M3d server

[tobiles]

I couldn't find a great topic area to put this. I feel like bragging a little bit.

I got myself a build-your-own system, an ASUS mother board, AMD quad processor running at 3.2 Ghz, 8 Gb of memory and a 1.5Tb drive, all for the main purpose of generating fractals. Am I obsessed or what?

So far, I'm using mostly Mandelbulb3d, running under Wine on Ubuntu Linux (well, I have Mint loaded as well, dual boot, but mostly seem to end up in Ubuntu). The speed is quite impressive on this system, generating long animations in less than half the time of either my Mac or Windows laptops.

What I find interesting is that I can run multiple M3d threads on this system with no problem at all (well, so far I have run two processes in parallel). I haven't really tried to do that on my other systems. So, now I have M3d running on 3 different operating systems and it runs fine on all of them. Great work, Jesse!

If I had to make a feature request, it would be for a means of looking at the parameters in an existing .m3p, .m3i, or .m3a file, without loading it in completely, but being able to copy particular parameters or groups of parameters into the current active project. The germ for this idea came when I wanted to go back to the reflectivity and transparency settings I had successfully used once before, but I didn't want to reload the parameters, and then reload what I was working on. This would be useful in a wide variety of ways, I believe.

So, I now have a rendering server, and am working on some new animations and really enjoying the new freedom. I can prototype on the Windows or Mac laptops, export the parameters over, and generate the results much faster on the new Linux system. Now I need to figure out how to get my local network to allow me to transfer files freely across all of the platforms, and even better would be to access the Linux box from a remote terminal, but I'm working on all of that slowly. One problem I've encountered, it seems to be that often background images get lost in the transfer, I have to load the background into each key frame and re-save it. They don't always get lost, and I haven't quite figured out how it works sometimes, but more often not at other times. Oh well.