Julia set visualizer

An application meant for visualizing various Julia sets. It is capable of computing julia sets in real time as the user moves freely in the complex plane. It was used as my semestral project at CTU FEE.

Project structure

The app is divided into two parts.

First of them being the main control app handling GUI and user interactions. It is also embedded with it's own computation unit providing the real time movement functionality.

The other part is a standalone computation module, which communicates with the main app via named pipes and takes care of heavy computation. This part was implemented mainly to comply with the semestral project assignment.

Directory structure:

├── fonts
├── images
├── libs
│   ├── src_cp_lib
│   ├── src_err_lib
│   ├── src_hlp_lib
│   ├── src_io_lib
│   ├── src_msg_lib
│   └── src_trc_lib
├── src
└── src_cmp_mod

Main app source code is located in src directory. Source and header files aren't separated further. Compute module code is analogically located under src_cmp_mod directory.

All the shared functionallity between the two is delegated into the libs directory and it's subdirectories:

• src_cp_lib takes care of the main computation heavy lifting
• src_err_lib ensures shared error handling across entire codebase
• src_hlp_lib provides helpers simplifying repetitive tasks
• src_io_lib unifys communication through named pipes
• src_msg_lib contains shared simple protocol used for communication
• src_trc_lib is used for terminal control tasks

All of above are compiled and packed into individual C static libraries and later linked to the executables.

Compilation

This project was developed under GCC 11.4.0 and is written in C99. Operating system used was completely minimal installation of Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS.

The only dependencies required are those from SDL2 library. Except for SDL2 itself SDL2_image and SDL2_ttf extensions are required.

After all of theese conditions are met compilation is handled by GNU Make. Makefile is located in the root directory of the project.

Controls

The GUI of the app is fairly minimal and thus most of the functionality is accessed through keybinds. Input is read from both underlying terminal and SDL window.

Keybinds

g - gets the version of the compute module
s - requests new computation
1 - starts computation
a - pauses computation
r - resets computation
l - clears computation done so far
c - switches app to the local mode (real time mode)
u - plays predefined animation
i - captures image of the current Julia set
m - increases value of the constant
n - decreases value of the constant

All of the keybinds are customizable. Current bind can be found in keyboard.h file.

While in local mode you can move in the complex plane by left clicking and draging with mouse/touchpad. Zooming is realized via scroll.

Notes

In order for the project to work properly both parts of the app must be running. The communication relies on existence of the named pipes, which can be created using create_pipes.sh shell script.

Hope you like the project :D!!