In article <3d60a321@news.povray.org> , Micha Riser <mri### [at] gmxnet>  wrote:

> That's not true. I had scenes with max_trace_level 1000 which also reached
> this level. And I just did a test with two facing mirrors: max_trace_level
> 5000 was reached..

Of course it depends on the scene to some extend.  Yes, you can create
really simple scenes that will not crash, but that does not mean that adding
a few semitransparent objects with reflection and refraction won't get you
there.

POV-Ray cannot know in advance which objects you will have in what order in
your scene, so it cannot tell if the scene may work or may not.  It would
have to know the scene before it has read it to gather such information,
which would still be complex to do even if this could be avoided by placing
max_trace_level at the end of the scene.

Fact is that there have been numerous crash reports with all official
versions because of stack overflows caused by too high max_trace_level.  And
there had to be some default limit, which happens to be 256.  BTW, by far
most scenes do not have such a number of perfectly reflecting objects in
their scene to even reach a max_trace_level of 256 before reaching
adc_bailout.

> I do not think the linux version of POV-Ray ever had a
> crash because of that. So I see no point in limiting max_trace_level in all
> POV-Ray version just beacuse some crappy OS can't handle it.

Nobody said you cannot change it, or did I miss something?  If you think
your program configuration (it has absolutely nothing to do with the OS btw)
will handle it, just define MAX_TRACE_LEVEL_LIMIT to something bigger in
config.h and compile POV-Ray yourself.  No big deal.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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