Iteration output for later coloring

[S-Streulicht]

Sugestion: store as png pictures. Benefit:

• Known format
• Can be used with standard tools
• Iteration count up to 2^32-1 wich sould be more than enough
• Standard libraries for export / inport
• png is a better format compared to jpg to stored the mandelbrot pictures, since jpg 100% quality has also a loss
• Don't know if standard libraries suport exif (since some version png does, since beginning png suports custom chunks), but with this, one can store meta like coordinates halfwidth max itaration ...

Potential steps:

• Make png lib runing
• Use boost-gil with png to output the current picture (prove of principle)
• store raw iterations as second picture
• out source the color functionality, to be used in second tool and original code
• create rough second tool (have modularity in mind, like more statistice other color methods ...?) -- read png -- (feedback some statistics, such as mean iterations, max and min iterations (exclusive the set maximum, ...)) -- apply coloring -- store picture
• bonus feature: breake and continue the original software -- read png prepopulate the result array -- in the core loop check if iterations already found for given point if it is the case go to next point -- implement brake logic / user interface. If stopped store the current result array an dexit program

[ckormanyos]

Potential steps:

• Make png lib runing
• Use boost-gil with png to output the current picture (prove of principle)
• store raw iterations as second picture

Hi @S-Streulicht I appreciate all of the ideas above.

These first three in particular seem rather straightforward and I/we could likely handle them in one simple effort.

• Invent and use a command-line parameter to choose the output format.
• Find the right place to extract the raw data and store these in a subsidiary binary file. But need to decide on export/import format here, which is straighforward, but requires a bit of thought from my side.

[S-Streulicht]

building the defaultconfiguration from pnglib (libpng16.dll) is straight forward after retargeting to VS2022. Clone: https://github.com/pnggroup/libpng.git https://github.com/madler/zlib.git Retarget there are a a few warnings treated like errors: relative path to h-file: #include "..\pngpriv.h"-> include directory: \libpng unnassary #ifdef PNG_ARM_NEON_IMPLEMENTATION unfortunatel the lib simes to be subceptable to Spectre (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/error-messages/compiler-warnings/c5045?view=msvc-170) -> disable the warning by the flag: /wd5045

fine tuning for our putpose is needed in the libpng\pnglibconf.h file. Next step I'll try is include the lib generation into the mandelbrot project.