nebula2

A program for calculating and rendering a Nebulabrot image.

Dependencies / Libraries

nebula2 uses these libraries:

• SFMT random number generator (included).
• iniparser for parsing ini files (no, really!). (included as git submodule).
• pthreads for parallelism. Should ship with your Linux distribution.

Get the sources

Using git

git clone https://github.com/silvasur/nebula2.git
cd nebula2
git submodule init
git submodule update

As .tar.bz2 archive

hi-im.laria.me/progs/nebula2.tar.bz2

Building

Simply run make in this directory.

If you have a CPU that does not support SSE2 you should remove the -DHAVE_SSE2 part of the SFMTFLAGS variable in the Makefile.

Usage

nebula2 needs a config file. It is an ini file. All parameters must belong to the section [nebula2].

Config parameters

• width – The image width.
• height – The image heigth.
• jobsize – The size of a singe job (how many mandelbrot traces should be recorded during one job).
• jobs – The number of jobs to execute. If the image quality is not good enough, you can later increase this number and rerun nebula2. It will continue where it left, if the statefile is still there.
• threads – How many threads should be working?
• statefile – The current calculation state is saved to this file. This allows you to abort the calculation and continue later.
• output – The rendered BMP image is saved to this file.
• iterX – The maximum iteration for layer X. X must start with 0 and be in ascending order (i.e. if there is a iter0 and a iter2, iter2 will be ignored).
• colorX – The color for the layer/iteration X. 6 hexadecimal digits RRGGBB, where R is the red part, G the green part and B the blue part.

See example.ini for an example.

Aborting and continuing calculation.

Calculation can be aborted by sending the SIGINT signal to the nebula2 process (this can usually be achieved by pressing Ctrl + C in the terminal with the nebula2 process). Stopping the job might take a while (it needs to save the current state. Also the image is rendered).

You can continue the calculation by simply executing nebula2 with the same config file again (if the statefile is still there).

Displaying progress

When you send the SIGUSR1 signal to the nebula2 process, it will display the number of jobs that still need to be calculated. It might stay pretty long at 0 open jobs, since it will render the image then (which can take some time on large images).

You can use this shell snippet to display the progress continuously:

while true; do kill -SIGUSR1 <PID of nebula2 job>; sleep 1; done

Portability

Only tested on Linux, might or might not work on other *nix systems.

Will definetly not work under Windows without some compatibility layer like Cygwin.

Where is nebula1?

nebula1 is very ugly and difficult to use and will therefore not be published. Some code of it is recycled in nebula2, though.