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I'm making another fractal rendering program but I'm still really new to it and I need a little help. I'm using visual studio express 2010 and the program I'm making is going to end up quite similar to Fractal eXtreme except completely freeware and with a few extra features.

I've got the math part down and the UI but there's a few thing I'm still having problems with.

Firstly and most importantly, I can't for the life of me seem to get it to draw individual pixels (also a bit of help with getting the program to use custom pallets would be good.)

Also I'd like it to be able to write files (avi and either bmp, gif or jpg.)

Any help you can give would be great and naturally I'll post the completed program here for free.

.NET? GDI or GDI+ - I would guess at - but I reckon it might be a tad slow.
I guess DirectX would be the way to go but I know nothing about that.
You could try and make it cross-platform and use SDL - that way I could run it under linux!

At the moment I'm making it for window but I might make it cross platform at some point. I'm using VB and .net since basic is the only language I understand at the moment. Unless using something different would drasically speed up rendering I'm going to keep it that way.

Sounds like you need direct pixel access to the bitmap. I'm not sure how to do this in VB, but a quick Google search brought up this:

http://www.bobpowell.net/lockingbits.htm (http://www.bobpowell.net/lockingbits.htm)

I'm writing a program similar to Fractal eXtreme but in Qt. I will be releasing it as Open Source software. Progress is slow due to health problems but I hope to release the first version within the next two or three months.

Hope this helps!