sdlfractal 0.1

Sdlfractal is a port of a simple little fractal generator which I wrote some five years ago. It is not supposed to replace wonderful tools like xfractint so it is very simple and not very fast. The main goal of this project was to learn SDL and it turned out that fltk was also required. The main construction is an SDL surface extended by a canvas class which simulates a high-resolution coordinate system. On this coordinate system the fractals can be drawn.

To control fractal parameters the generator displays a second window using the fltk engine. From this dialog the currently displayed fractal and it's parameters can be changed. This requires a dual engine event loop in the program.

By dragging the mouse on the drawing canvas you can zoom into all fractals. If fractal drawing takes too long (and nothing is shown), then just click the canvas and the generator will stop.

The fractal generator can also save high-resolution PNG files. The following images are some examples created by the fractal generator.

The source code to sdlfractal 0.1 can be downloaded in a tar.bz2 archive (121 KB). It is also browsable on the web.

Sdlfractal was designed to the portable to Win32 using SDL and fltk compiled with MinGW. A compiled version which should run out of the box on most windows. Download the zip archive(267 KB) containing the executable.

MD5sums of the source and binary archives:
538da60a5ef2d427fbb901d6080e631e sdlfractal-0.1.tar.bz2
5bab1ccb93e170f5c42d995a6761ca7a sdlfractal-0.1-win32.zip

This section of the mandelbrot fractal is so beautiful that it is my current wallpaper. It can be downloaded at 800x600 (242 KB), 1024x768 (372 KB) or 1280x960 (552 KB).

Screenshot of sdlfractal with the mandelbrot fractal.	Image from the tip of the mandelbrot set.
Cyan-colored snow flake from the mandelbrot fractal.	Blue-colored swirl.
Feigenbaum fractal	Zoomed into the chaos.
Mira dust fractal drawn on a transparent background.	Pythagoras tree using PNG transparency.