Copyright 2015-2024 Andrea Medeghini
NextFractal is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
NextFractal is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with NextFractal. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
NextFractal depends on several thirdparty libraries including FreeImage, FFmpeg, ANTLR, and other software from Apache Software Foundation.
NextFractal contains Java code derived from C/C++ code from applications Xaos and ContextFree.
NextFractal is an application for creating fractals and other algorithmically generated images. Images are generated from instructions contained in a script. NextFractal provides tools for rendering images, creating time-based and event-based animations, and exporting images and animations.
NextFractal is currently able to interpret two scripting languages: Mandelbrot and CFDG. Mandelbrot is a domain specific language for creating images of the Mandelbrot set and its variants (the Julia and Fatou sets). CFDG is a context-free grammar for creating images by an iterative process.
NextFractal has been tested on OS X 14 (Intel), Windows 11, and Linux/Debian 12 and Linux/Fedora 38. NextFractal requires a machine with at least 4-cores CPU and 8Gb RAM.
Please see the Wiki for documentation. The wiki contains a tutorial for the scripting language, and examples of scripts.
Get the code from https://github.com/nextbreakpoint/nextfractal:
git clone https://github.com/nextbreakpoint/nextfractal.git
Install Eclipse Temurin 21 JDK and configure environment variable JAVA_HOME if needed. Install Apache Ant 1.10 and Apache Maven 3.9. Install Xcode and the development command line tools (only for Mac).
Make sure that the toolchains file contains the correct path of the JDK for you operating system. Make sure that both ant and mvn commands are present in the command path.
Run ant with target build-mac to build the distribution for Mac:
ant build-mac
Run ant with target build-linux to build the distribution for Linux:
ant build-linux
Run ant with target build-windows to build the distribution for Windows:
ant build-windows