Bob Hughes wrote:
> 
> "Jordan" <cel### [at] voyageurca> wrote in message
> news:395### [at] hotmailcom...
> | I've been looking around at different raytracers lately (I *love*
> | PovRay, of coarse), and PolyRay has caught my attention.  It seems like
> | a fairly complete package, and even supports Nurbs; but, the latest
> | version (1.8a) seems to have been released 5+ years ago.  Is it no
> | longer being developed/maintained?  How does it compare with PovRay (no
> | flames please)?  Thanks for your time and help.

[As mentioned in email as well.]  Polyray as a separate application
really isn't being supported any more.  The source is available if
people really want to play with it, but I've pretty much rewritten the
entire thing as a library (which can be seen as a plugin for Moray).

> 
> That was the last version I guess.  Nothing else ever seemed to surface.  I
> used Polyray before finding POV-Ray way back in 1993 or '94, about the time
> 1.8 was first around I think.
> Alexander Enzmann seemed to have joined up with the POV-Team, I don't know the
> specifics, and left Polyray to gather some dust.

Was with the POV-Ray team before there was a Polyray or a POV-Ray...

  Except I think many people
> still use it so that's not a completely accurate statement.
> Polyray 1.7, 1.8 and POV-Ray 1.0, 2.0 are, or were, very similar in the way
> the syntax was done.

For a very simple reason - I was using (and writing patches for) DKB at
the time I started Polyray.  I happened to choose lex/yacc for the
parser rather than build a recursive descent parser like DKB or POV-Ray.


  Very comparable in 1994-96 I'd say but thereafter
> POV-Ray has been pretty unbeatable because of feature additions like
> atmosphere and halo first then media (kind of volumetric things).

The Moray plugin handles volumetrics...

Polyray still has features that the baseline POV-Ray doesn't
accomodate.  Some things that come to mind:
    - Depth maps for lights
    - Direct output of zbuffer values
    - General functions to describe object shapes
      [Both implicit and parametric]
    - Displacement surfaces
    - General functions for texture components
    - General functions for light colors
    - Multiple microfacet models
    - NURBS (untrimmed)
    - Point, line, and spline drawing into image
    - Lens flares
    - Particle systems
    - U/V coordinates for texturing
    - Environment mapping
    - Scanline/ZBuffer rendering modes
    - Static (cross frame) variables
    - And others I can't remember...

Mega-POV seems to provide for most of the things that are in Polyray
that are missing from POV-Ray.  It's taken a while to get there though.

Xander

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