Introduction to Leshy Fractal Explorer

When first loading Leshy Fractal Explorer the default view is a normal mandelbrot fractal. From this view it is possible to navigate the fractal in many ways.

Panning
Zooming
Rectangle Zooming
When zooming or panning the fractal draws in a notably lower quality in order to maintain performance. The quality used is referred to as the "Low Quality Scale" and can be customized so that faster systems can show more detail while doing these actions.

Many keys can be used to cycle through options. For example, the C key will cycle through different coloring modes. Each press of the C key will move to the next coloring mode.

Some keys can have their behavior reversed by pressing the SHIFT key along with them. For example, SHIFT and C will cycle to the previous coloring mode.

Here are some useful keys:
There are many other keys and key combinations supported. The full list along with more details can be found in the documentation.

The keys are laid out so that the common ones are accessible with the left hand on the home keys. This is intentional and it allows advanced users to quickly use the keyboard controls with their left hand and the mouse controls with their right. This isn't in anyway required, but can helpful.

There are a number of modes and filters supported. When calculating a final color each mode and filter can be used in combination.

Color Mode
Z-Color Mode
Zoom-Color Mode
Grayscale Filter
Invert Iterations Filter

When zooming sometimes features begin to smooth out and sometimes solid colored holes may appear. This may be because the "iterations" value is too low. It can be raised through the settings, or by pressing the 'D' key. The 'D' key causes causes it to cycle through some different values for the field. Raise the value up high, and the patterns will remain much more detailed far deeper into the fractal.

If you zoom much further into a fractal eventually things will get blocky. This is due to running out of floating point precision. There isn't much that can be done here. Some fractal programs support what is called "deep zooming" which allows the zooms to go way beyond this limitation by supporting larger precision floats. This was attempted, but the performance wasn't nearly good enough to release.

Auto-zooming allows the fractal to be zoomed into or out of at a fixed speed and framerate. When auto-zooming the mouse does the steering, so if you see a feature you would like to go towards, just move the cursor onto it.

To begin auto-zooming press the 'A' key. To go the opposite direction press SHIFT+A. To stop, just press the key again.

The auto-zoom speed, quality, and target frames per second can be customized. This will be covered in the Advanced Settings section.

In the upper right corner of the fractal viewport there is normally a box labeled "Settings / Help / About". If the left mouse button is clicked on this, then a settings dialog appears. The settings information can be toggled in visibility with the 'H' key.

A number of the settings are also controllable through the keyboard or the button bar. In some cases (such as iterations) the settings dialog allows for further customization than can be done with just the keyboard.

The settings dialog has the tabs: General, Fractal, Audio, Advanced and About. The documentation goes into full details of each setting. Here we will discuss some that may be useful in the sections that follow.

The "Fractal" settings tab allows for configuring all of the modes and filters associated with the current fractal view. In addition to this it provides some special fields that allow customization of fractal attributes that can greatly alter their appearance.

Bailout
The "Bailout" setting defines a Z value that is considered the maximum to check against for escape in escape-time fractals. This will effect all Mandelbrot and Julia fractals as well as their variants. Making the number smaller generally can have notable effects, though with some modes (especially z-color modes) larger numbers can have an impact as well.

Here are some links to examples of low bailout settings:


Newton Fractal Settings
Towards the end of the fractal tab there are a number of settings that only effect Newton fractals. As a warning, the technique used to create Newton fractals is notably slower than the Mandelbrot and Julia fractals. Using them takes longer to render and may make the browser less responsive.

The first Newton-only setting in the fractal tab is "Novaify". This provides two options for modifying the process to create Nova fractals. Technically something may not be quite perfect, since they don't look exactly like Nova fractals should. Still, they are interesting and can be worth exploring.

The "Newton Step Size" and "Newton Accuracy" are used when calculating each pixel with the Newton fractal. Increasing or decreasing these values can greatly alter the fractal generated.

The last two settings are for "Newton Alpha". This is a complex number and so there is a real and an imaginary portion. Changing these values can cause all sorts of new modifications to the fractal occur. Similar to with the "Novaify" parameter, something doesn't seem quite perfect here, and equivalent values don't always result in equivalent renderings to other fractal programs.

Stripe Average Coloring

Stripe average coloring modes use a smooth coloring technique that produces very different views of fractals, with some amazing possible results. To toggle stripe average coloring, use the V key. This technique is much slower than other ways of coloring a fractal, but the results make it worthwhile.

These features are experimental and may change in the future. Options were added under the "Fractal" tab, and some details are found in the documentation.

Settings can be randomized with the 1 key. More extreme settings can be randomly chosen with the 2 key. Color weights can be randomly chosen with the 3 key.

Here are some links to examples of stripe average colored fractals:

Color Cycling

Color cycling dynamically changes the color of each pixel based on color cycle settings. It is toggled on and off by pressing Q or SHIFT+Q for reverse. Settings aren't yet available in the user interface, but they can be randomized by pressing the 9 key. Color cycling is effected by other modes, so results can vary greatly based on color and zColor settings.

Unfortunately, color cycling isn't performant enough this way to do at a good speed, and so it is only done in low quality drawing mode. When exiting color cycle modes all colors are restored to their default.

Leshy Fractal Explorer can toggle full-screen mode either by pressing the "Full Screen" button on the control's button-bar beneath the viewport, or by pressing ALT+ENTER. In IE10 the "Full Screen" button must be used, since ALT+ENTER is handled by the browser itself to make the browser full screen. To exit the full-screen mode just press ALT+ENTER again, or the ESCAPE key.

Full-screen mode actually is full-window mode. It increases the viewport to the size of the window. To fully increase the size to cover the entire monitor, just full screen the browser window. In most browsers this can be entered by pressing F11 and exited by pressing it again.

With the new release, full-screen is the default. When leaving this mode a controls button-bar becomes visible, which may make the program a little easier to use for beginners.

Full-screen mode does provide an improved viewing experience, but it also can be a lot slower since there is a lot more to render. See the performance section below for advice on how to get things more responsive.

There is an experimental music mode which can be used to produce fractal audio and music. With the current implementation getting good sounds does take some work and a lot of trial and error.

Audio works to varying to degrees in different browsers. To generate audio, Leshy SFMaker is used. Internet Explorer 10 does not support WAVE audio, and so no sound will be produced when using it. Google Chrome usually is the best browser to use, but when it comes to audio it can have some serious issues. In Linux especially, Chrome's issues often crash the application. At the time of writing this Firefox seems to be the best at generating audio with this application, though this will likely change and may vary on different platforms.

Audio data is generated by reading the fractal at a position and using that value. Coloring modes have no effect, but z-color modes will alter the sound. The interesting music generally comes from the more noisy parts of the fractal, though this could vary based on the settings.

There are two ways of playing music:

Viewport Scanning

Fractal Instrument

It is possible to use either of the techniques for playing music, or both of them together. They determine where audio data is read from. The "Music Mode" setting, found in the Audio tab of the settings determines what happens next.

There are currently three options in "Music Mode". The "Noise Maker" option produces a droning sound. The other two "Synth" options convert the fractal data into notes and then use defined instruments to play those notes. There are two "Synth" modes. One is weighted, and it makes recently played notes more likely to be played again. The other "Direct Note" mode takes the fractal data and converts it into a specific note so that the same data will always result in the same note.

There are a large number of instruments to choose from. They don't all generate the same length sound and so the best settings to use with each instrument can greatly vary.

The "Min. Note Space" setting defines the minimum space between notes in milliseconds. This is actually the minimum space between playing notes, and so if one note is 300ms long and the value here is 200ms, there will be an overlap between notes. Negative values are allowed. The space between notes is generated randomly using this value as a guide, unless "Fixed Time" is enabled, in which case all notes start this many milliseconds after the prior notes. This setting will work in "Noise Maker" mode as well as synth modes.

When not in full-screen mode, beneath the fractal browser are links that allow sharing of Leshy Fractal Explorer on various social networks. These links will share the application itself.

If you wish to share a link into a particular fractal view along with its settings, this can be done by through the "Share" button on the button-bar beneath the fractal viewport. Alternatively, the sharing dialog can be accessed by pressing CTRL+M. This dialog gives a direct link which can be copied and pasted or bookmarked, as well as links for various popular social networking sites.

The advanced settings tab contains global settings. These are all either performance related or preferences. Each setting has a checkbox to the left of it. At the bottom of the tab there is a "Save to LocalStorage" button. When pressed, all checked items are saved into the browser's LocalStorage. This means when the same web browser returns to the page it will be able to remember the preferences and performance settings.

Some of these settings can destroy performance if misused. Settings should always be well tested before saving to make sure that they leave the application in a usable state.

This article will go over some of the more important settings.. Be sure to look into the documentation for details on every settings including the ones not mentioned here.

WebWorkers

Low Quality Scale

Anti Aliasing

Here are some notes on how to get the best performance out of Leshy Fractal Explorer:

• Other applications including web browsers and pages running flash (and streaming video) could have a large and detrimental effect on performance. It could be worth trying to close these applications to see if performance improves.
• The Advanced setting for WebWorkers determines how each rendering is broken up into multiple threads. This value by default is calculated automatically, but that process could be error prone or noisy (especially in certain browsers.) Figuring out the optimal value and saving it may notably effect how long it takes to render fractals.
• Web browsers and releases can greatly impact performance. Generally, at the time of writing this, Google's Chrome browser performs the best. Make sure your web browser is up to date. Performance improvements happen regularly and older releases may be slower.
• When running in full-screen mode there are a lot more pixels, and so everything takes longer. If you prefer to work full-screen, the "Low Quality Scale" and "Quick Draw Scale" settings could be modified to trade initial quality for performance to keep everything responsive.
• The "Image Smoothing" setting (under the Advanced tab) will make low quality drawing take a little longer, and so disabling it may be helpful if there are performance issues.
• With stripe average coloring, the "SAM Color Mix" option when not set to 1 requires calculating colors twice for each pixel. Once with the SAM method, and once without. For this reason, it can greatly slow down rendering when enabled.
• Newton fractals are slower to calculate, and stripe average coloring is even slower. When using these modes it may be helpful to work at a lower resolution or outside of full-screen mode until ready to do a larger render. With stripe average mode when making changes to a fractal, it may be helpful to turn off stripe average coloring, make adjustments, and then reenable stripe average coloring.

To get started, launch Leshy Fractal Explorer, or take a look at some example fractal links.