"Peter J. Holzer" wrote:
> 
> Only 33 % if you use base 64 encoding. How do you get a factor of 3-4?
> 

I thought of a human readable form.

> 
> If you want to automate the process (e.g., for distributing a render
> over several computers) having to maintain a list of files is
> cumbersome. However, I think that having Povray to generate a list of
> all the files it read is enough for that task. It also has the advantage
> that you can easily generate Makefile rules from the output.

Exactly, it's much more flexible.

> > Remember that floating point numbers in binaries are not platform
> > independant.
> 
> Neither are integers. If you define a portable binary format, you will
> have to define the format of all its components, too.
> 

Reading integer files cross platform is not difficult, you just have to
take care of the byte order, which is easy and does not take much time,
see for example the png file format.  I don't know any file format which
works this way for floating point numbers.

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde>
IsoWood include, radiosity tutorial, TransSkin and other 
things on: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/

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