To continue my string of updated GameMaker projects, last night I uploaded a new version of my old Mandelbrot Fractal Explorer project, finally making it compatible with GameMaker: Studio.

The previous version was built in GameMaker 6, and relied on old functions like screen_refresh(), which have since been removed from the program. Surfaces are much more robust these days, so I've employed them instead of the old tech. I've made a handful of improvements to the functionality of the program as well, including making the zoom center on the view (this had always bothered me before), adding a timer to the render process, and moving the fractal drawing code out of a script (which basically froze the program for input on every update/render) and into the step event where the fractal surface is updated progressively, and the user can easily interrupt it at any time.

Render times remain an issue of course, but this was originally just an attempt to see if I could build something that would render fractals at all, so I still consider it a success.

The full source for this project is now available on my GameMaker Examples & Tutorials page, so if you'd like to tear it apart, make it better, or just see how it works, go right ahead!