You can use the mouse to explore fractals.\n\nDouble-click to zoom in.\nClick and drag to pan.\nDouble-click with the right mouse button to zoom out.
You can graphically select a favourite fractal to load. On the Location menu, click Favourite Spots.
You can rotate fractals by Ctrl-dragging them.
You can try out the tip of the day without having to close the Tip of the Day window.
If you prefer using the keyboard to explore fractals, the 'I' key zooms in around the mouse, 'O' zooms out, and the Arrow keys pan.
You can get arbitrary magnification control, with real-time feedback, by Shift-dragging on a fractal. Moving up increases the magnification, moving down decreases it.
You can get precise magnification control by typing a zoom level into the Set Location window's Zooms text box.
Fractal eXtreme uses a lot of special optimizations and tricks to render fractals as quickly as possible. If they are still too slow, make your window smaller, or decrease the Maximum Iterations Per Pixel value in the Iteration Control window.
You can easily set your desktop wallpaper to the fractal you are exploring by choosing Save As Wallpaper from the File menu.
Fractal eXtreme makes calculation of animated zoom movies both easy and efficient. From the Render menu, click Make Zoom Movie, choose a filename, and that's it!
You can render zoom movies most efficiently by making your fractal window quite small before starting a render. This will save time and disk space. Then, when you play the movie, make the playback window large. Fractal eXtreme's movie player uses inter-frame data interpolation for high-quality scaling, so quality is almost unaffected by rendering at a reduced size.
Fractal eXtreme's curve based palette editor makes it trivial to choose beautiful colours for your fractals. From the Options menu, click Colour Palette.
Fractal eXtreme's palette editor makes it easy to do psychedelic colour cycling -- just select the Cycle colours option in the Colour Palette window.
Fractal eXtreme employs multi-pass drawing, with each pass having higher resolution, to give you a rough preview as much as sixty-four times faster than the full calculation.
Fractal eXtreme's palette editor has multi-level undo, cut, copy, paste, and other editing options.
If you want a striped palette for your fractals, choose Show Stripes from the Colour Palette window's Colour menu. This lets you edit the even and odd colours separately.
Fractal eXtreme's multi-level undo (Ctrl+Z) means you can easily retrace your exploratory steps.
Fractal eXtreme's arbitrary precision (deep zoom) capability means that you can explore to unimaginable depths -- you will give up long before Fractal eXtreme does. Available on selected equations only, a maximum of two thousand decimal digits of precision, or 7200 zooms!
Fractal eXtreme is a 32-bit program that makes full use of the power of modern microprocessors. This also means that Fractal eXtreme lets you save your fractal finds with long descriptive file names.
You can let Fractal eXtreme do the exploring for you. On the Location menu, click Auto Explorer.
You can get Fractal eXtreme to graphically show the location of one fractal relative to another. On the Location menu, click View Location. Or, select the fractal you want to use as the map and press Ctrl+L.
You can highlight the edges between iteration bands. On the View menu, click Edges.
Some fractal equations have additional options. Read their descriptions to find out, or choose Plug-In Setup from the Options menu.
The Set Location window shows the coordinates of the center of the window, to the appropriate level of accuracy. This can be anywhere from one to two thousand digits!
If you have any comments or suggestions you can contact us by sending e-mail to: comments@cygnus-software.com
Fractal eXtreme does all its fractal calculations in background threads, so that no matter what you are doing, the calculations continue at top speed.
The area of the Mandelbrot set (the black bulbuous thing) is finite. The length of its border is infinite. How does it do that?
After a fractal has finished calculating, you can display a real-time animation of its iteration bands appearing. On the Render menu, click Make Iteration Movie.
The help file describes all of Fractal eXtreme's menus, windows, and dialog boxes. It also contains priceless gems of fractal wisdom. On the Help menu, click Help Topics. Alternatively, press F1.
The Colour Palette window's multi-level undo is active even when the Colour Palette window isn't open. So, if you load a new fractal, and you don't like the palette it brought with it, you can always go to the Colour Palette and undo the loaded palette.
It took a long time, and a lot of careful work from a dedicated team, to make Fractal eXtreme what it is today. I hope you enjoy our creation!
You can show the path that a point follows during its calculations by Ctrl+Shift-dragging a fractal. Note how the calculation paths of interior points never go too far away, while the calculation paths of exterior points quickly explode off to infinity. Most points in the interior go into a repeated cycle -- watch the status bar for cycle lengths.
Fractal eXtreme supports multiple processors -- for the fastest possible fractal exploration experience.
You can adjust a Julia fractal's seed point by Alt-clicking on a non-Julia fractal. Alt-dragging animates the Julia set.
The fractal files that Fractal eXtreme saves (the .fx files) are standard BMP files. Any program that loads BMP files should be able to load and use them. Some programs have problems with compressed BMP files, or the extra data Fractal eXtreme inserts. If you run into this, complain to the vendor, and use Fractal eXtreme's Copy or Save Bitmap Only commands to save files that these programs can handle.
Because Fractal eXtreme lets you open up multiple fractal windows simultaneously, it is easy to study the differences and similarities in different areas of fractals.
Fractal eXtreme's plug-in architecture allows you to explore dozens of different types of fractals, including Julia sets and many more.
Fractal eXtreme's plug-in architecture means that any C programmer can add new equations to Fractal eXtreme -- contact Cygnus Software for details.
Fractal eXtreme lets you calculate fractals that are larger than screen size. On the Options menu, click Advanced Settings. Then select the Virtual screen option and type in any image size your computer can handle. Use the Save Bitmap Only command (in the File menu) to save the result to disk.
Most of Fractal eXtreme's dialog boxes are modeless, meaning that you can continue exploring your fractals, or open other dialog boxes, without having to close the first one. Even this Tip of the Day window is modeless, so you can try out a tip while you are reading about it.
Writing a fractal exploration program requires a lot of mathematical knowledge. Using one doesn't.
The Mandelbrot set contains many (actually an infinite number) of distorted miniature copies of itself. To see one of them, on the Location menu, click Set Location, then type +0.377,586,1 into the Real text box and +0.207,273,3 into the Imaginary text box. Finally, click the Zooms up arrow until you're at around sixteen zooms. See it? To make it more precise and detailed, increase your Maximum Iterations Per Pixel value in the Iteration Control window.
The infinite complexity of the Mandelbrot set and other fractals comes from incredibly simple formulae. The formula for the Mandelbrot set can be expressed simply as Z(n+1) = Z(n) * Z(n) + C. Isn't that amazingly weird?
Setting maximum iterations to higher levels gives you a more detailed, and more "accurate" picture, but also increases the time required to calculate images. Feel free to set it to whatever level looks good. On the Options menu, click Iteration Control.
If you're dragging something in Fractal eXtreme (a fractal, or a palette editor control point) and you want to cancel the drag, click the right mouse button or press the ESC key.
Fractal eXtreme makes it easy to calculate full-screen-size fractals. Just maximize the main window and the document window and the image created will be screen size, even though not all of it will be visible within Fractal eXtreme.
Fractal eXtreme's Colour Palette window has pop-up (context) menus attached to the curve editing areas. These let you paste part of one curve into another, at any location.
Don't forget to visit our website, to check out our fractal gallery and other neat pages. Browse over to: http://www.cygnus-software.com
See your name as a fractal. Open an Autoquad fractal window. Then, on the Options menu, click Plug-In Setup and type away.
