glaretechnologies / fractal

A simple realtime fractal rendering program

Fractal

A realtime fractal rendering program. Uses OpenGL to render on your GPU.

It also serves as a simple introduction to getting an OpenGL shader up and running, and displayed fullscreen on your monitor with C++.

Supported platforms

Should work on Windows, Mac and Linux. Only tested on Windows so far though!

How to build

Prerequisites

• CMake - not strictly needed, but there is a CMake project that you can use.

• SDL - You will need to download and build SDL, or download pre-build SDL binaries. Get it from here: https://www.libsdl.org/

Building Fractal

• Download / check out the source

• Make a directory to build in. Open a powershell window and change to that directory

cd D:\programming\fractal\fractal_build

• Run cmake to build the compiler project.

cmake ..\trunk\trunk\ -G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" -DSDL_DIR=D:\programming
\SDL2-2.0.9 -DSDL_BUILD_DIR=D:\programming\SDL2-2.0.9\VisualC\x64\Debug

The first argument to cmake, ..\trunk\trunk\, is the directory where you checked out the fractal source.

-G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64" selects Visual Studio 2015 as the compiler, and selects a 64 bit build.

-DSDL_DIR=D:\programming\SDL2-2.0.9 sets the directory of the SDL source on disk. This dir is used to find the SDL include files.

-DSDL_BUILD_DIR=D:\programming\SDL2-2.0.9\VisualC\x64\Debug is the SDL build dir. I have used the VS project files included in SDL, and that's where they output the built .libs and .dlls.

• Open the generated compiler project, and build the project. On Windows:

.\Fractal.sln

to open, Then press F7 to build.

• Copy vert.glsl and frag.glsl from your source dir to your fractal build dir.

• Copy SDL2.dll from your SDL build dir to your fractal build dir, e.g. from D:\programming\SDL2-2.0.9\VisualC\x64\Debug to D:\programming\fractal\fractal_build.

• Back in Visual Studio, run the 'fractal' project.