Today I added a couple of features to Marzipan, my fractal generator, so I’m going to show a few images of what I worked on 🙂

First, I refactored the orbit trap coloring to be able to expand it with other types of orbit traps; then I added the implementation for line orbit traps. Turns out, adding random line and point orbit traps is pretty fun, and can yield pretty results!

The other thing that I did was to add “multi-color palettes”: instead of giving a “beginning color” and an “end-color”, I can now pass a set of colors that will get used over the value interval. Which means, I can get much more colorful (and hence incredibly more eye-hurting) images!

And, well, I can also combine these two approaches to get NEON RAINBOWS!

Finally, I also played a bit with the ratios of the image that I generate – the goal is to not distort the general shape of the bulbs when zooming in the image. This is still pretty unsatisfactory, I need to make that work better (and to understand exactly how the size of the Qt window interacts with my window manager, because I’m probably making my life more complicated than it strictly needs to be there).

I had a lot of fun today implementing all of that, and then losing myself into finding fun colorings and fun trap orbits and all that kind of things. Now, the issue is that if I have more colors, I have more leeway to generate REALLY UGLY IMAGES, and I may need to develop a bit of taste if I want to continue doing pretty stuff 😉

Now what crossed my mind today:

• I believe I have a bug, either in the multi-color palette or in the orbit trap coloring – I’ve seen suspicious things when zooming on certain parts (colors changing whereas they should not have), so I’ll need to track it and fix it. I also made performance worse when playing with multiple orbits for laziness reasons, I’ll need to fix that too.
• I have some more things that I want to experiment with on orbit traps – I think there’s some prettiness I haven’t explored yet and I want to do that.
• I should really start thinking about getting a better UI. I want a have better UI, I don’t want to code the better UI 😛
• I should at least add a proper way to save an image instead of relying on getting them from the place where I dump them before displaying them – that would be helpful.
• I should also find a way to import/export “settings” so that a given image can be reproduced – right now it’s very ephemeral. Which is not necessarily a bad thing 😉
• I can probably improve the performance of the “increasing the number of iterations” operation, and I should do that.
• The “image ratio” thing is still very fuzzy and I need to think a bit more about what I want and how to do it.