Chris B wrote:
> "Leroy Whetstone" <lrw### [at] joplincom> wrote in message 
> news:486### [at] joplincom...
>> I've made several models and other things(macro,functions...) with POV. 
>> Awhile back I got tired of having a test program for each of these. So now 
>> I use #ifndef(Get)in all my Pov models and include files to bracket a 
>> camera and lights and the object and what ever else I need to test the 
>> file. Before you include the file you have to #declare Get=1;.
>>  I was wondering do many use this trick?
> 
> I think quite a lot of people use a fairly wide range of different but 
> similar techniques to enable an include file to be rendered directly (for 
> testing etc.). There was quite a long discussion a while ago about 
> incorporating something into POV-Ray to enable the #include file chain to be 
> interrogated when the file is parsed, so that a generic technique could be 
> used to implement this. The discussion arose because having to declare 
> variables in all of the scene files that use a particular include file is a 
> bit of a pain.
> 
> I don't recall whether any concensus was ever reached or whether anything 
> made it into the development stream. My vote would go for a read-only array 
> listing the files in the #include chain. If the array is length 0 you know 
> that the user has asked to render the current file and can add a camera, 
> lights etc. It would also enable more sophisticated decisions to be made by 
> examining the actual contents of the array.
> 
>>  And if you do what type do you save the file as?
>>  I save objects like a boat,rock as a '.pov' and macros as an '.inc'.
> 
> I store anything designed to be able to be included into scene files with an 
> extension of '.inc'. Files designed as top-level files (scene files, 
> examples, document image generators etc) as '.pov'.
> 
> Regards,
> Chris B. 
> 
> 

The only related change I know about so far is that POV-Ray for Windows 
now supports an 'alternate render file'.  Then again, I've been away for 
a while.  I've still been dreaming of having a main_scene_file keyword, 
but I do like your array (array of strings I hope) even better.   It can 
fill the same purpose, but also provide more information.

Charles

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