Reviving the old Kai's Power Tools plugins for Photoshop (one more time)

I was telling my son (a budding graphics programmer), you know, I wrote a ray marcher for Kai's Power Tools 5 back in 1998. (KPT was our collection of plugins for Photoshop back in the day.) These plugins, however, are more than twice my son's age.

This needed a demo! KPT5 is somewhat old now, and you might wonder if it still runs. Well, you can, but you need an older 32-bit version of Photoshop (Photoshop CS6 still has a 32-bit version), and it only works on Windows, not modern macOS. But it doesn't work right out of the box.

Installing the usual way, you'll get a "file not found" when trying to run KPT5 on Windows 11, and after I thought about it, well it's probably a DLL inside the plugin that failed to load. This is because the DLL load rules changed at some point (like XP SP2 in 2004?), and these plugins tried to link even more DLLs from weird folders, and this isn't allowed anymore. These days, Windows will only link files directly next to Photoshop.exe, or ones from the PATH...oh!

So the easy fix is to add the plugin folder (Photoshop/Plug-ins/KPT5) to your system PATH, and it works right away. You might have to swap the PATH around a bit when there are overlapping DLLs (e.g., KPT6 uses newer shared DLLs than KPT5, but they have the same name).

Anyway, here's some proof that this 4-D Julia set could be rendered even in 1998 before there were GPUs everywhere. I used my Ryzen 9 9900x (but only one core) to do it:

Also here's what that interface looked like - I was pretty proud of the procedural panels, which do all the roundrects and shadows on the fly (no precomputation or 9-slice bitmaps)