I really like the exploration experience improvements (mouse wheel zoom around cursor location, using the previous view to give an idea of the zoomed view, animating the transition, only updating completed pixels).
Thanks
I've not got the hang of the distance colouring though (I'm guessing it's calculated using a method similar to slopes rather than true derivative-based distance estimate?). The palette repeats in a way that I don't like - I'd rather it stops at the end, so dense regions aren't so aliased and grainy while sparse regions are still bold. I ended up combining 4 slope-colouring images at 90deg angle increments in GIMP using the Darken Only layer mode, then post-processing a bit (contrast stretch, blur to remove some grainyness, downscaling), to give something that looks more like what I want (top image, second image is one of the angles, parameter file attached too).
Indeed, DE is inspired by Mighty Mandel
However I have attached what I wanted to achieve, several layes with different colors.
Background is blue. First layer is black, second layers is dark green and third layer is yellow. Each layer comes from a close passage of a Minibrot.
Some other minor things I ran into:
* auto-solve glitches isn't on by default, which meant that my first zooming ended up pixelated at double precision limit (I don't remember exactly which option fixed it, maybe it was a different option)
* reuse reference can't be selected at the same time as auto glitch solving
You cannot combine reuse reference and automatic glitch correction, since reuse reference means that one reference only is used and glitch correction involves several references. Reuse reference is meant to be used for the frames closest to the final minibrot in a Movie
* I couldn't get the palette waves (the one below the infinite waves) to work properly, no matter what I chose for offsets it just ended up shades of grey when all the periods were the same
If you use e.g. 4 periods on 128 colors, you would need to offset it with 16 in order to move it half a period.
If you use 32 periods on 128 colors, you would need to offset it with 2 in order to move it half a period.
* reducing contrast then increasing it again gives a posterized effect (colour precision is lost when reducing contrast)
Yes, reducing contrast to grayish colors and then back makes color information to be lost
I need to come back on the other comments