@hackage gruff0.2.1

Mandelbrot Set fractal explorer using the ruff library.

Requires GTK, OpenGL, and GLSL fragment shader support; lots of RAM and multiple CPU cores recommended. If you want to explore very deep zooms, you'll need hmpfr which currently requires GHC to be compiled with integer-simple instead of the default integer-gmp. To install without MPFR support, use cabal install gruff -f-mpfr.

This version is a bugfix release. Changes since gruff-0.2:

• Supersampling bugs are fixed (no more undocumented quantization leading to inconsistent appearance at different zoom levels).

• Race condition bugs in cache management are fixed (no more incompletely rendered images).

• Internal changes/refactoring to make future additions easier.

Features in this version include:

• Interactive fractal browser display (left click to zoom in, right click to zoom out, middle-click to center).

• Session persistance (stored in ~/.gruff/state.gruff - states can also be loaded from and saved to other files).

• Tile cache (by default in ~/.gruff/cache - symlink it somewhere with a few GB of space if you plan on exploring a lot).

• High-level feature finding using angled internal addresses (enter an address, for example 1 2 3 1/3 10, and hit return, then click the adjacent Go button).

• Feature finding using period location (navigate to approximate location of the desired feature, click the Scan button).

• Angled internal address calculation using reverse ray trace (navigate to approximate feature location, click the Scan+ button).

• Uses MPFR where available for higher precision, allowing deeper zooms and locating high period nucleii.

• Limited amount of customizable colouring (colours for interior, border, and exterior points).

• Supersampling for more detailed images (useful range is 1 to 16).

Future features might include image saving, external ray and feature information overlays, more feature finding and identification algorithms, scripting support for rendering animations, ...