in news:3bb719c3@news.povray.org Rune wrote:

> Ok, but that's rather inefficient.

 Don't think so, it doesn't matter much wether you have a mesh with 10 
normals in the normal_vertices and a normal_indices list with 10.000 
entries, or 10.000 normals, most identical, in the normal_vertices and 
no need for a normal_indices list. The first one may be a bit smaller 
in size, the second one may parse a bit faster (untested).

> I think there's plenty of good reasons to implement the feature I've
> proposed.

> Is there anybody besides me who thinks it would be a good idea?

 I think it is too specific for a direct POV-Ray implementation, but it 
is very interesting as macro implementation. The latter for two 
reasons, first, we'll have a nice animation possibility.
 Second, in writing the macros you'll probably run into some problems 
with array manipulation. The speed of looping through arrays. There is 
no direct way to search in the content of an array. There is no way you 
can 'directly' manipulate all of the content of an array, say apply a 
function to each vector in it. Now if you can define this kind of 
problems accurately and can convince the Team that these should be 
possible to do from inside POV, without the need of macros, there would 
be a 'bigger gain' than by implementing what you proposed.

Ingo

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