Sorry for the radio silence, an update is certainly overdue!
Chaotica is still being developed, we had to put some time into Indigo Renderer 4, but the long-awaited Indigo 4 Beta has been released and Chaotica development is back in full swing. Indigo and Chaotica share a lot of code, and the upcoming GPU support for Chaotica uses technology originally developed for Indigo, so there's a lot of shared benefit.
A quick development update: the new GPU rendering engine is done, and the focus now is on making sure the user interface behaves as it should - a lot of the old code was removed and needed to be rewritten. We had a lot of grand ambitions for the big new release, many of them were developed almost to completion, however the 90/10 rule (the last 10% takes at least as long as the first 90%) came into full force and we're not going to try to release eveything at once anymore, instead getting the basic version out the door ASAP, with several smaller updates behind it. Lesson learnt :)
Closed beta testing is expected to begin Soon (TM), and there has been limited successful testing among some Chaotica artists already.
In other news, the forum is working again, and I'll be watching it regularly: https://www.chaoticafractals.com/forum/
Users who prefer not to use Facebook, where the bulk of the community hangs out at the moment, are most welcome to post there.
There's also a new Discord server for chatting about fractals (not just Chaotica, but probably mostly populated by Chaotica artists), in case anyone is keen. You can join it here: https://discord.gg/zEbYqtp
Finally, I'd like to thank everyone in the Chaotica community for your support - there has been an amazing amount of great artwork produced, it seems like fractals are becoming increasingly used everywhere, and I'd like to write some special feature posts about this. Stay tuned!