Fractal Desmos
A graphing calculator for escape time fractals built with Typescript and WebGPU.
Users can input their own equations to render unique and possibly never seen before fractals!
Followers
Eucatastrophe
Check their projects out: sciolyskillz, the wiggling wigglewoods!!!!!!!, existential, retroweb site, marbles, inconspicuous authorization a 5 minutes ish game , sands
Shubh
Check their projects out: Maze Playground, Wavefunction Screensaver, Songbook, Personal Website, UIL Downloader
Blu Zed
Check their project out: silentcord
Ship Your Project
Get ready!
Once you ship this you can't edit the description of the project, but you'll be able to add more devlogs and re-ship it as you add new features!
Timeline
I added those section and panel collapse buttons, some color map options for more variety, and wrote a README.md.
I did a massive UI overhaul on the side panel where I added some tutorial text and preset buttons. I still do want to add some buttons that can optionally hide the side panel and its sections of text, but it's almost 4am and I should probably get some sleep lol.
Eucatastrophe
about 2 months ago
I added support for implicit multiplication, panning, and zooming. The site does, so I kind of want to do a quick rewrite of this project as a desktop app just to see the performance difference.
You can now set the initial z value of the fractal with another math formula entry. I also added sliders for user defined variables. These sliders automatically pop up if there are variables detected in either the z(0) or f(z) math input areas.
I converted the AST into shader code so now different fractals can be rendered based off user input!
I implemented a lexer and parser to generate an Abstract Syntax Tree from the Mathquill Equation text entry (Mathquill is the library the Desmos Graphing Calculator uses). Right now it generates a new AST every time the user changes the equation.
I got a basic Julia Set shader working, and I sort of ported my entire codebase to Typescript... but the WebGPU code is a lot less verbose now and it's easier to integrate everything with the web since I don't have to compile to web assembly everytime.
Spent a bunch of time learning about buffers and shader uniforms in WebGPU. Having past experience with OpenGL definitely helps. Next, I want to get a web build with Emscripten working and hopefully render a basic Julia Set.
Now rendering a triangle! I am going to learn how to use buffers and uniforms in WebGPU next after which I will do some major code organization and try to get this running in the browser using Emscripten.
I got a color rendering to a window lol. It may not look like much, but it took me a long time to learn the basic setup for WebGPU using C++.
