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Show HN: FractalViewer: A JavaScript fractal explorer

valera-rozuvan.github.io

This is awesome :) The one feature request I have that would make navigating a lot less frustrating is for the zoom to go to where the cursor is located, instead of the center of the screen.

Will be implemented in version 2.0 of FractalViewer. See progress at https://github.com/valera-rozuvan/FractalViewer/issues/1 .

Great! :)

Love it! Nice job! Did you think about using a render technique like the maps one? (render smaller square intead of all the screen multiple times)

Right now FractalViewer is using a modified version of the Successive Refinement algorithm invented by Robert P. Munafo. See a description of the original algorithm http://mrob.com/pub/muency/successiverefinement.html .

Version 2 of FractalViewer will use Web Workers (multipple threads) to render the image, so it will resemble "the maps one" (rendering multiple smaller squares at once). See progress on this at https://github.com/valera-rozuvan/FractalViewer/issues/3 .

By the way - maybe I got your question wrong. What do you mean by "a render technique like the maps one"? Can you point me to a resource where it is described?

You got completely right! Version 2 answered my question, thanks!

Is there a way to increase the max depth by just rendering the zoomed area, or is it unviable as the mathematics require calculating the entire object?

Last time I implemented something like this was in uni about 10 years ago now, but I recall that not being the case – you should be able to render just the visible area, as (at least in the case of Mandelbrot) the data is independent.

Do you mean to render the same view (what you see), but at a higher resolution? So that, for example, you can print it out?

No, I mean that at a certain level of zoom the fractal appears to stop being generated, and I end up just zooming into pixel blocks. For example, if you try to recreate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jGaio87u3A you can only for for a bit before the fractal appears to stop generating.

It's because currently FractalViewer is not designed to work around floating point precision limits in JavaScript. So, after zooming a bit, you hit the "pixelated wall". I plan to address this issue in future release of FractalViewer. See https://github.com/valera-rozuvan/FractalViewer/issues/10 .

More information on JS floating point numbers, their limitations, and ways to work around those limits - can be found in this informative article http://blog.chewxy.com/2014/02/24/what-every-javascript-deve... .

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