What's new in Fractal eXtreme 2.25
Jan 17, 2016
- This release fixes a bug with creating of zoom movies that was introduced in 2.24 - all zoom movies created were corrupt.
- This release also restores the spiral rendering technique, when doing deep zooming.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.24 (Jan 12, 2016)
- Fixed bugs that caused two image finalization steps to run once on each worker thread, causing multi-second hangs on many-core machines on high-res images
- Fixed limitations that prevented guessing from working on the last four chores
- Changed rendering to always do horizontal lines instead of spiraling out from the center, for greater efficiency
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.23 (Jun 10, 2013)
- A fix was made to correct a bug that prevented Fractal eXtreme from reloading very large (over 105 MB) .fx files.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.22 (May 13, 2013)
- A fix was made to correct a bug that prevented Fractal eXtreme from running under Wine.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.21 (Sep 19, 2012)
- A number of optimizations were made to the playback of zoom movies - the frame rate is often two to three times higher now, especially on the 64-bit version.
- A Vertical Sync option was added to the zoom movie player. This option synchronizes playback to the monitor refresh which can make for more stable playback speeds. This also stops the zoom movie player from wasting resources trying to play back movies faster than the monitor can display them.
- A bug in the auto-explorer system that prevented calculations from continuing after saving an auto-explored image was fixed.
- Fixed some bugs in the bilinear filtering code that could lead to crashes or slightly incorrect results.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.20 (Dec 29, 2011)
- A bug related to pixel guessing was fixed. On one test movie this fix gave an overall calculation speedup of over 25%!
- Support for variable speed playback when converting zoom movies to AVI movies was added.
- A bug that would occasionally cause crashes when saving a zoom movie was corrected.
- A bug that would cause images wider than 4,096 pixels to not reload iteration data was fixed.
- A bug that caused failures when creating zoom movies from fractals that were rotated 90 or 270 degrees was fixed.
- The progress meter that appears when rendering a zoom movie has been improved. It is now horizontally sizeable, it has an option to pause rendering, and it has an option to bring up the status window for more details on what is happening.
- The timers that track how much time has been spent rendering an image or a movie now stop counting when your machine goes into hibernation, which makes them a more accurate reflection of the total computing time.
- Statistics about each frame rendered are now saved to a .fxz.log file in the same directory as the movie. This records how long each frame took to calculate, the total number of iterations, the percentage of pixels that were guessed, the precision, and more.
- When you save a zoom movie as an AVI file it is now optional whether the resulting AVI will be played automatically.
- The undo limit in FX was increased from 50 to 500.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.11 (Dec 29, 2011)
- A bug with changing the zoom speed in the Zoom Movie player using the up/down arrow keys was corrected.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.10 (Dec 29, 2011)
- Customers continue to make ever longer zoom movies, and even the 64-bit version of the zoom movie player hit a limitation that prevented movies longer than about 4900 zooms from being loaded. This is fixed and you can now create zoom movies up to the full precision of Fractal eXtreme.
- Some optimizations to the Mandelbrot deep zoom code were made. This gives up to a 25% speedup and is discussed in more detail here.
- Performance when repeatedly zooming was significantly improved. When Fractal eXtreme does its animated smooth-zoom after a double-click it is actually calculating the next image in the background. In the ideal scenario it can finish calculating the next image before it is actually needed, at which point you have true real-time fractal exploration. There used to be a 50-100 millisecond delay before this calculation began and this has been removed, so real-time fractal exploration - especially if you have a many-core processor - is now easier to get than ever before.
- Video synchronization on zoom movies was improved.
- Control of zoom movie playback speed was improved, especially at slow speeds.
- It was made harder to accidentally cancel the creation of a zoom movie.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.04 (Dec 29, 2011)
- Fixes a bug that would cause the File Open menu to fail the second time it was used.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.03 (Jan 14, 2010)
- This version of Fractal eXtreme adds a 64-bit version of the zoom movie player, installed automatically when you install 64-bit Fractal eXtreme. This allows zoom movies of length limited only by your computing power and installed memory.
- Creation of zoom movies beyond about 530 zooms was broken if the fractal image was rotated. This has been fixed.
- Zoom movies weren't loading reliably into Fractal eXtreme, meaning that the Explore from Here functionality in the zoom movie player was not reliable. This has been fixed.
- The Save as Wallpaper command in Fractal eXtreme has been broken since Windows Vista was introduced. It is now fixed.
- Fixed a few crash bugs in the zoom movie player.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.02 (Nov 3, 2009)
- Version 2.02 has been tested and confirmed to work with Windows 7, both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Fractal eXtreme also still works with Windows XP and Windows Vista. You can download the latest version from here.
- When you go buy your shiny new quad-core computer with tons of RAM be sure to get the 64-bit version of Windows 7 to get the substantial Fractal eXtreme benefits such as four times faster deep-zoom calculations.
- However the biggest change for this release is the update of the plugin development kit. The documentation has been significantly improved and the sample plugin now includes a working example of how to create a deep-zoom plugin. Every installation of Fractal eXtreme now includes helper routines for high precision math that have been highly optimized and are easily available for plugin developers. The new plugin developer kit requires Visual C++ 2008 and is available here. With luck we'll see some third-party plugins for PRODUCTNAME, or perhaps a programming course based on creating plugins.
- Some of the miscellaneous changes made include:
- Fixed a problem with unreliable loading of zoom movies into Fractal eXtreme, such as when using Explore From Here in the zoom movie player.
- The auto-explore maximum depth was changed from 2,000 to 7,200.
New in Fractal eXtreme 2.01 (Dec 23, 2008)
- Fixed "Encountered an improper argument" file dialog bug on Vista.
- Fixed crashing bug when zooming out rapidly with the mouse wheel.
- Fixed preferences dialog bug that would reset preferences on closing.
- Added checking for new versions.