Be Excellent To Each Other

This place is understandably glum at the moment. I hope this will cheer someone up, maybe the older and geekier among you *waves*.

At some point during the last couple of months, Microsoft finally fixed whatever it was that was preventing me from installing Visual Studio 2015 Community in Windows 10. So I have been teaching myself some DirectX, and while learning pixel shaders, I had a light-bulb moment.

And here is the result, a program that will let you zoom around in the Mandelbrot set in real time. Behold a demonstration:



You basically just left click to zoom in, right click to zoom out. The program will start up with a text summarizing the functions available. Esc to quit.

You can use alt-enter to leave full screen mode.

The program should work on Windows 7 (fully updated) or newer, but you need a graphics card that supports Shader Model 4.0 (ie. DirectX 10, I think). That's probably almost all of them by now. If you don't have that, the program will simply quit with a baffling message.

I have limited the maximum zoom level, because beyond the chosen point, the floating point number representation becomes insufficient for the calculations, and things start the get wobbly and pixelated anyway.

If you get areas where the spirals have black holes at the centre, or where the edge of the black part (the actual Mandelbrot set) looks incomplete, you can try increasing the max. iterations. But be careful! Setting this too high may cause the program to become unresponsive, since it will basically lock the pixel shaders. I have limited this possibility to a point that seems safe, but I have no way of knowing if it is enough for all computers - so just make sure the frame rate doesn't drop too far. Be particularly wary if there is a lot of black on the screen since this is where that max. number of calculations are done. If you are unsure, don't touch it, or at least make sure you don't have any unsaved work in other programs (probably the right thing to do in any case).

Now then, THIS IS UNSIGNED CODE STRAIGHT OUT OF MY COMPUTER. I have obviously done my utmost to ensure that this program is safe to run. It doesn't do any I/O writes or network stuff. But if you suspect that I am a terrible person, or simply inept, don't run it! Or use a sandbox or whatever. YOU RUN IT AT YOUR OWN RISK!. I am truly sorry to have to say this, because it sounds terrible, but I feel I need to cover my back.

That looks cool.

What's a Mandelbrot set?

It's mathematical awesomeness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set

You young and fast living types, you wouldn't know this sort of thing.

BTW, if you try to run it and Windows says No Fucking Way, click 'More info' to get to tell it Yes Fucking Way. At your own risk, obv.

That video is awesome, and has made my eyes and brain go all wonky.

Heh, Koch Curve.

Infinite Complexity!

ARRRRRRGGGGGggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

etc...

That was pretty cool, I do quite like Fractals and trippy stuff like that.