In article <3eaeff00$1@news.povray.org>,
 "Early Ehlinger" <ear### [at] respowercom> wrote:

> You could do a bounding-sphere at the beginning of each element.  The parser
> could then scan past the element quickly by checking open and close braces.
> It would store the center and radius of the element.  Determining if the
> element needs to be checked for ray collision is then simply a matter of
> comparing the distance from the center of the bounding-sphere to the ray
> with the radius of the bounding-sphere.  If it needs to be checked, the
> parser would go back and read the entire element.

This would require a bounding object to be specified for every object, 
and for the parser to save the entire text of each object associated 
with each bounds until it parses it, which will likely take more memory 
than the parsed object. This would just slow things down, eat up memory, 
and make things difficult for the user, as well as making the source 
code much more complex. And it adds yet another way for people to make 
mistakes, the manually specified bounding. POV originally used manual 
bounding, there's a reason it was automated.

-- 
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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