Iterated Dynamics

Iterated Dynamics is an open source fractal renderer that can generate the following fractal types:

Mandelbrot set
Julia sets
Inverse Julia sets
Newton domains of attraction
Lambda sets
Mandelbrot version of lambda sets
Plasma clouds
Generalized lambda sets
Halley map
Phoenix curve
Barnsley Mandelbrot/Julia sets
Barnsley IFS
Sierpinski gasket
Quartic Mandelbrot/Julia sets
Pickover Mandelbrot/Julia sets
Pickover popcorn
Dynamic system
Mandelcloud
Peterson Mandelbrot variations
Unity
Kam torus
Bifurcation
Lorenz attractors
Rossler attractors
Henon attractors
Pickover attractors
Gingerbread man
Martin attractors
Icon
Latoocarfian
Quaternion
Hyper complex
Cellular automata
Ant automaton
Custom escape-time formula
Frothy basins
Julibrot
Diffusion limited aggregation
Lyapunov
Magnetic
Volterra-Lotka
Escher-like Julia sets
L-systems

See the on-line help for more of what the software can do.

See the wiki for the current release plan.

Building

Iterated Dynamics uses CMake to generate build scripts and vcpkg to manage third party library dependencies. You will need a C++ compiler capable of supporting the C++17 standard.

Make a directory for the source code and build directories and then clone this source repository, initialize and update git submodules with the commands:

mkdir id
cd id
git clone https://github.com:LegalizeAdulthood/iterated-dynamics
cd iterated-dynamics
git submodule init
git submodule update

CMake presets are provided to simplify building the code. The command

cmake --workflow --preset default

will configure, build and test the code in the directory id/build-default, a sibling directory to the source code in id/iterated-dynamics.

The build will first compile hc, the help compiler. This generates the run-time help file from the help source files and an include file used by the iterated dynamics compile.

Contributing

Iterated Dynamics welcomes contributions from everyone! The code has a long history of contributions from many people over the years. There are many small ways in which the code can be improved as well as large changes that are on the release plan.

To get started, fork the repository into your github account. We recommend using the github workflow to make contributions to Iterated Dynamics. We recommend you enable GitHub Actions on your repository to get feedback on your changes as you push to your branch in your repository.

Once your change is ready, prepare a pull request and submit it back for incorporation into the main repository. We couldn't have gotten this far without contributions from many persons!

Code Structure

Most of the source code is in a library named libid in a folder by the same name. The files are organized in the IDE into various categories:

3d Files containing 3D drawing support. Eventually these should be subsumed into the driver interface, with this sofwtare implementation as a fallback if the driver doesn't support 3D rendering.
engine Files containing the implementation of the fractal rendering engines that are shared between multiple fractal types. Also contains the big array that defines the available fractal types.
fractal specific Files containing rendering code or user interaction code that is specific to a particular fractal, such as the Lorenz fractal or L-system type.
IO Anything related to doing external file I/O: saving and loading GIF files, dealing with overlay files, saving parameter files, etc.
math Files containing math routines for arbitrary precision arithmetic, complex arithmetic, etc.
plumbing Miscellaneous routines that don't fit elesewhere like memory and driver management.
ui Anything to do with displaying menu screens, help screens, intro screen, etc.

Additional files are in the following directories:

fractint Miscellaneous files in the main fractint source folder. These are not currently used for any of the compilation of the code and are placed here just for reference.
hc Help source files with a custom build step on help.src to run the help compiler on the source to generate new fractint.hlp and helpdefs.h files.
unix Files needed for the unix platform.
win32 Files needed for the Win32 platform.