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>> Holy crap! FractInt is still maintained! There goes today's hope of
>> doing actual work.
>
> Not well maintained, though.
No, there is that.
Then again, most of the recent questions on the FractInt mailing list
are "how do I make FractInt run under Windows XP?" or "how do I make an
MS-DOS boot disk?"
It's a powerful little program, for sure, but I fear it has been
somewhat left behind by now...
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Invisible wrote:
> It's a powerful little program, for sure, but I fear it has been
> somewhat left behind by now...
Is it open source? It would seem to be the kind of thing that isn't hard to
keep up to date, at least at the core.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Serving Suggestion:
"Don't serve this any more. It's awful."
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Invisible <voi### [at] dev null> wrote:
> >> Holy crap! FractInt is still maintained! There goes today's hope of
> >> doing actual work.
> >
> > Not well maintained, though.
> No, there is that.
> Then again, most of the recent questions on the FractInt mailing list
> are "how do I make FractInt run under Windows XP?" or "how do I make an
> MS-DOS boot disk?"
> It's a powerful little program, for sure, but I fear it has been
> somewhat left behind by now...
I would recommend XaoS. It might have all the features of fractint, but
most fractals can be zoomed in real-time, which makes it cool.
--
- Warp
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On Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:54:16 +0200, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> >> Holy crap! FractInt is still maintained! There goes today's hope of
>> >> doing actual work.
>> >
>> > Not well maintained, though.
>
>> No, there is that.
>
>> Then again, most of the recent questions on the FractInt mailing list
>> are "how do I make FractInt run under Windows XP?" or "how do I make an
>> MS-DOS boot disk?"
>
>> It's a powerful little program, for sure, but I fear it has been
>> somewhat left behind by now...
>
> I would recommend XaoS. It might have all the features of fractint, but
> most fractals can be zoomed in real-time, which makes it cool.
>
I'd love to see a screensaver like that =)
-Nekar Xenos-
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>> It's a powerful little program, for sure, but I fear it has been
>> somewhat left behind by now...
>
> Is it open source? It would seem to be the kind of thing that isn't hard
> to keep up to date, at least at the core.
Yeah, the source code is completely open.
On the other hand, the entire UI is text-mode fun and games using BIOS
calls, and the entire graphical engine revolves around either calling
the BIOS or directly poking magic numbers into hardware registers.
(Wanna guess why it doesn't work under Windows any more?)
On top of that, the entire program fundamentally assumes you're working
with 6 bits per channel and palette graphics. These assumptions are not
easy to change. (E.g., all of the external file formats describe colours
as triples of integers between 0 and 63.)
Really, it would be simpler and quicker to just start again. And indeed
many modern fractal programs understand FractInt parameter files as a
sort of de facto data standard. (Although none of them have the layers
upon layers of backwards compatibility that FractInt itself has, and
AFAIK none of them can read the data chunks that FractInt embeds in the
GIF files it writes.)
Then again, I'm not really aware of any freeware program that has quite
the range of scope that FractInt has. Most of them seem to plot just one
kind of fractal, and that's it...
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On 08/11/2010 05:54 PM, Warp wrote:
> I would recommend XaoS. It might have all the features of fractint, but
> most fractals can be zoomed in real-time, which makes it cool.
On the other hand, it seems to be comparatively slow. And it doesn't
have arbitrary precision, so you can only zoom in so far. (Then again,
FractInt's arbitrary precision mode makes continental drift look fast,
so...)
It also has an annoying habit of sometimes "forgetting" to finish
rendering an image. Like, when you zoom in it's all blocks, and
gradually the resolution increases. But sometimes, it stops increasing
before it's finished.
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On 08/11/2010 05:54 PM, Warp wrote:
> > I would recommend XaoS. It might have all the features of fractint, but
> > most fractals can be zoomed in real-time, which makes it cool.
> On the other hand, it seems to be comparatively slow.
Comparatively slow? You can use XaoS to zoom into the Mandelbrot set
(and other fractals) in real-time. Fractint isn't that good.
> (Then again,
> FractInt's arbitrary precision mode makes continental drift look fast,
> so...)
Btw, "continental drift" is an obsolete theory. "Plate tectonics" is the
currently accepted one.
(Of course you are talking figuratively, but I couldn't help but nitpick.)
--
- Warp
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>>> I would recommend XaoS. It might have all the features of fractint, but
>>> most fractals can be zoomed in real-time, which makes it cool.
>
>> On the other hand, it seems to be comparatively slow.
>
> Comparatively slow? You can use XaoS to zoom into the Mandelbrot set
> (and other fractals) in real-time. Fractint isn't that good.
FractInt seems to render things quite a bit faster than Xaos. I haven't
actually measured it, it just seems more responsive. And you don't need
to zoom in very far before you have to frequently stop zooming and let
Xaos catch up with redrawing the image, so you can see where to go next.
(It probably doesn't help that Xaos uses boundary-trace to draw the
image in certain instances, and the display updates very, very
infrequently while it does this. With FractInt, you can see what's
happening while it does this. It's kind of mesmerising, actually...)
> Btw, "continental drift" is an obsolete theory. "Plate tectonics" is the
> currently accepted one.
It's news to me that continental drift isn't the same thing as plate
tectonics...
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Btw, "continental drift" is an obsolete theory. "Plate tectonics" is the
> > currently accepted one.
> It's news to me that continental drift isn't the same thing as plate
> tectonics...
Wikipedia is your friend.
--
- Warp
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