Hi,
....there are already a lot of good
fractal apps already out there. ....
Many of the apps are purchasable products.
What's kept people coming back to Fractint?
Has it been the free availability? The
website? The features? Are those the
items to build on?
Yes, there are several very good fractal related applications
available. And some of the more recent ones, over the past five or so
years, have incorporated the better features of their predecessors.
And
one item which has spurred the popularity of a few of these apps is
the
ability to use the files from FractInt (FRM, PAR, MAP, IFS, etc.).
There are at least fifty different programs around that can use
various
files from FractInt. So what does that say about the people coding
their programs to use such files?? THAT FRACTINT IS STILL ONE OF
THE
BEST !!!
:) very interesting
I want to see the Uber, the Ultimate, the
Unitive fractal app. There are a lot of
neat features that can go in that no one
has ever done before. What do you guys
think are the best fractal apps out there
(besides Fractint)? Best features?
What has been mentioned before more than once, and what I believe
should
be seriously thought about, is making a core set of program modules
that
are not platform dependent, so that they can be used by any computer
and
operating system. Then various User Interfaces would be written to
use
those modules for actually handling the aspects of fractal generation,
but would be developed for each of the various OS environments. The
different UI versions would basically function the same and have
everything the other ports had, but they would be more tailored for
their own systems, working like other apps within those environments.
It seems easy to agree there is a need for a universal component model / design architecture. Something which enables beautiful extensibility where developers can step up and add genuine not-before-seen value. And its all in the details. This is the platform, implementation, performance question. Java offers some degree of universality, but lacks performance for the fractal calculation. Java might do well in providing a somewhat universal application implementation through windows, unix, mac if we have platform specific data types to call for faster calculations. Without platform localized data types Java would offer universiality with some performance hit. Apple and Microsoft offer their own Java language API to their own technologies providing more performance and no cross-platform compatability. Sun and Apple would like to have ubiquity, more market share, they would be Microsoft if they could. Apple and Sun like to strong arm as much as Microsoft, the only difference is that they have smaller arms :) So where are people at? Whos the Fractint userbase? And why was Fractint written for DOS and not some other operating system when it was made? :) Whats everyone running on their desktop? Does Fractint being written for DOS mean it would be extended to Windows? Picking up on David's thoughts on making a design specification. Perhaps Fractint could be a platform independent application design specification? File format specification? And possible peer-to-peer and server commuinication specification? I dunno.
And, one very big item that should be incorporated into FractInt is
the
ability to produce real 3-D objects and meshes for a variety of
formats: OBJ, POV, DXF, WRL, LF, etc... This is the wave of the
future for most graphic applications, being able to create, render,
import, export, and handle various 3-D objects.
3-D object meshes and their formats are slightly different than the output of a rendered fractal from what I understand. Though texture extruded meshes can be formed from fractal bitmaps? Cheers, rana