What's new in 1.80/1.801?
Version 1.80/1.801 is a very exciting upgrade to Fractal eXtreme, and it's free! Antialiased fractals, antialiased zoom movies, mouse wheel scrolling, and the annoying copy protection scheme has been replaced with a simple serial number.
- We have a new purchasing and licensing system. With the bankruptcy of Release Software it became necessary to come up with an alternative. We have chosen DigiBuy and are pleased that this new system avoids locking a Fractal eXtreme license to a particular machine. If you purchased Fractal eXtreme prior to November 2001, contact Cygnus Software with proof of purchase information (original license number or contact information for looking up in our database) to get your personal registration code that will allow you to use version 1.801.
- Antialiased fractals - now it's trivial to get rid of the distracting jaggies and see photographic quality fractal images. Antialiased fractal images are available in the regular fractal windows, through the new Antialiasing setting in Advanced Settings, or by selecting Antialiased from the View menu. Antialiased fractals take longer to render, but are perfect for printing or any other time you want maximum quality.
Antialiasing can also be used when creating zoom movies. This makes the animated zooming of the Zoom Movie Player silky smooth, with no jumping visible even at very slow playback speeds. Antialiased zoom movies played back using the OpenGL option of the Zoom Movie player look absolutely perfect - better than DVD quality!
Even colour cycling works on antialiased images - although this requires a fast computer to work well.
- Mouse wheel scrolling is the fastest and most fun way to explore fractals. You will find yourself zooming deeper and more easily than ever before. Try it!
- Image comments let you label your images with a description, your name, a copyright notice - whatever you want.
- Grid lines give you another way to zoom in on - or find - significant locations at simple coordinates, like (0,1), (-2,0), (-.75,0), (.25,0), (-1.75,0), or the 0.25 radius circle at (0,-1).
- Antialiased images are saved with an alpha channel that marks the Mandelbrot set interior as transparent, for amusing image compositions.
- The zooming speed, and the control of zooming speed, now works properly on fast machines - previously the zooms would happen instantaneously on fast machines.
- The Fractal Size window has been improved and expanded.