new set as complex as mandelbrot?

[Jules Ruis]

If you wish to create and use your own formular and do other experiments then also the Fractal Imaginator (Fi) is a very good program.

See: http://www.storesonline.com/site/1265859/product/205-5160684

[rloldershaw]

I'm not very good at math, but isn't it "formula", with no r on the end?  Or have you coined a new word: "formular" with a special application?

With apologies,
Rob

[Jules Ruis]

Dear Rob,

I am Dutch, so my English language is full of errors. You are completely right: 'Formula' is the correct word.

Thanks.
Jules.

[woodlands]

thanks for the info.  i coded back then in C+, but have gotten out of it, and embarased to say that i code in Access basic for database applications mainly, and basic is pretty lousy for math applications.  Let me try some of these tools, see if they can help me explore

[Nahee_Enterprises]

John (woodlands) wrote:
>
>    thanks for the info.   ......
>    Let me try some of these tools, see if they can help me explore

You are more than welcome!!  If you need specific assistance with any of the fractal applications you decide to try out, then either post a message here to get help from somebody or send me a private email.

>
>    i coded back then in C+, but have gotten out of it,
>    and embarased to say that i code in Access basic
>    for database applications mainly, and basic is pretty
>    lousy for math applications.

VBA can do quite a bit within the Microsoft Office products.  I have coded hundreds of thousands of lines of code for not only Access, but Excel, Word, Outlook, etc...  But none of those is the correct development environment for creating fractal applications.

You should think about acquiring Visual Studio so that you can work with both C and Basic.  Both of them will allow you to create whatever you want in the way of a fractal app.  Microsoft's Basic can do many things now that it never could before and is very much compatible (as far as functionality is concerned) with C+ and C#.

[woodlands]

compatible yes, but performance?  I remember watching fractals draw dot by dot until i moved to C+, and got satisfactory performance  (on a 386 remember  

actually isnt there some story about the orignal mandelbrot guy (benoit ole bean himself) waiting so long for the next set to show up that he tried to calculate the percent differnce between sizes or something, and came up with a constant or  some such?  4.3 or somthing?

[Nahee_Enterprises]

John (woodlands) wrote:
>
>    compatible yes, but performance?  I remember
>    watching fractals draw dot by dot until i moved
>    to C+, and got satisfactory performance....

Back then, C was quite a bit faster, but these days, Basic has gotten much better and C has become a bit slower in my opinion.  I think it is because Microsoft keeps adding so much to C (like they do the Office Suite) that it is becoming bloat-ware.

But if you really want a lot of speed in execution, then you should really program in Assembler.

[lycium]

Back then, C was quite a bit faster, but these days, Basic has gotten much better and C has become a bit slower in my opinion.  I think it is because Microsoft keeps adding so much to C (like they do the Office Suite) that it is becoming bloat-ware.

But if you really want a lot of speed in execution, then you should really program in Assembler.

on the contrary, c/c++ speed has just been getting better and better over the years (more features doesn't mean anything gets slower unless the slow ones are actually used, obviously), and basic still lags behind even delphi and is on par with java for some types of computation last time i checked.

what's more, it's almost impossible to beat a good c/c++ compiler these days with assembler programming; you have to have an incredibly directed attack in mind (eg very specific simd optimisation plans), spend hours and hours and hours fine tuning it to a specific architecture, and even then you'd still be very lucky to beat it. i used to program optimised triangle rasterisers in x86 assembler back in the (mode 13) day, and stopped after things got crazy with the pentium2. out-of-order cpu architectures mean you can never really know when stuff gets executed, it's all optimised internally anyway. i know totally incredible asm programmers who've been doing it for decades who still only manage par with gcc 4.2, doing sse code in a very restricted context.

the other thing is that with the current trend towards parallelism you really don't want to be writing threading code in assembler. my dualcore amd runs at 2.5ghz (5ghz effectively) pretty much day and night computing fractals, and i don't think a 2x speed improvement with asm over c++ will ever be found again...

to wit, i just rendered a 12288x8192 "julius ruis" set with 256 samples per pixel in under a minute with really casual code, about 30 minutes from start to finish including the (much more subtle) image-to-palette routine: http://www.fractographer.com/propaganda/tlset.png (warning, that image is huge in dimensions and filesize: 12.3mb)

[woodlands]

all that hard core programmingspeak makes me afraid, very afraid

[Nahee_Enterprises]

John (woodlands) wrote:
>
>    all that hard core programmingspeak makes me
>    afraid, very afraid 
>
>    Does anyone have access or know of how i can get
>    access to plug and play fractal programming?   .....
>    (when i did play with fractals, pre Fractint, i had to
>    teach myself C+ on a 386 with a coprocessor.....
>
>    i coded back then in C+, but have gotten out of it,
>    and embarased to say that i code in Access basic for
>    database applications mainly.....

Well, if you are really wanting to do your own "plug and play fractal programming", then as you already know (based upon your statements about actually doing programming), you have to learn to speak the language.   

But if you do not have the time to invest in such tasks, then I suggest just downloading one of the many FREEWARE and TRIALWARE fractal generators that are available, and just do some image (and optionally formula) creation.

And besides, with the hundreds of available programs already out there, why would you really want to do your own fractal programming??  Much more fun seeing what various graphics can be produced.     

[woodlands]

>Well, if you are really wanting to do your own "plug and play fractal programming", then as you already know (based upon your statements about actually doing programming), you have to learn to speak the language.   

yep, i do know the world of coding, and as such its actually not the fear of the programming itself, its the time involved...getting to know a program is usually some intense effort to make it play nice.  thankfully, i guess  there are more plug and play things out there...but from experience, as soon as you want to do somethign different, its a tougher ballgame.  For instance, i want to imagine a third axis (pun intended, what could be more imaginary than the imaginary axis), and code accordingly.  i did do it once when i had programmed in C, and it was cool, but it involves generating a third loop to scan through for the third axis, plus inventing the third parameter (i.e. a +bi +cj) and its arithmetic...(a+bi+cj)(a+bi+cj)=(a**2 - b**2 +c**2 -b*c) + 2abi +2acj   (the idea is that i*i=-1;    j*j=1;    i*j=-1 ) 

so in my ignorance of the plug and play programs, i fear that they wouldnt be able to handle that particular quest for unusual fractal worlds, or some other ways i want to play, and my time is so bad right now that even typing into forums is a stretch   damn real world!

plus hearing the other computer speak of how people who really know the stuff and use things to optimize the calculations really makes me roll my eyes.  ah well, maybe i will get time to investigate and make things happen in spite of my reticence for starting.   

actually, back to the original question, are there other fractal forms out there that could be considered as complex as mandelbrot, or with an atomic core like the snowman, but different?  Every other form i see just appears to be variations of the "aura", which never zoom in to see anything other than more aura, or a core that is  different than the mandelbrot "set".  anyone have examples?

thanks, its fun to be talking about this stuff.