> Just wondering...what was that patch supposed to do?

It was an attempt to make a completely general purpose area light that,
like the current area light implimentation, only worked on shadows.  The
difference is that you would provide a list of vectors as the shadow sample
points.  It actually works but needs some kind of jitter to eliminate
artifacts.  I tested the patch with a large array of points derived from a
geosphere mesh and ran into an obvious problem - the shadows can completely
surround the surface, but the lit calculation still only eminates from one
point.  Therefore the light doesn't illuminate from the sides properly.  I
figured that the only way to get it to work would be to perform a complete
diffuse and shadow calculation for each point and the amount of work
involved wasn't worth the trouble. That, and you could do the same thing
with an array of standard lights and get the same effect which also happens
to take about the same amount of time to render as ambient geometry with
radiosity on.

An excercise is futility I suppose.

-Mike

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