What?

mdz is a Mandelbrot Set explorer and image renderer. The Mandelbrot Set is perhaps the most famous fractal.

Unlike other similar software for Linux (as far as I am aware), mdz is the only application that allows you to zoom in deeper than your hardware's native floating point support allows. MDZ uses the GMP and MPFR libraries for multiple-precision floating-point computations to allow deep exploration of the M-Set beyond where ordinary precision floating-point calculations fall apart.

NEWS

NEWS - 31st January 2017

Has it really been this long?

I'm currently working on a few new features to make MDZ a little more user friendly and/or improve workflow. Initially began as a few minor bug fixes then moved onto a few fixes for irritations. Essentially this stuff is low hanging fruit and nothing exciting.

A release should turn up at some point but until then, checkout the git repo.

NEWS - 20th November 2010

mdz-0.1.1 fixes a couple of problems by removing a minor feature which probably went unotticed by all but the most technical and inquisitive minds. mdz-0.1.1 now forces all images to be saved in the RGB format. Older versions only saved to RGB format if colour-interpolation or anti-aliasing were in use. Forcing RGB format in the saved image fixes some problems related to limitations in palette indexes.

NEWS - 15th November 2010

Another new feature release - archive/mdz-0.1.0 goes against my previous statements of MDZ never rendering any other fractal type than the Mandelbrot Set. This new release includes 3 fractals new to MDZ. These are the Burning Ship fractal, Generalized Celtic, and a variation of the Generalized Celtic I decided to call "Variant".

archive/mdz-0.1.0 also makes available a slightly faster multi-precision maths mode which uses GMP instead of MPFR. GMP may not produce as high-quality images as MPFR and for that reason, MPFR rendering is still available by selecting the "Correct Rounding" mode.

Finally, a fix worth mentioning is for when duplicate is used (from the file menu) or zoom-in-new-window is used. Both of these invoke a new instance of MDZ like they always have done, but now they don't loose image dimensions, anti-aliasing settings, or threads settings.

NEWS - 11th November 2010

A new feature release - archive/mdz-0.0.9 adds improvements to the colour palette manipulation dialogs. Gone are the colour-scaling, random-palette, function-palette, and colour-cycling dialogs, and in comes one single tabbed notebook dialog along with a display of all the colours in the palette. The palette display can be dragged with the image updated as the colours are dragged for fine tuning of the palette offset position.

The introduction of the draggable colour display has caused an incompatibility* between mdz-0.0.9 MDZ settings files and older versions of MDZ. However, older MDZ settings files are compatible with mdz-0.0.9.

*The incompatibility is a result of now using an offset value for colour cycling instead of the old way of changing every colour in the palette.

MDZ Features

• Mandelbrot and Julia sets of the Mandelbrot Set and three close relations (The Burning Ship, The Generalized Celtic, and The 'Variant').
• Uses the GMP and the MPFR libraries to get past the native floating point precision limits of your hardware for really deep zooming.
• Multi-threaded rendering using POSIX Threads (since version 0.0.4) makes the rendering almost twice as fast compared to previous versions of mdz.
• Settings saved to file are human readable and can be edited in your favourite text editor.
• Command line options for rendering without the GUI, loading settings, specifying image size, logging location settings while zooming, etc.
• Julia set preview.
• Colour palette scaling, interpolation, manipulation, randomization, striping, load, save, and auto detection of palette files installed system-wide by other programs (gnofract4d, gfract, gkII, fractint).
• Change colour scaling and colours instantly without necessitating recalculation of fractal.
• Colour based RGB image anti-aliasing.
• Editing of either/both center coordinates and window corner coordinates.

mdz is on Freshmeat.net where you can subscribe to receive notification when mdz is updated.

There is also an mdz source repository at https://github.com/jwm-art-net/MDZ though it's mainly for backup.

	Name	Last modified	Size
	Parent Directory		-
	AUTHORS	14-Nov-2010 23:43	152
	BUGS	14-Nov-2010 23:43	242
	CHANGES	14-Nov-2010 23:43	8.5K
	COPYING	14-Nov-2010 23:43	18K
	INSTALL	04-Nov-2010 16:12	705
	MDZ Build Instructions for Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard.txt	10-Nov-2010 07:56	1.7K
	NEWS	04-Nov-2010 16:17	1.8K
	README	14-Nov-2010 23:44	4.0K
	THANKS	14-Nov-2010 23:44	78
	TODO	14-Nov-2010 23:44	276
	archive/	20-Nov-2010 14:27	-
	gallery/	29-Dec-2010 14:00	-
	mdz-0.1.1.tar.bz2	20-Nov-2010 14:23	63K
	screenshots/	22-Dec-2010 09:29	-

http://www.jwm-art.net