Hello Folks. Well I have played around with Ultra Fractal and actually made a couple Fractals. So I subscribed to the List and have gotten really cool emails from the list with parameters included for viewing and tweaking. But for the life of me, I can't get them to open in UF. I have copied and pasted till I am blue in the face. Same for the entire list downloaded from the ultra fractal site. It can't find the file, after c and p, it says corrupted, or the program completely hangs up on me, and I have to shut it down and start all over again. Even had a recent college grad come over and try, and he got the same thing.

Can anyone help?? Any idiot should be able to copy and paste - I do it all the time in other programs. But after the last 24 hours, I have very little hair left to pull out. Maybe the file extension is wrong? It should be simple, what am I doing wrong??????????

Would desperately apprecaite any suggestions.

Thanks for your time.

Two possible problems could be that you do not have all the latest formuals that a UPR could possibly use. Go to the UF formula database and download the entire update and unzip them. Go to JPP's resource pages and locate the links to the half dozen or so formulas that are not in the UF formula database, such as Edward Perry's or Stig Petterson's, and download them as well. There should also be a link for the orgform.zip and it would be wise to get it. If you don't see a link go to the Spanky database for Fractint and download and unzip that. That should get you completely up to date with all publicly available equations and formulas for UF. A second problem may be a simple error in cutting and pating the UPR in from the email. Just put the cursor on a word, hit "Ctrl A" to highlight the entire text(UF ignores text outside the UPR), then with the fractal image window of UF active and highlighted, NOT the properties windows, hit "Ctrl V"(or use Edit menu) to paste the UPR into the fractal image window. Sometimes UF takes a second to recognize and find all the formulas in a UPR and searches it's folders to locate them. After all an image can not only have multiple layers, but each layer can have different seed image formulas, inside and outside coloring methods as well as a transformation or two if an author has incorporated all those things. This should clear up most problems, but others more experienced may have other solutions. If that doesn't solve the problem, then it's not likely a problem with UF. If your computer hangs with any other graphics apps, then consider reducing the speed of the graphics hardware accelerator.

With the zipped data base from the UltraFrac site, enter the zip file you have downloaded in WinZip (or the equivalent zip reading program you have), check the file extension and tell your zip progam to unzip that file to the correct subfolder. No need for cut+paste there.

The subfolders and their related extensions are:
Alpha...... .ual
Formula.... .ucl, .ufm
Fractal.... .uxf
Gradients.. .ugr
Parameters. .upr

From there you simply open UF and access the different items from the programs menus.

For the emailed parameters....don't have any experience there, perhaps some of the more experienced UF folk who are on the email List can help.

RosemaryR
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"This...this is magnificent!"
"Oh, yeah. Ooooo. Aaaaah. That's how it starts.
Then, later, there's ...running. And....screaming."

Thanks ever so much. I knew it was something really simple - turns out it was something really stupid. My database was not downloaded into the correct folder!!! Now that it is in the formula folder, I will take a look at the file extensions and see if any of them need to be moved into the correct subfolder. Thanks for that tip! Now I can open these up and try to learn how they were made. Thanks also for the tip on other sites to get files from, that's even better. Sorry to bother you guys - I'm such a greenhorn here - but I really! appreciate your time!! Thanks Stotty - your message clinched it!!