Release 4.0

Options Window - Fractal related options

Here you can configure settings which are related to fractals: They let you adjust memory usage, speed, etc.

Zoom Settings

• Speed: When you double click onto the fractal ChaosPro will scale the fractal in order to zoom in or out. This value lets you specify how much time (in milliseconds) this animated zoom should need.
• Animate: This checkbox lets you completely switch off the animated zoom feature of ChaosPro. This saves some CPU time.
• Factor: Lets you specify the normal zoom factor (i.e. when you double click onto a fractal). 2 means: ChaosPro will zoom in/out by a magnitude of 2.
• Factor (+Shift): Lets you specify the zoom factor when holding down the shift key. 4 means: ChaosPro will zoom in/out by a magnitude of 4, i.e. the complex rectangle will be divided by four.

Default Palette Mode

• 256 Colors: Tells ChaosPro that fractals by default use the 256 color mode. This mode allows you to do color cycling.
• Interpolated: Tells ChaosPro that fractals by default use the 24 bit mode. This mode allows the fractal to use all possible colors (upto 16 million colors).

Refresh Interval

ChaosPro calculates most of the fractals line by line. So after calculating a line the line could be drawn. But this way for a fractal of size 640 x 480 there would be 480 draw commands. Lets assume that a single draw command (Win32 API call) takes about 10 milliseconds (much of that time is overhead used up in the GDI sub system of Win32, so it does not matter very much whether one issues a command for drawing a single line or 10 lines). Then every fractal will need 4.8 seconds ONLY for drawing, not taken into account the time needed to actually calculating it.

Lets assume you calculate the standard Julia fractal, which needs a calculation time of, say, 3 seconds. Then ChaosPro would need 7.8 seconds instead of 3 due to all those drawing commands. Wouldn't it be nice if ChaosPro would calculate the whole fractal and draw it as a whole at the end (after 3 seconds) with one single draw command? This way ChaosPro would need 3.01 seconds.

Now lets assume you calculate a very nice, complicated fractal, which takes 5 minutes. Here it does not matter, whether it takes 5 minutes or 5 minutes and 4.8 seconds. So in this case ChaosPro should draw every line as soon as it is calculated.

To solve this issue the refresh interval can be specified, i.e how often ChaosPro issues a drawing command. The time is specified in milli seconds. After a line has been calculated ChaosPro tests whether the time elapsed since the last drawing command exceeds the time specified by this parameter. If no, it does not draw the line now. If yes, it draws all lines, which have been calculated since the last draw command.

In other words: ChaosPro adds up lines until the specified time has elapsed and then issues a drawing command.

Reducing the refresh interval results in more overhead for drawing commands, but you will see a smoother drawing. Increasing the interval results in less overhead for drawing commands, but the image is drawn in whole bunches of lines.

Redraw on Resize

Normally whenever you resize a fractal by resizing the fractal window ChaosPro will redraw the fractal. For long-running fractals this can be quite annoying, as it takes an enourmous amount of time. By unchecking this checkbox you tell ChaosPro that it does not need to redraw the fractal when you resize the window. ChaosPro then will simply scale the fractal and leave it as it is. You can then yourself press F5 (refresh) in order to redraw the fractal.

Redraw on MouseWheel

Same as before: If you use the mouse wheel in order to zoom in/out of the fractal normally ChaosPro will redraw the fractal after a short time. By unchecking this checkbox ChaosPro will only scale the image. You then need to press F5 or the space bar in order to redraw the fractal.

Undo Steps

This setting lets you specify how many changes ChaosPro should remember per fractal, so you can undo your changes. Set this value to 0 in order to completely disable the undo/redo mechanism, thus saving a (small) amount of memory.

Priority

Here you can specify the priority of all fractal threads. The priority class of all fractal calculation threads is the IDLE_CLASS, meaning that the fractals only take time which no other program really needs. So you can continue to work with other programs.
Within this class you now can specify the priority level.

Default Comment

Here you can specify the default comment template. New fractals will use this comment template. You can use several variables which will be replaced by their values, for example [xdots] or [ydots] for the width and height of the fractal, or [creationdate] for the date of fractal creation. For more information about comments see Comment Window.