Christoph Hormann wrote:

> Thomas wrote:
> >
> > I  know, I just like both :). But IMHO network rendering is a feature that is
missing
> > from pov, and yes I know it is next to impossible to implent it with the current
code
> > and nobody, including me, was able to get pvmpov running on win32.
>
> Why not?  I never tried it until now, but i don't know about any problems?

I have tried it (for a very long time) but I never managed to get it through the
compiler
completly (or linker, I can't remember)


> Surely, but what do you gain with that, there still needs to be a lot of
> code written for every platform and it can still be extremely difficult to
> get all the different versions work together.

I gain network support, which means faster renders. I know that there are some tools
around
that help you to distribute renders over more machine, but they are not cross
platform.
Sure a lot of code needs to be written, but writing a ray tracer involves writing lots
of
code.

As far as I know the network interfaces on Unix and win32 are quite similar, just a
few
calls different. I don't know about MacOS, but MacOS X should be similar again, since
it is
a BSD unix. And endianess problems are well understood and all operating systems with
a
tcp/ip stack provide functions for it (or at least should).


> > Pov does that at the moment as well, but only for a few minor things,
> > just look in the platform specific file in source/your_platform.
>
> There is nothing but the user interface that is specific to the platform,
> of course some minimal interface is always needed.

To me the user interface is optional as well, I can use any editor I like for writing
pov
code. It is the rendering core that matters and if written in c or c++ is should be
pretty
portable I guess.

Thomas

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