I'm new to POV-Ray, so feel free to flame.

The Short Story:
----------------
  I'm looking to improve the animation performance when using large height_field(s)
and pigment image_maps.  Most (90+% of 5 minutes) of the "parse" time for each frame
is spent loading the 7039x7402 tga height field and the 14825x15587 png image map. 
The animation consists of [mostly] camera movement along a "flight path" over
real-world terrain to create a fly-through movie.

The Long Story:
---------------
  I see that rtr/clockless animation in 3.7 will not re-parse, so the 5 minute file
loading hit is done only once.  Now I need to figure out where to add the file-saving
code.  Is there a technical reason (i.e. thread complexity) or a more administrative
reason why that capability is not in the current 3.7 beta?  Any pointers to where I
could add it would be appreciated.

  The problem with using the clockless animation approach to solve my performance
problem is that my script does actually contain a minor amount of animation so I'd
like to preserve it if possible (which clockless animation does not currently allow).

  I think what I really want is "persistence of variables" as implemented in MegaPOV
pre v1.0, as there's no need to re-read the tga and png files from disk on every frame
render since they haven't changed.  I may dig into the old MegaPov code to see how
that was implemented.

  Another approach would be for me to get a whole lot more sophisticated in the use of
my height fields/pigments. Basically pre-process them into smaller tiles, calculate
those tiles visible to the camera for each frame, and create a unique (+/-) pov file
for each frame.  This could be a lot of work, but there may be some Open Source
projects to leverage on (e.g. libmini http://www.stereofx.org/terrain.html, and VTP
http://www.vterrain.org/).

Thanks,
Brent Fraser

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