Fractal eXtreme, is a fractal exploration program that draws pictures of the Mandelbrot set and other fractals on your PC and allows you to explore these fractals by zooming and panning towards interesting areas with your mouse or keyboard.

In Fractal eXtreme, we have attempted to combine speed, power, and simplicity with a few unique features -- all designed to make it easy for you to discover uncharted regions of the Mandelbrot set and many other fractals.

Point and click animated zooming is the most intuitive way of exploring fractals that we could think of. It's as easy as using a magnifying glass.

Fractal eXtreme's multi-pass drawing means that even slower PCs can easily explore fractals. It lets you see an approximation of the final picture in just a fraction of a second. Even for pictures that will take several minutes to complete, you can get a good idea of what your picture will look like almost immediately. This allows you to decide quickly whether to keep zooming, or wait for the completed picture.

Fractal eXtreme has a multi-window, multi-dialog design. You can adjust parameters and see the changes in real time as Fractal eXtreme continues calculating. Leave as many dialogs and fractal windows open as you want. Here we see three antialiased fractal windows, the status window, the Julia seed control window, and the bottom right fractal window is displaying the Julia seed location, the location of the other two windows, and a grid

Fractal eXtreme has separately optimized code for the Pentium 4, to ensure maximum performance.

Fractal eXtreme lets you calculate fractal zoom movies quickly, by calculating key frames and letting Fractal eXtreme's Movie Player create the intermediate frames at playback time. Zooom movies are very easy to create -- just choose your area, specify a file name for your zoom movie, and go!

The results, crudely simulated here with this animated GIF, can be quite spectacular. And, by using the zoom movie plugin you can put spectacular zoom movies in web pages. You can also convert these zoom moviess to .AVI format, for use in multi-media and other applications.

Limitations:

· Fractal eXtreme is almost fully functional program in demo mode. However, it has a limited zoom range (still greater than most fractal programs) and displays a reminder screen each time you run it. If you wish to continue using Fractal eXtreme, and if you want it to be fully enabled again, you must then purchase it. Fractal eXtreme can be purchased for $34.95 over the Internet, modem, phone, or fax, and will be instantly unlocked as soon as you purchase it.


What's New in This Release:

· Due to a bug in MFC 7.1, double-clicking on .fx files would not reliably open them in Fractal eXtreme. This also affected the 'Explore from Here' button in the zoom movie player.
· The interactive rotating of antialiased images was completely broken.
· The 'acceleration' value in the colour mapping dialog was always being displayed as zero.