On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 3:53 PM, david
<gnome@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
Mike Frazier wrote:
On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 5:58 PM, david wrote:
Nice image. I love the way Fracton renders the colors. It would be
nice to have a Linux version of it!
Thanks. You can anti-alias FractInt images too by drawing them larger and shrinking them in an external image manipulation program. Hal Lane does this on his web site.
And here I thought Fracton was generating the images that way ... does Fracton work in 256-colors like Fractint does?
Fracton has 24 bit color and does the anti-aliasing inside the program. I was just suggesting it does exactly the same thing that can be done with FractInt and an image manipulation program.
Converting Fracton to Linux would be very difficult. It is 30,000 lines of Objective C code now. A lot of the code interacts with the user interface and that is totally Mac centric.
If the code is cleanly separated between UI classes and fractal calculation classes, I think all you'd need is a documented API for using the fractal calculation classes. Then a Linux UI could be coded separately using any of the common Linux graphics frameworks (QT, GTK, whatever).
It is separated that way and uses a model, view, controller architecture but there is still so much that would be difficult to port. For example, all the multiprocessor stuff is totally Mac centric since you have to have the OS handle that. The equation compiler uses tons of Cocoa string object constructs. There are dozens of Cocoa objects that are used everywhere. It might be easier to just start over for a lot of it. Anyway, isn't there already a Linux version of FractInt?