How come radiosity pretrace replaces mosaic preview?

They work differently, they have different purposes, and the former has side
effects which may be undesired (especially when using load_file).

When I use mosaic preview, my intention is to get a fast view of the scene
so that I can see what it looks like in general without worrying about
detail. When I use radiosity pretrace, my intention is to add additional,
high quality radiosity samples to my scene. The former is a convenient
change in the order that pixels are rendered, the latter is a way of
changing the scene itself.

When I am using radiosity, I often generate a radiosity file with save_file.
Then I can use load_file to view my image as I tweak things. I would like to
use mosaic preview as I tweak, but doing so sends extra radiosity samples
(which changes my radiosity data) and takes forever because it's doing so.
Mosaic preview is essentially useless in this situation.

Wouldn't it make more sense to first run the radiosity pretrace (based on
the pretrace_start and pretrace_end values in the radiosity{} block), and
then run the mosaic preview on top of that (based on the command line or ini
settings), followed by the final pixel-by-pixel render? Then, by setting
pretrace_start 1 pretrace_end 1, one can nearly eliminate the pretrace step,
and then watch their image render from high to low levels of detail - as
they would do without radiosity in the first place.

Does this bother anyone else, or am I one of the few who really uses mosaic
preview a lot?

(By the way, while I'm talking about separating the two, it would really be
nice if there were a way to turn the radiosity pretrace step off *entirely*,
to avoid sending any extra samples at all and only use loaded data.)

 - Slime
 [ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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