On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 13:47 -0600, Richard wrote:
In article <002201c78c23$df25f820$ef77facd@your55e5f9e3d2>, "John W." <juanw@telus.net> writes:
Sounds like the photo base I use; "Flickr". http://www.flickr.com/photos/thejohnw/
Yep, "community sites" are all the rage right now, but I don't feel that there is a community site that really serves the fractal explorer beyond a place where you can put up your rendered images for sharing.
FractInt currently has an idea of getting data from files. It doesn't integrate with the community except by manual means. That should change.
Incidentally, I implemented code to upload images to Flickr directly from Gnofract 4D. (See http://flickr.com/groups/gnofract4d ) The good part is that Flickr has an API which makes this relatively trivial to implement; the bad part is that the Flickr guys have a weird policy where if you don't post 'mostly photos' (and fractals don't count as photos) they reserve the right to mark your account 'not for display in public areas', which means your images are more or less invisible. This seems stupid to me but there you are. There's also no scheme for storing files other than images - I resorted to putting the fractal params in the photo description. UltraFractal has a nice scheme where you can upload your formulas to the public formula database (http://formulas.ultrafractal.com) and download the latest version of all of them automatically from within the program. You could consider utilizing the same thing for Fractint, since UF can also run Fractint formulas. There's also a weird scheme for sharing the UF equivalent of PAR files run by some guy in Venezuela but I could never seem to get access to it. The other existing sites which seem somewhat relevant are Renderosity and DeviantArt, which are inexplicably popular even though they are both (IMHO) slow, ugly and painful to use. If you are interested in setting up a dedicated fractal repository, drop me a line - I've toyed with the idea myself but dropped it for lack of time. It would seem a good idea to have it relevant to more than one fractal program to attract a wider audience. Regards -- Edwin