Ray Gardener <ray### [at] daylongraphicscom> wrote:
>> You need double precision floating-point processing.  Sorry!

> What if... we limited the scene extents (in a seperate
> version of POV-Ray, of course) to some small volume
> like 1024 cubic units where single-precision floats
> would be more viable?

  I think that you misunderstand how floating point arithmetic works.
It's not about the maximum value. It's about precision.
  Granted, single-precision floating point numbers have a smaller upper
limit than double-precision. However, this upper limit is at about 3.4*10^38
(that is, 340000000000000000000000000000000000000), which is certainly
much larger than that 1024.

> POV's bounding slab bbox are already single-precision,
> interestingly. BBOX_VAL is type SNGL.

  That's because a bounding box does not need that much *accuracy*.
The maximum value of single precision is plenty for bounding boxes.
Which demonstrates well the whole point. Actual objects can often need
the extra accuracy in order to render properly.

-- 
plane{-x+y,-1pigment{bozo color_map{[0rgb x][1rgb x+y]}turbulence 1}}
sphere{0,2pigment{rgbt 1}interior{media{emission 1density{spherical
density_map{[0rgb 0][.5rgb<1,.5>][1rgb 1]}turbulence.9}}}scale
<1,1,3>hollow}text{ttf"timrom""Warp".1,0translate<-1,-.1,2>}//  - Warp -

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