified function from being wrapped by a random colouring and spatial transform node.
• -v, --verbose — Verbose mode. Probably most useful for getting a list of supported function names for use with the --F option. it's giving "tell me everything" 🗣️
• -x, --favourite functionname — Force a specific function type to be used at the top level of all new image function trees (wrapped by random colour and spatial transforms, unless the --unwrapped option is also specified). This can also be controlled from the "Favourite" dialog.

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🌟 EXAMPLES 🌟

evolvotron -F FunctionSpiralLinear

evolvotron -F FunctionKaleidoscope -u

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

evolvotron was written by Tim Day (www.timday.com) and is released under the conditions of the GNU General Public License. For further details see the application's "About" dialog (accessible from the "Help" menu), or the file LICENSE supplied with the source code.

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🫶 SEE ALSO 🫶

evolvotron_mutate(1), evolvotron_render(1)

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okay that's the whole page, you're so welcome 💖 this was brought to you by www.timday.com, dated 16 Oct 2009, from the EVOLVOTRON(1) manual — periodt. ✨🎀🦋