In article <Xns9598D30B5E378seed7@news.povray.org>,
 ingo <ing### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:

> > No, it wouldn't benefit particle systems. A general database system 
> > would be too slow for that kind of thing.
> 
> I can see that it would be slower than some dedicated particle program,
> would it also be slower than an SDL implementation. What if we're
> dealing with "millions" of spheres bouncing down a mountain? SQLite can 
> keep the database in memory, so no disk action to slow us down.

Unless the SDL data structure is very poorly designed...I don't think 
the array implementation is that terrible, and it could be fixed if it 
were. Accessing a built in array structure will be faster than a 
database query. Databases are vastly more powerful, but you don't need 
any of their features for a particle system, and they come at a cost in 
efficiency.


> > However, some more versatile data structures (easily modifiable
> > arrays, lists, sets, and dictionaries) would be very useful. Also
> > things like point sets and other more specialized structures...
> 
> They are high on my ever growing POV-whislist, especialy dictionaries. 

It would allow something that someone else mentioned, a kind of 
user-defined structure...just define your structures as dictionaries, 
with the name of a member being its key. You could easily extend this to 
allow JavaScript style objects. You could even extend it to all the 
built-in objects.


> But what I'm realy interested in is, what could an embedded (or ODBC) 
> database add to POV-Ray. 

I don't think it'd add anything. The two things I can think of are 
building a scene from data already in a database, and filling a database 
with data generated during scene parsing. Both could be easily done with 
file I/O and/or external scripts. (Though I do think that also needs to 
be improved.)

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

Post a reply to this message