[chaoscope] New user, and a few questions...
- From: Kay Dekker <kaydekker@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: chaoscope@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2007 22:32:13 +0000 (GMT)
Hello everyone!
I'm Kay (a male Kay, which sometimes confuses people who think that all Kays
are female), and I've been having fun with fractals and chaos ever since I read
the Scientific American article on the Mandelbrot set by A K Dewdney back in
August 1985.
First, I want to say that I really like Chaoscope. The only thing that I'd put
on my wishlist for it would be some kind of scripting language (like the
Fractint formula interpreter) so that new functions could be added easily. Of
course they wouldn't run as fast as compiled code would, but it would at least
be handy for prototyping. I know that it would take a lot of work, so I'm not
expecting it to happen any time soon :)
I'm using Chaoscope on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core 3800+ running at 2GHz with
2Gb of RAM, and a Radeon X1300 graphics card, which makes things very nice and
fast for me.
A few things I've noticed: maybe bugs, maybe not. I just thought I should
mention them.
1) It doesn't seem possible to set the View Width and Height to arbitrary
values by entering them in the fields. For example, if I type in "300" to
Width, it changes to "296"; "295" changes to "288", and so on. If there isn't a
strong reason for restricting the values, I'd respectfully say that that is a
bug :)
2) The largest number of iterations that I can set is 4294967295. I know I'm
lucky that I have a fast machine, but truly that sometimes isn't enough
iterations to eliminate all the "noise" in Solid Render mode, and often
represents only about an hour of rendering time. Could there be some way to
make the maximum number of iterations larger for those of us who can afford
them?
3) This is somewhat hard to describe, so please bear with me. If I render an
attractor in Solid mode, and then switch to Plasma or Light mode and re-render,
it seems that the gradients are not applied correctly. Instead of the normal
'rainbow' appearance expected from the default Speed gradient, the image is
rendered in shades of pink through white, and sometimes with a sharply
demarcated band of a quite saturated red. Usually, moving the image does NOT
fix the problem, though Adjusting the view or changing any of the parameter
values will. Opening a new speed gradient, or Reversing the gradient also does
not fix the problem either.
4) Could the new version please not keep restoring things to their default
values? For example, if I've set up colours in Solid mode, and then switch to
Plasma, and then back to Solid, my colours have been reset to the defaults.
Also (this may make no sense, and if it doesn't I apologise) if, say, I have
values set up for P0, P1 and P2 for a Polynomial Type A, and then I change to
Polynomial Type B, could it please keep the existing values of P0, P1 and P2,
and just zero the values of P3, P4 and P5? I think this would be particularly
handy for things like IFS, where you can change the number of matrices - I keep
having to write down the 'old' values of the components to type them in again
when I investigate the effect of adding in a new matrix.
Oh dear, this sounds as though I'm complaining! Truly, I'm not - just telling
you what I've found and what I think, based on a few weeks' experimentation
with Chaoscope. Maybe others have said the same before, and if so, I apologise
for repeating :)
If any of you are LiveJournalers, I'm "mhw" there. And if people would like to
see what I've been doing, I have a small gallery of Chaoscope images at
http://pics.livejournal.com/mhw/gallery/0000wf81?.view=grid
Happy Chaos to you all!
Kay
___________________________________________________________
What kind of emailer are you? Find out today - get a free analysis of your
email personality. Take the quiz at the Yahoo! Mail Championship.
http://uk.rd.yahoo.com/evt=44106/*http://mail.yahoo.net/uk
=====================================================The Chaoscope mailing-list
Archives : //www.freelists.org/archives/chaoscope
Admin contact : chaoscope@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Web site : http://www.chaoscope.org
=====================================================
Other related posts:
