Various plugins created over the last week

[simon.snake]

Here I present for you a few plugins I have created over the last few days.

32-bit version of plugins here

64-bit version of plugins here

Each zip file contains 3 dll files:

Simon53a looks like the image in this post

Simon86 has been updated from the original panzerboy plugin (and the original simon86f.dll plugin should be deleted before installing this one) with additional formulae. Two of these look like a power 10 and power 5 version of the mandelbrot, but have smaller minis. The third has some strange symmetry which causes a small island to appear when you zoom in at the top middle.

Simon100a is my first one (see a previous post in this sub forum), and it will be updated soon with a power 3 and power 4 types of the original power 2 fractal.

I've got a few additional formulae to include eventually, but a high percentage of my formulae include division, power, or trig functions, many of which are not implemented in Fractal eXtreme (especially in high precision). Maybe one day they will be included, but for now we'll all just have to think about what could be possible.

Please note, these plugins may be rough around the edges, are quite slow and probably unoptimised, and could do with some tweaks here and there, but for my first attempts, I'm quite impressed that I can do this, even though debugging them is really a right pain in the butt!

None of these implement the smooth variants that panzerboy has worked hard on, but I am sure they are not too difficult to add (once I figure out how he does it! )

[simon.snake]

Oh, and if anyone (mainly panzerboy I would have thought) wants the source to take a look at, let me know and I'll drop the files onto my web server.

[simon.snake]

Just a quick update to say that the Simon100 plugin has been updated and now supersedes simon100a.dll, so please delete that plugin before placing the simon100.dll in the plugin folder. Download links are as in the previous post (I've simply overwritten the old files on my server with new versions).

The plugin now has 12 versions of my formula (which first performs a z=z*abs(z)). Here's a screen shot of Fractal eXtreme with all the starting positions:



The 100A (first row) is z^2, 100B (second row) is z^3 and 100C (third row) is z^4.  The plain version (first column) does no additional abs, the burningship (second column) performs an abs on the real side, the celtic (third column) performs an abs on the imaginary side and the buffalo (fourth column) performs an abs on both sides.

There are some lovely new places to browse.  All should work perfectly into deep zooms, but if there are any problems (I've not tried all 12 thoroughly yet), do not hesitate to let me know... As before, if anyone wants to see the source files, drop me a message, or reply to this thread.

[simon.snake]

I've updated the two plugin zip files listed in the initial post with additional plugins.

Once again, if you extract the zip file into the plugin folder, you'll have to delete similar named files.  For example, I've updated Simon53A.dll to Simon53.dll which includes the formula 53A and others (so if you have already saved any .fx files they should still work). You should delete Simon53A.dll from your plugin folder.

I promise that I won't do that again.  If I create a new plugin I'll give it a sensible name from the start which will stop this from happening in the future.

A couple of the fractal types are simply rotations of the others (just the way they are written I suppose), and I haven't created any screenshots of them, so you'll have to take a look and see what you get.

Happy exploring.

P.S. If you're using these plugins, can you let me know.  Just wondering how many people actually use FX and these plugins so I can gauge interest.

[kallisti]

P.S. If you're using these plugins, can you let me know.  Just wondering how many people actually use FX and these plugins so I can gauge interest.

I use your Smooth Shaded Mandelbrot plug-in as default. 4X4AA, Interpolate Colors and Smooth Shaded is usually the only way to go for me these days, although I do enjoy the effects of the Scalloped and Partial Iteration versions. I have downloaded and installed all your "old" ones (before the ones above), and have looked at all of them, but I must admit I am still an M-monkey (just recently got back into fractal exploration after more than a decade off, I first bought FX in 2002).

The only down-sides are (apart from longer calculation time) 1) Long zoom movies with consistent color mapping is not possible (I'm not a programmer or mathematician, but I guess it's a natural result of "steepness" caused by the added 256 bands for each "real" band?), and 2) FX will not render posters with the Interpolate Colors effect. 4X4AA isn't enough for super-crisp details, so I contacted Mr. Dawson for a possible solution, and he's looking at it. He fixed the 105MB bug after I contacted him about it, so I have faith that this will be solved at some point as well. When I can render large AA'ed Smooth Shaded images, I'll start posting..

Anyway, any and all FX additions are appreciated (or will be). Keep up the good work!

[Pharmagician]

Yes, also using, very happy to have, and also not posting anything.  But definitely happy to have - thanks for your work on these!

[simon.snake]

Think you guys are confusing me with panzerboy.  He created the smooth colouring code.  I'm simply converting some of my FractInt formulae into plugins for Fractal eXtreme.

Full credit for the smooth plugins should go to him, I'm merely modifying his plugin source code to produce my own plugins.

[kallisti]

Oops. Well, thanks Panzerboy for Smooth Shaded and so on, and to Simon for the other plugins.

[kallisti]

It seems I owe you an apology. As it turns out, I'd only looked at a few of your plug-ins and mistook some of the original FX ones for yours. Yesterday evening I installed the last pack and looked at several, and was impressed by especially some of the Modified Mandelbrot ones. I look forward to further exploration! Keep up the good work.

Any chance of getting Smooth Shaded versions of these?

[simon.snake]

I look forward to further exploration! Keep up the good work.

Thanks. Have got more ideas, and hopefully some more in the pipeline soon, but as there's no trig functions, division or power functions in the high precision stuff, there's not many more of my formulae that can be added to support high precision.  Most of the others will work up to around 43 zooms, however.

I would also like to create a replica of the igeometry plugin that is on Bruce's website.  It might only be 32 bit as it doesn't work in my 64-bit install. Just not sure at the moment how it is coded.

Any chance of getting Smooth Shaded versions of these?

I'm not entirely sure how panzerboy does it, and I think it is different for every type of fractal. I'll see if panzerboy can take the source code and add the smooth shading if I don't work it out for myself.