Happy π Day! The following bugs have been fixed:
1) There are several bugs involving the rendering of large images.
First of all, please note that images in Fractal Domains are limited to a maximum size of 32,767 x 32,767. This is pretty big; images larger that this are not supported directly in Fractal Domains 2.0, although larger images can be generated piecemeal using the "Tiling" command.
Given this restriction the followng bugs were fixed:
a) Spool files were not correctly generated when the size went over 2GB, even when the image size was within the correct bounds. The program would freeze when this limit was exceeded.
b) Similarly, image files in JPEG, PNG and TIFF format were not guaranteed to be generated correctly for large file sizes.
2) There were several bugs related to the Color Map Editor which could cause visual anomalies and crashing, especially when editing certain color maps from the predefined menu selections.
These bugs have all been fixed.
Changed the behavior when opening Fractal Domains files using "Open..." in the File dialog.
In the process of making the changes for 2.0.7 (see below for details), a bug was introduced: the ability to open files created by versions of Fractal Domains previous to 2.0 was lost. For the benefit of users (like me!) who still have some pre-2.0 format files laying about, the ability to open these files has been restored.
Changed the behavior when opening Fractal Domains files using "Open..." in the File dialog.
Previously, the files displayed were filtered according to Finder information that tagged each file. This is a technique left over from pre-OS X days, since OS X applications generally do the same thing by using an explicit extension in the file name.
The Finder tagging can be lost in some situations (such as moving the documents to a non-Mac file system and then back again.) In these cases Fractal Domains would simply not allow the files to be opened.
This problem is now circumvented by allowing any files at all to be opened via the "Open..." dialog. If a non-Fractal Domains document is opened, Fractal Domains will detect this and will not allow the file to be opened.
Corrected a minor bug. Registration number could only be entered by copy/paste -- typing didn't work because the edit field didn't allow hyphens, which are part of the reg code. This has been corrected; registration numbers can now be typed as well as pasted.
Corrected a bug introduced in 2.0.4: TIFF images weren't saved correctly when running on PowerPC Macs.
A bug prevented an image file from being saved if an image file of the same name had been previously saved in the same session. Fractal Domains would ask if the file was to be replaced, but would not actually replace it. This has been fixed. Also, possible problems with TIFF image saving have been fixed.
Fixed bug that caused the program to hang when attempting to autosave image files after rendering (affected JPEG, PNG and TIFF autosave).
Fixed bug that sometimes caused crashes when moving the mouse while previewing Julia images in the Preview window.
Fixed bug that caused Fractal Domains to crash at startup on OS X 10.2.8.
Operation of Fractal Domains is unchanged, but there are two major changes to the application:
Fractal Domains is now a Universal application -- it will run natively on both PowerPC and Intel based Macs.
Fractal generation has been modified to be multi-threaded, so that the availability of multiple CPUs will speed up performance.
I have added a page to the site discussing some benchmarks I have run on available machine comparing the performance of 2.0b5 to 2.0.
Fractal Domains v2.0 will no longer run on OS 9. Version 2.0b5 still has an OS 9 compatible format and continue to be available for download to support remaining Mac OS 9 users.
Fractal Domains v2.0 should work under versions of OS X from 10.2.8 up through current versions of 10.4.
Corrected a bug that sometimes caused the title bar and/or the size box to be placed off screen, out of reach of the mouse.
The following bugs have been fixed:
Some color map bugs have been fixed. In particular, when saving a file with a map created by Randomizer, the file was often in a bad state and the color map couldn't be edited when the file was reopened.
A bug in the Randomizer window wouldn't allow some valid values to be entered for upper and lower limits. This has been fixed.
A first draft of the user manual for 2.0 has been included.
The following bug has been fixed:
Page Setup dialog would not come up when a document window was showing.
Would sometimes crash when trying to use the Color Map Editor, in cases where the minimum dwell value in the map was not zero.
The following bugs have been fixed:
Partially complete spool (rendered image) files could not be reopened (would cause a crash).
Would sometimes crash when trying to edit and save a file created by an older version of Fractal Domains.
Would occasionally crash when trying to use the Color Map Editor.
The following bugs have been fixed:
Crash would occur when Julia tool was used to click a point in a Mandelbrot set image.
"Show Preview Window on Startup" preference wasn't working.
Added a "Randomizer" window that allows more control over the generation of random color maps. Some of the settings that were previously in the "Image" dialog (which has now been eliminated) have been moved here.
Various bugs were corrected in the Color Map Editor.
The Color Map Library window was redesigned. It is still not populated with predefined color maps, these will be avaiable in the next version.
Besides some bug fixes, some long awaited usability improvements. The fractal image can now be "nudged" one pixel at a time for improved control over positioning. When the image is shifted by nudging or by re-centering with the Center tool, only the newly exposed parts of the image are calculated, rather than the entire image as in previous versions. See the read me file for details.
When portions of the fractal image are selected in the editing window, the "Copy" command is now enabled in the "Edit" menu. You can use this to copy the selected part of the image to the clipboard. (This will not be anti-aliased, though, so you can still get better quality by using the "Render..." command and editing the ant-aliased graphics file generated from the rendering process.)
Color map editing now has some new options; colors can be copied to or swapped with neighboring color break points.See the read me file for details.
Fixes a bug that caused the program to crash if the Parameter window was opened for a Rational type fractal.
This is the first release of a major revision of Fractal Domains. Although there is a lot of work to be done before the final release, or even before a feature-complete beta release, enough functionality has been implemented to justify a release of this alpha version.
Major new features
- Carbonized ("Built for Mac OS X")
- New Graphical Color Map Editor
- Color Map Library feature
- Miscellaneous usability improvements
Fixed a bug in previous versions that caused crashes when unregistered users tried to do some restricted operations, especially trying to save an image from a spool file or trying to auto export the image from spool file. A dialog box was supposed to come up informing the user that the feature is not available to unregistered users, but the dialog referred to a "bad resource" which caused the crash.
A minor enhancement was added to the preferences. You can now specify a default image export format which is used as the intial value in the auto image export menu of the "Render Image..." dialog. This is useful if you use the auto export feature a lot and you don't use the previous default image format (which was PNG). It bacame annoying to continually reset the image format with each new spool file.
Fixed a bug in previous versions that prevented images greater than 16K in width from being generated correctly, whereas the maximum dimension was intended to be 32K in both width and height.
Fixes a bug in 1.3.4 that caused a crash when the user attempted to bring up the "Register" dialog. This bug must have truly been introduced in 1.3.4 since I tested this function in the previous version.
Fixes a bug in 1.3.3 that made the "little arrows" controls (used in the Color Map Editor and the Polynomial editor) practically impossible to use. In 1.3.3 even a short click on an arrow would make the corresponding value advance too rapidly to control.
This is a bug fix release. Several bugs slipped by in the 1.3.2 release, probably due to the short time in beta. Here's a summary:
Automatic Image Export was not implemented correctly for PICT, although it worked all right for the other three image formats. Any attempt to automatically export a spool file as a PICT would result in a crash (and sometimes corruption of the spool file). This has been fixed.
The tiling function had bugs almost too numerous to mention. Options specified in the tiling dialog were not properly transferred to the individual tiles. The target size was not properly used. Non-square tiling schemes (# of vertical tiles not equal to # of horizontal tiles) were not generated correctly. I've corrected every problem I could find and this function seems solid to me now; please inform me of any problems I may have missed.
If two or more spool files attempted to auto export images simultaneously, crashes could sometimes result due to the auto export function not being sufficiently thread-safe (those of you who are not programmers may not know what it means, but suffice it to say this has been fixed). Although this is not, strictly speaking, a tiling bug, you would not be likely to see this happen unless you were using the tiling function with "auto image export" on and "generate serially" off.
Rememberance of Bugs Past
Feedback from the release of 1.3.2 brought to light bugs from 1.3.1 that resulted in incorrect parameter files. These may appear to the user as bugs in 1.3.2. Here's what to be on the lookout for:
Do you have files that used traps that look fine in 1.3.1 but just look black where the traps colors used to be in 1.3.2 or 1.3.3?
1.3.1 did not respect the "Trap Interior Ponts" check box in the Orbit dialog. It would trap interior points whether or not the box was checked. This was fixed in 1.3.2, but if the box was not checked for some reason in some of your files, they will now look different. This is easy to fix, though; just check the "Trap Interior Points" box in the Oribit menu.
Do you have a Halley or Newton Julia set that you could open with 1.3.1 but no longer opens with 1.3.2 or 1.3.3?
This is due to an unfortunate nasty and sneaky bug in 1.3.1 that was fixed in 1.3.2 (this is one big reason to switch to 1.3.3). I mentioned this bug in the entry for 1.3.2, but it probably requires further explanation.
First, let me break the bad news to you. You can't open that parameter file in 1.3.1 either. The file is lost forever. I apologize for this, this bug caught me a few times too. It is not because you tried to open it with 1.3.2 or 1.3.3; the file was already corrupt, but you didn't know it.
Here's what happens; in 1.3.1, if you pick the Halley or Newton type fractal, you can generate a Newton or Halley Julia set by using the Julia tool. You can then save that Newton/Halley Julia set as a parameter file. You can open that file later and see your image just fine. If you save it again (after editing or changing some colors let's say) that file is corrupted. You won't be able to open it again (or if you can, the data will be totally wrong).
That's the sneaky aspect of this bug. When you save the new file and then open again, the image looks fine. At that point you can edit, print, spool etc. When you save it again, that second time destroyed the file, but if you didn't go back to open it again right away you may think that it is OK. It took me a while to even realize this was happening myself, since the appearance of the anomaly is delayed in this way.
1.3.3 works fine with Newton/Halley Julia sets. Please don't use 1.3.1 for this. If you have such a file that you saved and did not open again, I wouldn't attempt using and saving it. The safest thing is to open it again with 1.3.1, copy the parameters by hand, and enter them into a 1.3.3 file.
Again, my apologies. I am hoping not too many people got burned by this one.
Fractal Domains 1.3.2 includes the following improvements over version 1.3.1. Most of these features are intended to support the generation of very large images using Fractal Domains. The improvments are:
More file formats for image export were added (JPEG and uncompressed TIFF).
Multiple spool files can now be set up to generate images sequentially rather than in parallel.
Spool files can be set up to automatically export an image after the image is completely generated, and to automatically delete itself after the image is exported.
A "tiling manager" has been added to allow very large fractals to easily be split up into separate image tiles. A separate spool file is generated for each tile.
Several bugs have been fixed:
Using the Julia tool on Newton and Halley type fractals doesn't work. Creating Julia sets of these types directly works OK, but if you turn off the Julia flag and then use the Julia tool subsequently to create a new Newton or Halley Julia fractal, the resulting fractal is not of the correct type and a crash can even result.This has been fixed in 1.3.2.
The "Windows" menu sometimes loses track of open windows. When this happens it doesn't recover until you restart the program.At first I didn't know what circumstances caused this, but eventually I found it only happened when Fractal Domains was launched by opening a file from the Finder.This has been fixed in 1.3.2.
Fixed bug in 1.3.2b1 that prevented Fractal Domains from running on operating systems preceding Mac OS 8.5.
Added several new features; see v1.3.2 above for description.
Found bug which has probably existed in all 1.3 versions up till now. Newton and Halley fractals which were saved to file were not read back correctly and would often be corrupted.
The problem would generally only appear after a fractal was read twice. That is, the fractal would be saved correctly the first time after it was created, then read back incorrectly, but the mistake in reading would not have any effect until the fractal was saved again; that's when the data would really get scrambled. This masked the problem for quite a while, since you'd have to save a file, open it, save it again, and open it again before the problem revealed itself.
If you have any Newton or Halley fractal files from pre 1.3.1 versions, try opening them. If it looks OK, then you have nothing to worry about. If it looks completely unlike what you saved, then unfortunately you may as well throw away the file; the data has been permanently corrupted at this point and can't be recovered.
Final release.
Continuous potential dwell method has been fixed for Rational fractals so that it works correctly for most rational functions. Please note that as a consequence, some fractals generated with the alpha and beta versions of Fractal Domains v1.3 may look different when generated with this version.
First beta release of 1.3. This version is now in its final form modulo any bugs I find in the following week or so.
Dialog boxes have been cleaned up. A few fields have been clarified and the "Trap Origins" menu is now on the trap panel for rational fractals, where it would logically be expected.
Memory usage is a little more flexible; color map values are still cached, which can take up a lot of memory, but that memory is now released in low memory situations at the expense of drawing speed. If redraws seem to slow down inordinately when you increasae image size, you might try allocating more memory to Fractal Domains if possible, to see if this could be the problem.
Cleaned up polynomial editor, which is now close to its final form.
There is now a selection of preview window sizes. Just click on the "zoom" box to cycle through 64 X 64, 96 X 96, and 128 X 128 pixel views.
Miscellaneous bugs fixed, including a problem with some of the Navigation Services dialogs popping up in strange places.
More bugs fixed, including one which has been present for quite a while: applying random color maps when the maximum dwell in a fractal was less than the total number of color breaks in the map could cause a crash.
Previous alpha version of 1.3 did not properly save the "Julia" checkbox value for Rational fractals, so all such fractals were saved as Julia sets even if this checkbox was not checked (which indicates that a Mandelbrot-like set was wanted). This is fixed, and if you saved any fractals like this you can open them, uncheck the box and save them again to restore the correct value to the saved file.
Implemented Navigation Services. This is a feature of the upcoming Mac OS 8.5, but you can still use this feature if you are running Mac OS 8.1 by installing the Navigation library, enclosed with this release, in your Extensions folder.
The alpha 2 release had some problems with regions due to some last minute changes, and this could cause crashes when editing a polynomial associated with a Rational fractal. This release should be more stable.
Mostly a bug fix release. Normally I would have delayed this release until there were more substantial enhancements, but the last generally distributed version, 1.2, has a serious bug (the "Save As PICT..." bug) and needs to be replaced now.
There is one major new feature — the ability to save an image as a PNG file. PNG is a relatively new standard graphics format that uses a lossless compression algorithm to store 24-bit color images.
Although the "Render Image..." option permits the creation of very large image files, restrictions in the PICT format prevents these images from being stored as PICT files. PNG does not suffer from this restriction.
There was one really major bug that slipped through with v1.2 — the "Save As PICT..." command did not work with a fractal window, it simply did nothing! It only worked with an image created with the "Render Image..." command, but this could only be used by registered users. This has been fixed. "Save As PICT..." now will save fractal images directly from the fractal window. For unregistered users, this will work with fractals using the "Escape Time" dwell method and either no orbit trap or the cross orbit trap. For registered users, it will work for all fractals.
Behavior in low memory conditions has been improved. In particular, some operations would fail "silently" when there was insufficient memory — now an alert box will come up in these circumstances.
A beta release – I revert to the prudent principle of releasing significantly changed code as a beta before the general release. At this point I realized saving very large files to PICT was futile, so I added support for the PNG format, which I had intended to do anyway. Also fixed the "Save as PICT..." bug. See description of v1.2.2 for details.
This release was an attempt to fix the problem with saving large image files to PICT format. At this point I wasn't aware of the restrictions that exist in creating PICT files. Naturally, the attempt was unsuccessful. This release also had other problems, (for instance, the "Save as PICT..." problem, described above, was still present). It was quickly pulled off the web site and replaced with v1.2.2b1.
This is the first shareware version. Several significant features were added since the last release. Also, the user interface was improved. For instance, some dialog boxes were combined into "tabbed" dialog boxes, and parameter values can be changed and tried out by using the "Apply" button, obviating the need to repeatedly open dialog boxes.
Major new features include:
New Options for generating dwell values (continuous potential, angular decomposition, distance estimation).
More orbit trap fractals; in addition to stalk-type fractals, you can now use: imaginary or real stalks, circular or square orbit traps).
New features for quality image generation: image rendering with anti-aliasing, and spooling large images to disk (allows the generation of images too large to fit into available RAM).
Before v1.2, the program was called FracPPC, and was freeware. FracPPC v1.1 is still available.
With this release, I finally decided to start a version history. All entries before this one, therefore, were reconstructed from memory and whatever I can reconstruct from the release notes for each version.
I have a lot of ideas for additional features for FracPPC, but since all versions I have released so far have been "beta" versions, I resolved to refrain from adding any new features until I had fixed all known bugs and cleaned up any parts of the program that were incomplete. As a result, FracPPC is considerably less "flaky."
Things that were fixed:
Finally, handling of low memory conditions has been made much more robust. I would appreciate any reports of reproducible crashes in low memory situations. I have cleaned this up quite a bit, but I suspect that memory management is still not perfect...
Color Map Editor now works. It sort of worked before, but I cleaned up all the loose ends and partially implemented features. This still isn't what the "real" color map editor will eventually be, this one is too hard to use. However, it does work now.
Preferences are now saved. Some startup preferences were added (these would have been meaningless when preferences were not being saved!)
Printing is fixed. This stopped working sometime in the two years between v1.0b2 and v1.1b1 — or maybe it never worked properly. Now it works right for any size fractal and any choice of parameters in the Page Setup dialog.
OK, so it's been a while! I didn't spend the entire intervening two years working on FracPPC, obviously! But, some significant new features were added that finally qualify this program as a serious tool for generating fractal images — admittedly, it still has far to go, but I think this is the minimum essential set of features.
- Images can be saved to PICT files
- Areas of image can be selected for zooming
- Can edit color maps
- Can apply color maps separately to different regions of fractal
- User interface has been improved
In a way, the ability to save to PICT files is the most important improvement. Without that, previous versions were more like "toy" programs. Now images can be used as input to graphics programs to manipulate or enhance the image.
The ability to separate fractals into different regions with different color maps is more significant than it may sound. This means that stalks, for example, can be colored separately from the rest of the fractal. Some stunning effects can be achieved with this capability (see the example parameter files). Now that the infrastructure for this capability is laid down, I intend to use it extensively as I add new fractal types to the program, so this will be increasingly useful with future versions.
This version fixed a significant bug in version 1.0b1. I had made a mistake in my effort to take full advantage of 16 & 24 bit color displays, and as a result many people saw only a blank window rather than a fractal.
In addition to the bug fix, the ability to generate Julia fractals was added. Also, the Pickover convergence criterion that generates the effect commonly known as "stalks" was added. Also added dithering for 8 bit displays.
This is the first publicly released version of FracPPC. It is a very rudimentary program which I wrote because at the time there were no programs available that took advantage of the superb floating point capabilities of the PowerPC to generate fractals.
This version only generated zooms of the Mandelbrot set. Random color maps could be generated. The most significant limitation was that the resulting image could not be copied to the clipboard nor saved as a PICT file. The image could be printed, however. Also, 8, 16, and 24 bit displays were all fully supported (or so I thought...)
