> If not, I would like to know how which POV-Ray source code files to alter so as
> to be able to load unchanging object data only once and retain it for all
> frames.

Sorry for the long silence, you find me in continuous state of guilt.

I did hack something together for this based on 3.7b34 (back in
2009 I think) with the intent of creating a real patch after 3.7
proper was released. Of course that turned out to be a lot of
years in between and now mostly busy with other things.

After your post I thought I might give it a shot but I actually got
stuck already getting 3.7 release to compile (new computer, new OS,
new Visual Studio version, changed build) and think I won't be
focussing on this anytime soon.

I just dug up an old CVS repository from a backup of my last
computers hard drive to find out what changes I did. Its a bit
of a mess, really, I didn't plan to store this for eternity.

Still I think the info could help you implement a patch for 3.7
even if the codebase probably looks totally different than in 2009.
The 5 files I changed were parse.h, parse.cpp, reswords.h, reswords.cpp
and tokenize.cpp. I attach 2 zipfiles, one contains the state these
files were in in 3.7b34 and one the files after my changes (because
it's all a bit of a mess there can be changes regarding tokens
for an aoi pattern in there too, ignore those).

The basic idea of the change is to introduce a new symbol table.
POVRay already had 2, one for reserved words and one for variables.
The new symbol table is for static variables introduced using a
new keyword #static instead of #declare. When a variable name
is use, it is first looked up in the static table and then
falls through to the dynamic table.

Really the only difference between the tables is that I
completely left out the code for freeing the static table
after rendering. This has the following effects:

In a command line environment, static variables values persist
between frames of an animation.

In an interactive GUI environment, static variables persist as
long as the process is running. So you can run a single render
that loads static variables, and when you run any other render
it can still see that variable. In order to be complete such a
patch should contain GUI functionality to show and clear the
currently stored static variables.

But even without it is very useful. It would be cool to see it
implemented in an official version.

Hope this helps,

   Christian

PS: Strictly speaking code changes based on beta version should not
be published but the idea there is to prevent variants of unsupported
and outdated versions making the rounds. I hope showing you one change
I made in 2009 will not cause b34 to go rampant again :)

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Attachments:
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