Release Notes and Plans

Version 2.0 of Fractal eXtreme is a significant rewrite. Fractal eXtreme may not look dramatically different, but there are a lot of changes under the hood.

• Due to a bug in MFC 7.1, double-clicking on .fx files would not reliably open them in Fractal eXtreme. This also affected the 'Explore from Here' button in the zoom movie player.
• The interactive rotating of antialiased images was completely broken.
• The 'acceleration' value in the colour mapping dialog was always being displayed as zero.

• New feature: When using the colour mapping speed feature to spread out the palette entries you can now interpolate colours to give smoother gradients and to allow creating images with thousands of colours. This option only works when antialiasing is enabled.
• Optimization: Fractal eXtreme will now automatically detect if you have an SSE2 capable CPU (such as a Pentium 4) and will use SSE2 instructions for better performance. The speedup varies between 0% and 130%!!
• Optimization reminder: If you have a Hyper-threading capable processor (two hardware threads on one processor) or multiple processors Fractal eXtreme will automatically make use of it the extra computing power. Fractal eXtreme can run an arbitrary number of computation threads to fully utilize your computer's abilities. This is not a new feature, but it is newly relevant now that more people are running multi-processor capable operating systems such as Windows XP.
• Bug fix: There was a bug in the zoom movie player that would sometimes cause a crash when creating an AVI from a zoom movie.
• Bug fix: An error in the BMP saving code caused antialiased images (24-bit images) to not be loaded by some graphics programs.
• Bug fix: Fixed an overflow bug in the grid display code
• Bug fix: Fixed a display bug for coordinates between 1000.0 and 1001.0
• Bug fix: Fixed an incorrect shortcut in the undo menu - the wrong keyboard shortcut was listed.

Even colour cycling now works on antialiased images - although this requires a fast computer to work well.

Improved plug-ins

The plug-ins have all been updated again, speeding up the deep zoom code some more.

Bug fixes

Several bugs related to opening new fractals and loading fractals from disk were corrected, along with many other miscellaneous bug fixes and small improvements.

Zoom movies

Zoom movies can now start at any arbitrary zoom level. This means that you can create a zoom movie that goes from 990 zooms to 1050 zooms - a surprisingly useful thing. Or, it means you can start your zoom movies at negative ten zooms, so that the screen starts blank, and the Mandelbrot set then zooms in. This option is only available if the Advanced flag in the preferences dialog is checked.

Auto-explore auto-save

Fractal eXtreme's auto-explorer can now find hundreds of interesting locations for you while you sleep. Turn on Autosave and tell Fractal eXtreme what zoom level to save at, and you'll have a disk full of potential masterpieces. Then you can use the Favourite Spots window to identify the promising ones, colour them with the Colour Palette, and post your very on fractals of the hour.

Maximum iterations

The maximum max-iterations has been increased to five hundred million.

Faster feedback

Partially calculated sections of fractal are now updated more frequently when calculating, for much faster feedback on slow to calculate fractals. To further ensure that the important areas are being calculated first, fractals are now calculated in a spiral from the center when in deep-zoom mode.

Version 1.01c was an upgrade to the Fractal eXtreme movie player.

The most requested feature for the zoom movie player was a way of converting the zoom movies to AVI format. This is tremendously useful for using zoom movies with video editing software, or with other hardware and software. Most people don't need this feature, but if you need it - you really need it. Zoom movies can now be converted to AVI files at any resolution and any number of frames.

Many convenience features were added to the movie player, such as:

• Improved and extended keyboard shortcuts
• A menu option to optionally double the playback window size
• An option for preserving the playback speed and double size flag.

Resource leak when loading images

Under Windows 95, Fractal eXtreme 1.0 was gradually using up system resources every time an image was loaded. This was particularly noticeable with the favourites dialog. This may have been a bug in Windows 95, but we fixed it anyway.

Resource has been modified

On some machines, running an unregistered copy of Fractal eXtreme would produce the message "A resource has been modified. You must purchase PRODUCTNAME to continue." Unfortunately, after displaying this message Fractal eXtreme would exit without allowing you to purchase it! The message still appears on some machines due to a problem with SalesAgent, but Fractal eXtreme now allows you to proceed, either to continue the evaluation or to purchase Fractal eXtreme. Purchasing Fractal eXtreme makes the problem go away entirely.

Partially calculated images

To allow resumption of partially done calculations, Fractal eXtreme always saves iteration data for partially calculated images. At least, it was supposed to. This feature was accidentally left out of Fractal eXtreme 1.0. Fixed.

Deep-zoom calcs spedup

Fractal eXtreme's deep-zoom Mandelbrot calcs were sped up approximately 15% for the 1.01 release. This was inspired by a large amount of exploration we were doing at around eleven hundred zooms.

MandN Arbitrary Exponent Julias

MandN Arbitrary Exponent Julias had the reflection type set incorrectly causing rather bizarre intermixings of the image data from above and below the x-axis. This rendered the results rather non-deterministic. Fixed. Check out the Julias with an exponent of 1.5 - very cool!

Preventing excessive zooms

Fractal eXtreme 1.0 would let the MandN, Newton and some other plug-ins zoom in to fifty three zooms. Unfortunately this is well beyond the accuracy that these plug-ins can actually handle. The limit is now set to a more realistic level, to avoid problems with image breakdown.

Coalescing of Julia undo events

Changing the seed for a Julia fractal is an undoable event in Fractal eXtreme (although you do have to remember to undo it from the Julia window, not from the Mandelbrot window where the seed is typically set). However in Fractal eXtreme 1.0 all Julia seed undo events were coalesced, making this feature less useful. Now each individual click-drag-release is stored as a separate undo event.

Windows 95 mouse run-on

Under Windows 95 (but not under Windows NT) it is possible to get "mouse run-on". If you are dragging around a large object, like a large fractal image, and you have a key pressed down, the auto-repeat events from the keyboard interfere with the automatic coalescing of adjacent mouse move events - meaning that programs can get way behind, and may continue processing mouse moves long after you release the mouse. This is probably a bug in Windows 95, but we fixed it anyway!

However, inevitably, some bugs and limitations in Fractal eXtreme 1.0 have been found. Therefore, Cygnus Software is pleased to announce the release of:

Multi-machine rendering

Multi-core rendering is a great time saver but for those people who have multiple machines lying around it would be great to be able to harness all that computing power for faster rendering. Maybe. Some day.

Rendering options

Rendering options such as biomorph, stalks, continuous potential and bubbles are high on our list of features to add. We hope to add these in via a new plug-in interface so that as well as being able to add new fractal equations, our users will also be able to add new rendering methods.

Better fractint compatibility

Many fractal enthusiasts have spent years using FractInt and are unwilling to give up the images and formulas which they have created with FractInt. Therefore we plan to add some level of support to make it easier to move fractal coordinates and formulae between FractInt and Fractal eXtreme.

More formulae

We have already released several more Fractal eXtreme formulae, and have dramatically enhanced the existing formulae, to speed them up and allow zooming to virtually unlimited levels. We plan to continue these efforts to give our customers the greatest possible choice in their fractal explorations. One of these new plug-ins will almost certainly be a plug-in that allows you to type in an arbitrary formula.

Mapping options

There is no reason why we have to draw the complex plane on the computer monitor as a simple rectangular plane. We already allow rotation, and there are lots of other distortions that could allow you, the fractal artist, more freedom in presenting your fractal finds. Shearing, inverting, twirling - the possibilities are endless. When you combine these planned mapping options, with the planned rendering options, with the existing palette and palette mapping options, and the existing fractal type options, you have an endless universe of possibilities.

Using the thumbsticks on an Xbox 360 controller to zoom and pan around the Mandelbrot set can be a stunning and intuitive way to zoom through fractals. Coming soon...