In article <3db919e9@news.povray.org>,
 "Andrew Coppin" <orp### [at] btinternetcom> wrote:

> I have also made a raytracer - in Java of all things! (Well, the original
> was made with Smalltalk - but who else actually has that?)

You mean your original raytracer? Because "the original" raytracer was a 
piece of twine. ;-)

If you mean your original, it sounds interesting...I've always been 
interested in Smalltalk. I know of another raytracer written in 
Objective C, which is basically a halfway point between Smalltalk and C.


> Again, the only
> way to make it render things is to write [miles of] Java code to generate
> the appropreate datastructures. I suspect my little effort isn't nearly as
> full-featured as yours - but then, I had to reinvent raytracing from first
> principles! Considering I've never had a propper algebra lesson in my entire
> life, I'm pretty dam impressed I got the ray/shape intersection tests to
> work at all!!! (Actually, waaaaay back I tried emailling one of the POV-Team
> members about the math, but never got an answer. Hardly suprising - they
> probably get daft emails like this every second wednesday...)

Try a post on one of these newsgroups, maybe advanced-users.


> PS. Isn't building a raytracer with OOP so confusing? Which kind of "object"
> are you talking about... ;-)

Do what I did for my tracer: physical things are "shapes", objects are 
bundles of information/behavior. Gets rid of the ambiguity nice and 
neatly.


> PPS. If I were God, POV_Ray's SDL would be object-oriented (in the
> programming sense).

It already comes close in some ways. I think it could be made into a 
prototype-based OO language with little modification.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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