On 9 Jul 2002, at 9:52, Thierry B. wrote:
On Mon, Jul 08, 2002 at 06:49:44PM -1000, David Jones wrote:
Yes, I have an interest, but for an Unix version. Any pointers ?
And I would be interested in a Linux version.
I've started looking over this new version, but it was full of windowscentrism, and maybe it was better to start from the original Dos sources and build a really portable version. Any idea ?
Might depend on what "windowcentrisms" you're talking about. UI? Memory allocation/management? Maybe something like Winemaker (IIRC, a component of the WINE project to facilitate compiling Windows code into native Linux executables) could help. I've always thought - and mentioned on this list! - that what was needed was a back-end style Fractal Processing Engine which contains all the functions used to generate fractals, with a standard API for using the back-end. Then the finicky OS-specific stuff like UI widgets could be in a separate app that basically calls the Fractal Processing Engine API as needed. Opens up many fun possibilities - a wider variety of UIs for generating fractals, a client/server architecture allowing the FPE back-end to run on a different machine from the UI, much greater platform independence. It would be nice if Fractint's processing routines could be turned into such a beast, but maybe Piclab would be a better starting point. Or XFractint. David gnome@hawaii.rr.com