After a couple of weeks tinkering (and I'm sure I found a Mozilla Composer bug somewhere), starting, restarting, changing my mind and starting again, I've finished going through Robin Bussell's Fractint Wish List - pruning out the deadwood so to speak. I'm sending the edited files to Robin, but I thought I'd summarise what I found here. Best way to do it is to reproduce the editorial I've put on the page and check with you lot in case there are any grievous errors that need to be changed in it. Morgan L. Owens "Well, it looked easy from here..." -----------8<---------------------------- Note added by the guest Editor, 2002-01-10. Some pruning has been done to this list - a number of wishes have been deleted and/or shortened for a number of reasons. Reasons include: * Wishes for things that have since been added to Fractint - often after being asked for on this list; * Wishes for things that were in Fractint all along; * Wishes for things that fall too far outside Fractint's terms of reference; * Bug reports. These now have their own page; * Things that have been asked for several umptillion times already that require a complete ground-up rewrite of the entire Fractint system, which today carries far too much legacy architecture and code from the days when the 80386 was worth its surface area in farmland. These points are already in hand in one way or another (and if they're not I agree they should be): * Truecolour/PNG support (JPEG is not a good format for the types of images Fractint produces) * A Windows CE/NT/ME/XP/FU implementation * A Macintosh implementation * Un*x support (this may become the default development platform, I hear) * Voodoo/Matrox/Whatever video card support * Randomness There are plenty of requests already in the lists for certain things. These are still in the list because (AFAIK) there is as yet no work being done on them, mainly through lack of various resources (time, manpower, talent) and current focus on other tasks. I've put them here, where they're easier to spot, to serve as a subtle hint of Fractint's Most Wanted: * Music - generation and/or synchronisation; * Built-in animation (as opposed to additional utility programs) - zooms and parameter manipulation, both offline movie generation and realtime (plug Fractint straight into your local nightclub's video wall!); * Screensavers, various plugins (WinAMP, Photoshop, etc.); * Multiprocessing - both exploiting multiple processors in one machine, or farming tasks out to a machine farm; * An internal formula/IFS/L-system text editor; One more thing, but probably the most important thing of all. Fractint is written (and is being written) by volunteers, who do it because they have fun doing so. They don't get paid for it, they don't want to get paid for it, and they don't want you to have to pay for it. But they all still have to put food on the table, so they work on it when they can in between w*rk. If you're a programmer (Fractint is written in C, and there're no plans to change this) who wants to contribute to its development, don't just say "I wish I could contribute", contribute!. That's how all the existing Stone Soup Group programmers got started, and it's why the credits list is so long. Download the current developers' sources from www.fractint.org and get hacking! You can subscribe to the Fractint Developers' list in much the same way as the Fractint list itself: send a blank email to fractdev- request@mailman.xmission.com with subscribe as the subject. I'll just reiterate one disclaimer. This is not the official Fractint site. It is not part of Noel Giffin's Fractint User site, nor is it part of Tim Wegner's Fractint Developer site. It is developer Robin Bussell's contribution of a place where Fractint's users can suggest ways to make it even better, and where he and the other developers can check in from time to time to see what you-all reckon needs doing. (Don't you wish English had a proper second-person plural form?) Don't make it an unpleasant chore for them :-) We now return you to the Fractint Wish List. - the Editor