Friday, October 4, 2013

Fractopia - fractal rendering with the GPU on PlayStation Vita



The above video shows Fractopia, my GPU-powered fractal explorer for PlayStation Vita and PlayStation Mobile certified Android devices. Sorry about the poor focus - it's hard to film yourself playing something on the Vita!

I had the idea to try GPU-accelerated fractal rendering on the Vita a while back, but I didn't get around to actually messing with it until a few weeks ago. My initial experiments turned out quite well, so I took the time to make it into a full-fledged application.

As you can see in the video, Fractopia allows smooth panning and zooming of fractal imagery. It allows you to navigate the Mandlebrot and Julia fractals, and lets you change the Julia seed in real time to create a huge variety of interesting "fractalscapes" to explore.

Fractopia has passed PS Mobile certification, so it should come out on PSN in the next few weeks.

4 comments:

  1. heythis app is very cool i love it already on my vita. but is it possible to make the start button not bring up the menu for screen shot purposes for wallpapers. thanks. please update it soon every thing else is great.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Jacob - glad you like it! I can see your point about the menu and taking screen shots. As long as you press the PS button just before the start button, you can get a shot without the menu appearing. I'll look into other ways around the issue, though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. youghta be able to take a mandelbrot zoom center and be able to use it as a julia seed.... zoom 'round the mandelbrot, zoom in on area ya like, hit a button, and be lookin' at a julia set from that sdeed.... it'd be easy to add that, right?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah - that would be a pretty simple addition.

      Delete