In article <1916.2579-2544-586195160-1178561760@seznam.cz>, =?us-ascii?Q?charlie=20chernohorsky?= <endlessoblivion@seznam.cz> writes:
a silly question: why should be the sampling area aligned with axes?
It doesn't have to be; currently fractint doesn't do this. But I have an idea for a sampling algorithm that maximizes the amount of reuse for each redraw during panning and zooming and that idea depends on an axis-aligned sampling grid. It would also be possible to store the itarations on your hard drive through this method so that you could browse your favorite fractal type and store as much iteration data as you wanted on your hard drive, up to the capacity of the drive. The other reason (and one more likely to be implemented sooner) that you might want to do this is to reduce "display fractal" to "display texture-mapped quadrilateral". In that case, any parallelogram or rotation would just be a shear to the quadrilateral or a rotation of the quadrilateral, respectively. Your samples would still be axis-aligned and stored in the texture that way. Basically with texture mapping support in the graphics card, rotation and shear of the fractal zoom box are trivial operations and higher-quality than what you get with fractint right now. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>