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 open source libraries including JavaFX, FreeImage, FFmpeg, and ANTLR.

NextFractal contains Java code derived from C/C++ code of 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/Ubuntu 22.04. 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 22 JDK and configure the 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