Mandel Machine - some questions

[simon.snake]

Hi

I've been playing with Mandel Machine and it is a very nice program.  I do have a few questions, however.

Saving and loading a location does not bring with it the palette used.  Is this normal, or can it be added?
The window appears to have a MDI interface.  It gives the impression that you can have more than one window at one time, but I can't open more than one location.
Is the program available on any other operating system?  Can it be run on Linux for example?  This would mean I could use it on my server which is running CentOS 6.5 instead of my poor laptop which gets too hot and then keeps experiencing crashes where the display drivers stop working.  It usually does recover but occasionally doesn't and then reboots.

Would it be possible to get the program to automatically create new palettes, or has anyone worked out the file format of palette entries?  Has anyone made a utility program to create colour palettes and save them to bitmap (or whatever format the program likes for graphics images)?

When will the program be getting its own section in the forum?  Would be nice to put all questions about it in one place.

Think that will do for now.

Simon

[Sockratease]

When will the program be getting its own section in the forum?  Would be nice to put all questions about it in one place.

Good question!

I think we can do that.

There are a few good programs that deserve their own section.  Feel free to compile a list of threads that should be moved into that section, and maybe others too.

Sorry, haven't played enough with The Machine to answer the other questions 

[panzerboy]

Mandel Machine's palette information is one line of the .mmf file that starts "rendering.palette="
The entries are four number groups, the first digit is a floating point number in decimal or scientific notation from 0 up to (but not incluing?) 1.
This is the position, this is different from Ultra Fractal style where the position is an integer from 1 to 400 or fractal Extreme where the position "index" is from 10 to 237.
So you can have many more colour indexes in Mandel Machine, I think up to a million or perhaps 1024x1024.
The next three numbers are the typical RGB values from 0 to 255.
So a simple even spaced palette sequence of black, blue, cyan, green, white, magenta, red, yellow looks like.

rendering.palette=0,0,0,0,0.125,0,0,255,0.25,0,255,255,0.375,0,255,0,0.5,255,255,255,0.625,255,0,255,0.75,255,0,0,0.875,255,255,0,

I've created palettes with 4096 colours, if you fill all million colour entries theres no spare entries to interpolate from one colour to the next for smoothing.
Using scientific notation preserves accuracy of the position when building palettes with thousands of entries eg.
rendering.palette=0.0000000E+000,153,153,0,2.4414063E-004,238,238,51,4.8828125E-004,102,85,17,
Without scientific notation that positioning would lose 4 digits of accuracy.

[simon.snake]

Anyone else having problems loading palettes from .mmf files?

I've saved a few parameter files, but when I try to load just the palette information from the .mmf file it doesn't load.  Instead, it shows the default palette.

No matter what I try it seems to load all other colour related information - colour density, offset, etc. but not the actual palette.

I've installed the latest version, but that still isn't loading the palette from a saved file.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

Simon

[simon.snake]

Also, another issue.  I've just hit a magnification limit of 1,900.

Is this done on purpose or simply a bug?  I will check the posts announcing the program to see if it is mentioned there.

Thanks

Simon