Sven Littkowski escribió:
> Your answer hits my worst fears: after three days working on a photon file 
> which has not yet been saved, all is lost!
> 
> My question is: why allows POV a scene to be continued, but not a photon 
> file?
> 
> Please, developers, create the possibility to also continue the photon map 
> file after a stop (of which reason ever). POV-Ray partially writes data into 
> an image, so it can continue where the previous render was stopped. Could 
> the same procedure of partial writing into a file not be applied to the 
> photon file, as well?

Note that when saving a PNG image, the file is only flushed to disk 
every 16 lines. Probably it's also updated when you pause the render; 
but that won't happen on a power failure, so you could lose your last 15 
lines :)

In the case of photons, it looks like they are "sorted" (whatever that 
means) when the photons finish shooting. And *then* they get saved. I 
see no reason why it couldn't save the photons as they get calculated, 
then sort them and overwrite the whole file with the sorted version, so 
that if the render gets suspended before it's done, it could in theory 
load from the file, shoot what's left, and sort the whole thing. But I 
know little about the internals of how photons work, so there may be a 
good reason why it's not done this way.

PS: what are your computer specs? If mine turns out to be better than 
yours, I could give you some CPU time for that insane render.

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