This is just an FYI for folks who are waiting for the source: it's just
about ready, I have to write build notes for the Windows code and have
folks test it. Windows requirements are Visual Studio v8 (free edition
ought to work) plus at least Windows 2000. If anyone wishes to volunteer
and is willing to report the exact steps needed to fix anything that didn't
work first time, please reply here.

thanks,

-- Chris

NB this applies to both Windows and Linux.

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On Tue, 05 Feb 2008 22:30:05 +0100, Chris Cason  
<del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
> This is just an FYI for folks who are waiting for the source: it's just
> about ready, I have to write build notes for the Windows code and have
> folks test it. Windows requirements are Visual Studio v8 (free edition
> ought to work) plus at least Windows 2000. If anyone wishes to volunteer
> and is willing to report the exact steps needed to fix anything that  
> didn't work first time, please reply here.

I suppose I could give it a go.
I have access to VS2k5 on Windows XP and I also have two Gentoo Linux  
machines (one x86, the other x86-64).



-- 
FE

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Thanks for keeping us updated.

By the way, I'd like to have MinGW officially supported...

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If you'd like me to give it a shot on Visual Studio .NET 2003 Enterprise Edition, or
on Visual C++
2005 Express Edition, let me know.  I could download 2008 Express Edition also.  My OS
is Windows XP
Pro.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Thanks for keeping us updated.
> 
> By the way, I'd like to have MinGW officially supported...

You might even see a patch from me eventually if there is support for 
MinGW. Some of us do not have enough online time to download a rather 
over-bloated version of VS.

Sam

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> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> Thanks for keeping us updated.
>>
>> By the way, I'd like to have MinGW officially supported...
> 
> You might even see a patch from me eventually if there is support for 
> MinGW. Some of us do not have enough online time to download a rather 
> over-bloated version of VS.

MinGW works with the 3.6 makefile.gcc, after some tweaking; what I mean 
is that the POV-Team doesn't consider "it officially supported", so it's 
not maintained, and complaints could (and did) get replies like "use a 
supported compiler".

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Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
> This is just an FYI for folks who are waiting for the source: it's just
> about ready, I have to write build notes for the Windows code and have
> folks test it. Windows requirements are Visual Studio v8 (free edition
> ought to work) plus at least Windows 2000. If anyone wishes to volunteer
> and is willing to report the exact steps needed to fix anything that didn't
> work first time, please reply here.

I have VS 2008 express, and run Vista64 and XP64.

Tom

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I decided that prior to releasing the windows source I would do more work
on the migration settings, rather than release more or less what beta 25
had. As a recap, betas up to beta 24 read their settings from pvengine.ini,
as per previous versions, and additionally shared the same pvengine.ini as
the installed version of POVWIN 3.6. (The editor does not use pvengine.ini;
it uses the registry, but also shared the 3.6 editor's settings).

Beta 25 made no change to the editor settings but moved the settings that
used to be in pvengine.ini into the registry, but still was under the 3.6
registry branch.

Additionally, betas 25 and lower used the same window class name as 3.6
(this is relevant in that it is used to identify if another copy of POVWIN
is running).

The new code (labeled beta 25a mainly to differentiate it from earlier
versions - it is not a formal release at this point) has the following
changes to the above:

  1. The registry location for both the editor and pvengine has been moved
     to a 3.7-specific branch. [For those wanting to poke around with
     regedit, check out HKCU\software\POV-Ray\v3.7].

  2. The window class handle has been changed to a 3.7-specific value.
     This means that 25a will no longer count pre-25a betas or v3.6 as
     being a 'running instance'. This really only matters if you have the
     'keep single instance' option set, and/or you are passing parameters
     to an already-running instance of POVWIN.

  3. Migration code has been added that will attempt to clone the version
     3.6 settings as much as possible. For pvengine settings for which it
     makes sense (e.g. the secondary render INI file), if the old path
     refers to a location within the old home dir, and the same file/dir
     exists in the new home dir, the path will be changed to suit. Other
     paths (open edit files, last rendered file, etc) are copied but
     otherwise left alone.

  4. The code now expects a help file named povwin37.chm (which doesn't
     yet exist, unless you want to do a copy/rename of the old one).

Additionally, I have updated to the latest version of the boost libraries
(this will make it much easier for folks to build the source since POVWIN
previously used a slightly customized version).

Note that one possible downside to the above boost change is that I can
no longer set the stack size on a per-thread basis. This can make a
difference to render threads since of course POV-Ray can be heavily
recursive. To compensate I have set a new default stack size and changed
some other threads (e.g. the editor syntax threads) to manually request a
smaller stack. However, it needs testing to ensure that the new stack size
is sufficient

Prior to releasing the source for testing I'd appreciate a sanity check of
the new code. If anyone wants to check it, it's available (for a short
time) via http://www.povray.org/temp/povwin-beta25a-test.zip.

If you want to put it into your 3.6 install dir, make a new subdirectory
(e.g. called POV-Ray for Windows v3.6\bin37) and put the exe and DLL's
there. [The location does matter since the code that infers the home dir
for installing the new registry settings looks at the path and if it
doesn't find some of the standard dirs present it will complain].

If you want to create a new 3.7 structure (recommended), you should at the
least clone the include, renderer, insert menu, sounds, and tiles dirs.

As per version 3.6, if you wish to make the inferred home path setting
permanent, you can run pvengine with the /INSTALL switch.

Please let me know of any issues. Source will be released on Sunday barring
any major problems.

-- Chris

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I presume no-one had problems with this EXE?

-- Chris

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Chris Cason <del### [at] deletethistoopovrayorg> wrote:
> I presume no-one had problems with this EXE?

I'd be glad to be of any help, but I'm running Linux.

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