Welcome to Fractal Forums

Howdy,

As this is my first post, I'll do a quick intro then get to the meat of the question.  I'm Phil, and I've been generating fractals off and on since MendelBlitz on my A500 up until now, and find myself drawn to Mandelbulber and MDZ.  My question revolves around MDZ:

How does one calculate the magnification level of the zoom? 

I've been poking around for a bit on the 'net and am finding that I guess I just don't know how to phrase the question so that the internet deities know what to tell me.  I apologize if this seems a bit brain dead or is an easy thing to find...I just find myself 15 zooms in and think, hmmm...how far in am I and wonder if it's just some simple math that I just haven't stumbled upon.

Anyway, thanks in advance for any knowledge that can be shared.

Phil

Hello and welcome to the forum!


And I apologize if this seems a bit brain dead or is an easy thing to find, ...  but - What is MDZ?

I don't know that program!

Sorry...wandered into "assume they know what you're talking about mode," right off the hop.

MDZ == Mandelbrot Deep Zoom, currently using v0.0.6.

No problem...

I'll see if I can find the program, and have a look   O0

That'll work.  Here's its happy place:  http://www.jwm-art.net/mdz/

And, thanks for the welcome -- I've lurked far too long!

Maybe it would be more precise to ask if determining the magnification level was a factor of the Xmin, Xmax and Ymax that are provided in the output logs of the program.  For example:

Is that helpful at all?  I'm thinking the answer is sitting in front of me, but I'm looking at it from the wrong angle...

I can't turn the numbers you posted into a zoom depth, nor it seems can I run MDZ (no linux   :( ).

But hopefully someone else here can help!

Good luck with it.

I kind of figured with the numbers, but it was worth a shot, right?   Maybe the next version will have some gauge for reckoning mag/zoom factor.  Maybe some of the math gurus on here, know.   I only know enough about the numbers to be dangerous.

If you want to be bold, you can install VirtualBox and some happy flavor of linux so you can run it -- I recommend the program a lot.  The mag thing is my only kibitz.  Well, that and now having the ability to zoom in so far, I feel the need to do so, but that's not the program's fault.

Peace

I plan to install Linux soon, today hopefully.  I will check that out.  If you know of any other cool Linux programs, please let me know.

you can calculate your zooming values, by subtracting xmin/xmax, use the absolute value, this is the visible area,
and this is basically your zoom value, now consider a transformation wich maps 1 to this range, e.g. by multipling with that value
the 0's in the scale factor are the rough e^xx notation values, they just give you the amount of zeroes to put in before the numbers ;)

@Thunderwave -- I heartily recommend it, as I have found that with a few exceptions, everything *I* want/need to do, I can do natively and that which I can't, for the most part, WINE helps bridge the gap.  Now, anything that requires the newer .Net framework things get dicey and that's where I would recommend a VirtualBox VM of WindowsXP or 7.  I've been running that setup for ~7 months, now, and it has actually helped me with programming as the apps I've been working on in .NET I've been able to bring into Mono C# with little effort.  At any rate, as far as programs,

Gimp is, of course, your friend.  It's not PhotoShop, but it's more than usable (I've used it since it was a 0.x program and still get lost...by the same token, I've used PhotoShop since v1.2 and get lost in it, a lot, too...).  For non-linear editing of your anims, I would definitely recommend KDEnLive.  I've been using it for the past few weeks and found that it only *really* gets crabby when you import 5000 frames at a time.  I know you do music, so I would also recommend Audacity.  It's the only program I've found (Windows or otherwise) that can fine-tune it's latency timings to a point to allow me to do multitrack recording with my DigiTech RP350 via USB. 

Now, for the nitty gritty:  MDZ is fantastic.  It's interface is a little lean, but what it lacks in UI refinement it makes up in the ability to throw 1024+ bits of arbitrary precision at your zoom.  From there, the old standbys are Fraqtive, Xaos and GnoFract4D -- which has the added bonus of having maps you can use in MDZ! -- and they're all solid.  My only kibitz with those three is that when it comes to deep zooms, you get to "um, no." after about 14 zooms, usually, somewhere around 10^12.  For the 3D side, I *really* like Mandelbulber.  My brain hasn't figured out how to do that anim side, yet, but the stills are gorgeous and it's interface is pretty simple to use AND the palette tool is really slick as you can load a palette from another image. VERY cool.  Of course, I've also discovered that some images will blow it up, but you know...

Wine is your friend and make sure you get the latest build.  It handles UF5, Apophysis and ChaosPro 4 very well.  Mandelbulb3D also works like a champ under WINE.  I fact, all of my successful anims have come out of it.

Hope that helps and I hope your installation went painlessly.  What distro did you decide upon?

@Trifox -- cool, thanks.  Of course, now my right-brained self is looking at that saying, "well, that makes sense," and then turning itself off. :)  I'll mess with that and see what I can come up with.  I may bounce a practice one up here just to make sure that something didn't get translated in my brain improperly.  The instructions seem simple enough, so I don't forsee that being too much of a problem.  We shall see.  Thanks,  again!

Unfortunately, the installer doesn't recognize the cd device.  I tried to change it and I lost connection to the device, while changing it I accidentally removed the RAID1 device and then I lost RAID.  I am now reinstalling everything and building RAID again.  Then I'm back to trying to figure out how to install Ubuntu, next by USB.

I want to install Ubuntu 10.10.  My Non-GUI friend said it was the best.
I'm excited to try all of those plus there's a whole art/video/music Ubuntu Suite.  That looks awesome!!! :D

Thanks for the list!  I already use Gimp and Audacity.

@Thunderwave -- how did it go?  Were you able to get up and running?  I run LinuxMint mainly because it takes Ubuntu -- in my case 10.04 -- and makes it less crabby during the installation.  It installs from a live CD so it *shouldn't* wig out when it comes to devices since it has to detect in order to boot.  Hopefully, all's on the up and up and you're up and running.

@Trifox -- and this is why I shouldn't try math prior to coffee...  In looking at your explanation, again -- and you'll have to pardon my mental block, here (there are reasons I was a psych major...really) -- would I be subtracting the min FROM the max or vice versa?  My brain says the former, but it also tried to get away with using Kruskal's algorithm to solve a finite math node theory problem...  As an example of what I'm thinking to see what it should be:
xmin -7.7807584720532449411643818e-1
xmax -7.7807584720530722648514244e-1
gives me
abs(-7.7807584720530722648514244e-1 − -7.7807584720532449411643818e-1)
which yields a result of
1.726763129574E-14
If I go the other way, it looks like, of course:
abs(-7.7807584720532449411643818e-1 − -7.7807584720530722648514244e-1)
which gives us
1.726763129574E-14
*blink*
From this, it would seem to be a zoom factor of 0.000000000000001726763129574 because of the negative ee value, so I'm thinking that either I'm missing something (entirely possible...) or, well, I'm missing something, since most zoom factors I see are listed in the positive exponent range.  I feel a bit like Dr. Venkmen being scolded by Dr. Stanz, "You never studied..."   :embarrass:
Thanks, in advance, for any insight. 

Phil

@kon
the order is arbitrary if you you use absolute values ;), and i wrote to use absolute values :D

abs(a-b)=abs(b-a)

OK - I think I've got it!  :embarrass:  Thanks for your patience.  Of course, I could throw some "gah!" in there and ask about programs like UF that use left and right (and center) rather than x and y and real and imaginary...thankfully, though, UF does the voodoo for me.

@kon16ov

I have struggled installing Ubuntu.
Apparently I can't install it with RAID on both OS.
They can't share a RAID Drive and I can't get rid of RAID.

So no luck.  I would get rid of Windows but I need it for work.
I will try on a different PC, when I have one.  :)

@Thunderwave:

I am sorry to hear that Ubuntu isn't playing nicely.  I can't say that I've dealt much w/RAID - umpteen drives, yes.  RAID, no.  And I hear you about work...I ended up waxing Win7 in favor of LinuxMint and putting Win7 in a VM since .Net 2.0 and WINE aren't exactly on speaking terms, yet, and there was code to write (but it's hard to write code when your system, despite 2 antivir packages and 2 malware "killers," goes down in a ball of "you can't run any executables" flames).  You might be able to do the opposite, for the time being, with Ubuntu in a VM.  And I am pleased that Fractal eXtreme runs with WINE, too.  Although, it does raise a philosophical question: can one have too many fractal generation programs?  Probably not...right?  ;D

Hopefully, your next go-'round will give better results.

Going back on topic, so it's agreed that the result of is the zoom factor?

I've started work on the version 0.0.7 of MDZ and hopefully the new release will include the possibility to view the coordinates and zoom factor - but I'm yet to implement that yet. Currently working on some stuff with settings loading/saving so the user can choose which parts of a settings file to load (for example to only the colour-palette without clobbering the current fractal settings).

Sounds very cool -- looking forward to it.  I like the idea of palette loading separate from the current fractal.  Now would that include "speed" and cycle "locations," as well?

Hi jwm-art!

I had Ubuntu installed and downloaded MDZ, but I was unable to install it and also my Ubuntu failed due to partition magic and windows, so I lost Ubuntu, but I am close to getting it back.

How can I install MDZ, and what libraries are needed to install it and is there a tutorial somewhere on how to install using command lines?  I have looked but they are so beyond me.  I need a step by step tutorial.  

Currently, it does save the "speed" which in MDZ parlance is "colour-scaling".

Cycle locations are not saved... in that no offset or anything remotely pertaining to such is stored. In other words, you cycle the palette you change the palette. A cycled palette is a different file to an non-cycled palette (unless the cycled palette has been cycled exactly full circle).

BTW, MDZ saves palette data in the same format as Fractint's colour maps. For example MDZ saves the palette data like so:


All you need do is load the MDZ file into a text editor and copy and paste the palette data into another file - just make sure to remove the first two lines (ie the palette and data lines).

HTH,
James.

The development libs you'll need are:
libpng, mpfr, and the gtk2 development files (the development packages have -dev on the end of their names).

If you're new to Linux and the command line, instead of using apt-get, you might try aptitude (I know Debian has it, not sure about Ubuntu) which I learnt before installing packages from the command line. Remember to sudo aptitude to get permission to install stuff. Within aptitude use / to search for a package, n to find the next search result, + to mark a package for install, and g to go to install the packages, then g again to confirm (after checking the dependencies and suggestions ;-)

Once you have MDZ downloaded.


Don't worry if the build fails here it's likely a dependency is not installed. Take note of the errors - scroll through all the spurious crap and try to find no-such-file-or-directory errors. Take a note of the missing file/path so that you can try and search for something within aptitude which looks likely to provide it (or do a google search for the error). Failing that, just let me know the problem and I'll try and help :-)

Finally once it's built without errors (warnings are ok):


And it's good to go.

I will make a new topic under linux software.