Vandalbrot

A Windows-forms based Mandelbrot fractal thingy.

Inspired by this.

I used to run something called Fractint on my first PC back in the early 90s and it used to take minutes to render a Mandelbrot set on a 640 x 480 screen; now it takes less than a second...

The mandelbrot set is the set of complex (two-dimensional) numbers that when a particular function is repeatedly applied, it converges on a value. Sounds complicated but it really isn't. I recommend the book above for a better explaination! Here's the bit of code that does the maths:

        private int GetDivergence(Complex c, int maxIterations) {
            var z = new Complex(0, 0);
            int i;
            for (i = 0; iter < maxIterations; iter++) {
                z = z * z + c;
                // If magnitude > 4, it's diverging for sure so skip out.
                if (z.Magnitude() > 4) {
                    break;
                }
            }
            return i;
        }

Than all you do is set up a two-dimensional canvas where each pixel represents a particular complex-number and apply that function to each one. If you then assign a colour to how quickly it diverges from the initial value, you get some pretty amazing patterns!

Features

• Zooming in and out with mouse-wheel
• panning with mouse
• Low-fi rendering of intermediate view during mouse operations

To Do

• zoom is buggy
• debouncing
• save coords
• reset button
• adjust max iterations
• buttons to replicate mouse operations (zoom, pan)

Nice to have

• customise pallete offset?
• cycle the palette?