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I'm wondering if I found a bug - I'm using 2.11 (or newest version whatever that is). I got curious and tried to use it on a virtual machine (an EC2 via Amazon web service with 40 CPU threads!)  As I expected, the first frame of my zoom out rendered in about an hour (would take over 30 hours on my home machine for the same frame) however, it then appeared to get stuck in some kind of loop - the image seemed done, but it just kept jumping back to 0% over and over, and never moved on to the next frame.  This happened with three different fractals I tried at three different resolutions.  Any ideas?

Also just curious, I'm a coder - What environment can I use to build and compile on my own?  Will Visual Studio 2010 work?  I'd love to poke around the source code sometime..

And, I guess since I'm at it (not complaining though) some other bugs I've noticed:

In the movie maker, if the old movie file is still there in the folder, the preview won't work / have to delete the old file.
Also in the movie maker, the correct values on a preview are not always picked up if you change the starting frame to a frame after a key frame (like rotation etc...)

Thanks!

What do you mean by this? GCC has support for Fixed-Point Types. However, the implementation is still not finalized, and is a WIP:

What about using some library (such as GMP) for arbitrary precision arithmetic operations? This will give cross-platform support...

I've commented this before without any feedback so I hope I get it now
When you multiply for example two 100 digit values, you need to put the result in a 200 digit mantissa to ensure correct result. Because, if every digit is 9 the least significant digit may flip all digits and affect the result.
However that small value is meaningless when making the Mandelbrot set, so you don't need more than 100 digits. This is even how fractal extreme is doing it, so even fx is a approximative! That is why it is so fast compared to if you use standard arbitrary precision libraries.
Further, when squaring you actually don't need to use more than 50 digits.

Does a general library such as GMP not make accurate correct calculations? I doubt that...

I have tried different options and using the same type of method described by the author of fx. This requires more memory per digit, and I was able to make it faster than the current up until some 4000 digits. Then it got significantly slower! I recall Botond mentioned this as an explanation why mantel machine doesn't go deeper, there is some optimization in the compilers that is lost.

I've also tried SIMD and was able to get more than 3 times faster. However that is only applicable on double, up to e600. Mandel machine analyses the values of the "delta" and use double, or even float, when values get appropriate high, but it is difficult to determine that in a chaotic system and MM have still some problems with glitches.

So, my conclusion is that I am not able to do anything at the moment

I have been using kf for a while now, mosly on a 32bit machine. And I think there is nothing wrong with the program in terms of speed. For me, on 32bit it takes two days to make a movie and about twenty minutes to an hour on average to render a 6400×3600 image. On 64bit about 20 minutes to an hour to make a 16k by 9k image. And the zooming speed is nothing I can complain about. I would rather take time to make a good zoom. And even the formulas that have recently been added are many times faster than I expected.

I would not want a faster but unstable program. It would make things frustrating instead of relaxing. I would suggest keeping the program like it is.