"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:3ac8608f@news.povray.org...
> Nekar Xenos <vir### [at] iconcoza> wrote:
> : Does this mean I won't be able to do a scene that starts on earth, flies
up
> : into space and look at earth again with the sun included?
>
>   Everything has its price.
>   If you wanted variable precision floating point numbers, then povray
would
> be about 100 times slower than it's now. And we don't want that, do we?
>   So we have to use the system's own floating point numbers. They are
usually
> 64 bit long...
>

    A systems floating point numbers may well be 64-bit, but POVs aren't -
not under Windows, anyhow - take a look at the source - it uses nothing but
32-bit floats, which according to the MSDN, gives 6-7 sig. digits and a
range of 1.17549351E-38 to 3.402823466E+38. Upping all the floats to 64-bit
doubles would give a much more respectable 16-16 sig. digits and a range of
2.2250738585072014E-308 to 1.7976931348623158E+308.

--
Scott Hill
Software Engineer.
NC Graphics (Cambridge) Ltd.
Web : http://www.ncgraphics.co.uk
E-mail : sco### [at] ncgraphicsnet
ICQ : 110661991

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