Alan Kong wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 21 Aug 1999 13:33:55 -0400, Alberto <ame### [at] mausbve> wrote:
> 
> >I was also thinking in
> >the history of POV-Ray more in the human point of view. People involved in the
> >development of distinct aspects of POV-Ray, telling stories about their mood
> >when they were working the details.

I remember holding my newborn son (the first one) while debugging
POV-Ray code.  This was often at odd hours of the night - probably
explains why the Bezier code looks like it does...

> > Stories about the discussion of the
> >implementation of new features, the development of the syntax, etc.

David Buck and I had several long discussions on what later became
filter & transmit.  On my 286 (actually a Harris clone of the 286 with
an IIT clone of the 287 chip) there was a big performance win by adding
a separate keyword and accumulating the transparency independently of
the various calculations that go into the normal (refracted)
transmission.  There were still just 3 components to a color then.  [And
the big feature everyone wanted was the torus...]

Also had several discussions with DKB about how bounding ought to work. 
I wanted the bounding shapes to chop pieces off when they were outside. 
He didn't want that to happen (and in fact really wanted clipping to be
done with CSG difference of transparent objects).  Since the performance
of CSG with invisible surfaces was a big problem, the compromise we came
to was to add clipping (well, to change my modified bounding code to use
the keyword clipped_by).

> 
>   Many of the POV-Team members have made an effort to meet up with some of
> the others at events such as SIGGRAPH over the years.

Yup - met up with Lutz+Markus (both of them), Thomas Baier, and Jeff
Bowermaster (Dave Mason too, but I see him all the time).

Xander

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