CAD-Andi wrote:

> Is there meanwhile a out of the box solution to "cache" large images 
> for image mapping?

for this special case you might get an improvement by
setting up a ramdisk for the image location and using
an uncompressed image format.

> Is it thinkable to implement something into SDL like a "permanent" or
>  "static" keyword/command that would designate geometry that will 
> never change during the animation and for that reason needs to be 
> parsed only once?

I did try a hack for something like this using an older beta of 3.7
and it was quite useful for me. A hack mostly because the keeping-it-
around part was easy but a clean way of getting-rid-of-it at some
later time was not due to the way the render process is organized
in frontend and backend (although it may not be a problem for
someone with more experience with the povray source code).

So a static variable was essentially a bit of a memory leak.
Although on the other hand "static" could also extend beyond
the animation case in which case this becomes a feature, i.e.
the variables actually stick around as long as the process
is running and can be used to keep data between individual
renders and even exchange it between different scenes (note
this applies to the GUI version on Windows, for the command
line version of course process life time is usually the same
as image or animation rendering time.

I think it is useful although it didn't get too much resonance
in the newsgroups. Maybe I should add the stuff I played with
as a feature request to the 3.7 bug tracker. Even without
cleanup it can be very useful, possibly tagged as an
experimental feature?

I didn't try to patch the change into the latest beta sources yet.
However, even if I did, I think I would not be allowed to give away
the sources or binary as far as I understand the beta licensing.

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