Hi,

Does anyone know if there are any plans to make a multithreaded version
of POVRAY?  This would have the greatest beneficial effect on
SMP machines, of course, but those are getting more common (and less
expensive) now, and UNIX, Linux, and even WindowsNT in it's own
primitive way support SMP.

Also, what about a way to do network rendering?  For frame-by-frame
stuff, this could be done pretty easily (at least in UNIX or Linux) with
scripting (using simple remote shelling), or somewhat more involved
using RPC.  With RPC, each potential trace box could run a small, simple
povray daemon that would receive incoming "assigmnents" from the trace
server.  The front end would hand out frame assigmnents to all the
machines in the "trace pool", and then check them periodically for
status, handing out more frames to the machines that were done with
their assigment.  If thread support were possible, this could be done
within a given image, handing out individual pixels or groups of pixels
to be rendered (perhaps with configurable granularity).  Of course this
gets more tricky...

Jason
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--
Jason Herring
jah### [at] nospamusanet
"You keep saying that word.  I do not think it means
 what you think it means...."

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This subject comes up all the time. A thorough read through
of this group will give you many answers to your question.
I believe for the official version of Pov-Ray I wouldn't look
for this kind of support in the immediate future.

As far as network rendering goes you might want to take a
look at PVMPov located at:

http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/6386/pvmpov/index.html

It is a patched version of Pov that offers paralell raytracing
capabilities.

Ken Tyler

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