Please encode TinyURL / Base64 presets for www image gallery sharing

[monstercolorfun]

I found presets of 104 lines and that's difficult for forum posts. That's a measure of the power of the program.

perhaps stackexchange will have some advice to reparse that savefile to 10 lines based, especially if the save data is totally unpredictable.


It's necessary to encode to a printable compression format i.e. base64, I don't know if mandelbulber can use python?

If so there is a page to compress printable Ascii(python recipe), intended to include large settings files in xml pages > http://code.activestate.com/recipes/355486-compress-data-to-printable-ascii-data/


this has 38% compression
http://www.txtwizard.net/compression

There are codes using "printable base64 cpp"
https://www.google.fr/search?num=100&ei=0-YSWvv0LNCSsAfbtLDwDA&q=printable+base64+cpp&oq=printable+base64+cpp&gs_l=psy-ab.3...7032.10915.0.11124.12.12.0.0.0.0.379.1989.1j4j2j2.9.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..3.6.1468...0i22i30k1j33i22i29i30k1.0.lXLRKpmrkt8

[zebastian]

hi monstercolorfun,
nice idea about the google search, works great 

about base64: base64 mapping is included in qt, so it will be quite easy for us to implement this into the program.
But what is the benefit of that?
The clear text variant is also quite portable, easy to read and dense.
The base64 version will be longer and non readable.
We could use some sort of compression but this will make it harder to share, since that would require a bigger alphabet.
Please explain the use case...

[monstercolorfun]

Yes perhaps Base64 is not the best option. The use is to make it easy for people to build preset remix clubs, super easy for MBR community artists to share and receive new settings.

Copy to clipboard, is perhaps intended for sharing files online. If it's 100 lines long, that's too much, and it's actually quite helpful if the settings file has an blocky alien / formatted appearence, like hyeroglyphics, it's intriguing, and it's easy to recognize.

Another option is a button for "upload settings" to share to the mandelbulber website (say max 10 settings per day per IP address) and copy the URL to clip-board, and format the URL with some Elite hacking writing, like www.mandelbulber.com/-=-M-B-R-=-F-O-R-M-U-L-A-=-/download.9263789
www.mandelbulber.com/-=-M-B-R-=-F-O-R-M-U-L-A-=-/preset.89342.zip

So that people can click a link and the MBR program will appear. Magnet URL's are the best, I think they go something like magnet:/b/543TG04549208HASH430928490 but they are difficult to program.

10,000 settings would be about 50MB

[zebastian]

About the online service:
We had this already in discussion and postponed that, since i will be quite some work todo.
The functionality i can think if is the following:
1. From inside Mandelbulber you can create an Mandelbulber account (email, password)
2. verify account by email.
3. Login with credentials inside Mandelbulber
4. settings folders can be synced with the Mandelbulber server at cdn.mandelbulber.org
5. settings folders can be made public at the server
6. settings folders from other users (which are made public) are browsable and can be loaded from the server

Anyway this will require a lot of work on server and program side to implement and secure.
Maybe we can manage to realize that for 2.14 

[zebastian]

i opened an issue for that: https://github.com/buddhi1980/mandelbulber2/issues/431

[monstercolorfun]

I totally see what you mean. I am had a brainstorm session... here is very easy code for sharing presets:

Imbed a TinyURL into any art-gallery page, When the user clicks TinyURL, he gets to the mandelbulber code prevew in txt form, you can do select-all, copy paste, last window, Ctrl-P to paste into mbr2. The best is If TinyURL sends us to a page which has code and a "copy preset to clipboard button" in the HTML code.

Mandelbulb3d uses 3 button clicks to copy the formula:
ctrl, mouse selection, Ctrl-Copy.
Mbr2 would use two clicks:
right-click TinyURL, wait for page, right-click button to copy preset.

You can't miss the other guy's presets because they look like this: >>>>____'''''''''''''aerZGs3'":Kk.....ytrerytre______ytreyhgfd in the middle of the image gallery view.

the miniaturized URL would be something like www.M|A|ND|E|L|B|U|L|B|E|R_presetfile.com/G5Ytr4^r

The tiny-URL and the full preset.txt are both saved on www. only the TinyURL is copied to clipboard by mandelbulber. That way, you can keep 10,000 presets on a fixed web address, all referenced by a short url text.

The primary and ultimate time saver when slow thinking and exploring fractals, can be to have an art gallery in the adjoining window, with 100 different mandelbulber JPG, where you can think... Oh I want to discover this kind of formula, and copy one of the previews. Deviant Art is one of the best communities and if there is a way to imbed a TinyURL on their