Well, let's have a look at your questions:

> - How should the user specify the sound information?

Depends on what you mean with "sound information". If it's just specifying a
sound with a given volume and its location, that would be real easy. Maybe a
single parameter could store something like global-scale, e.g. how much one
POV-Unit is supposed to be in meters or such, to properly calculate the
doppler-effect. I'd guess tracking the relative position of the sound to the
camera would supply all the data needed to calculate volume and doppler.

> - How can the system be made to work both for clock-based animations and
> frame-based animations (typically simulations with I/O)?

In my animations, I define a variable Animation_Time, which I use to tell
different macros how long the scene is in seconds. Especially for
physics-simulation this is useful, as balls etc drop as much in 10 frames as
in 100 frames. My clock always run from 0 to 1. With the seconds and the
frames I can simply calculate the time-interval and voila: clock-based and
frame-based aren't a problem anymore.

> - How should the specification of the data file be? The current one is
> somewhat a mess.

Not quiet sure what you mean with the data file. The POV-Source?

> - How does one make a java program easy to use by others who don't know
what
> to do with .java and .class files? There should be a good solution to
this,
> but I'm not experienced in this area.

Me neither. But if your app just parses the data-file and outputs a
wave-file, a simple batch-file which runs the app should be sufficient.

> - How can I make the java program more clean and well-structured? How does
> one write a text parser? (The current one is a hack.)

Ah, well, I'd need to have a look at it to say anything about that, but I'm
not *that* experienced either.

I hope some of my comments are of some help. I'd like to have a look and
all, but I'm currently tied up working on an IRTC entry that needs to be
finished, but I'll be happy to participate in a few brainstorming sessions
or discussions, either here or via email. But maybe off-topic would be a
better area to discuss things then, in order not to junk the groups here.

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>

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