Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

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

But this does not speak for a fixed limit on max_trace_level. You don't 
limit the number of objects either because with too many objects there will 
be not enough memory.

> 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 agree with that but as completly transparent containers are used for 
media and maybe also complete transparancy for some stacked cloud or 
something I see that this potentially could be a limit.

> 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.

Of course one can change it (now the source is available). But that 
something is changeble does not mean that the default hasn't to be 
reasonable.

IMO it *is* a matter of OS. I cannot see any way to bring my linux into 
problems with the stack size other than explicitly limit it or make a scene 
that needs a stack size larger than my whole memory (which happens about at 
a max_trace_level of 500000). I do not see any different with that than 
running out of memory due to too many objects.

- Micha

-- 
http://objects.povworld.org - the POV-Ray Objects Collection

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