Rich wrote:
32-bit iteration counts can be stored in PNG easily, which is the max of what fractint can handle. (Do we need iteration counts larger than 2^32?)
I think PNG would actually do better at compressing them than gzip. But yeah, it doesn't really matter *how* you store them since an extension chunk is just a blob of binary data.
well, isn't a regular grayscale up to a 16 bit depth? i thought you were talking about something like "phantom image" with usual api constraints.. while now it seems you meant some custom data being appended.. of course it's better when it's packed together with the visual representation.. anyway, a raw output (a sort of a dump) would be also of a use for postprocessing.. with infinite iterations (more comes bellow) it's easy to get over 2^32..
P.S.: Rich, please, stick somewhere in the roadmap an SVG and an HPGL support for L-systems
Hrm. I just killed printer support, so HPGL doesn't really make sense. SVG would be a good 'save' option so you can convert to other vector formats from there.
SVG: or edit it in Inkscape SVG editor just or view it with a web browser.. HPGL: i consider it also a save option, it's a sort of non-XML-SVG, some vector editors are also able to load it, and you can send it to the printer manually..
and that infinite looping for escapetime fractals -- tell me which of these are blocked by your current development.. Thanks.
You lost me with "infinite looping for escapetime fractals". Can you elaborate?
infinite iterations approach just iterates the whole plane at once, at each step coloring those pixels that actually bailed out (it usualy forms continuous regions, somewhat like boundary tracing).. and it never stops iterating, unless it has colored the whole plane.. (attracted pixels and periodic cycles are considered to be colored with inside) ..thus after a while, just a few pixels near the comlpex borders remain active and undecided and you can wait to see if they finally turn inside or outside, or you can stop the calculation.. you just need to keep the actual state (i.e. Z_n) and an activity flag (can be bit-packed) of each pixel.. /charlie/