Warp - thanks for your reply.

First let me mention my computer problems... my last GOOD computer was a
custom built Falcon Northwest computer pre-ordered in early 2001, delivered
in June 2001... I waited until the *first* GeForce 3 video cards arrived
via Canada. This was a cutting edge state of the art computer for its time.

That computer was destroyed a few months ago in an accident. My sole income
is military retirement + a small VA disability (a minor service connected
injury involving an "exploding knee"... hehehehe) - and I had my
hospitalization in July 1998 from a *massive* heart attack, and have since
developed COPD - so know I am very disabled and cant work (plus some debt
left over as a result of an $80,000 hospitalization, two operations, etc -
Im retired military, but they DONT pay for it all). If I just look at a
trampoline, or a treadmill or even a pair of athletic shoes I get angina
and wheeze. It will be a while before I can afford a good computer.

In the meantime, I have this old IBM 350 that I slapped together a few years
ago for playing old DOS games under DOS 6.22, with only a *Pentium 166*.
Originally, just to get back on the Internet, I scrounged 128 Mb of old
legacy RAM for it (it had 16 Mb at the time), and bought a cheap external
serial port dialup modem. I installed WIN98SE on the 850 Mb hard drive and
converted it to FAT32. It gets me back on the Internet. NOT the best thing
for ray tracing.

Having said that.... regarding Vista Buffers - its not rendering speed (so
much, speed is a *secondary* concern on this issue) but memory that I am
concerned about. If I generate 1000 stars but only 50 are visible, then 950
evil stars are not contributing to the scene and eating RAM. So I bump it
up to 10000 stars... maybe only 100 are visible, leaving 9900 freeloading
no-renderin ram-eatin evil stars. The 100 that are visible probably would
be unacceptable. If I keep going, my RAM will explode. Therefore I need to
make sure the stars I DO generate are not "wasted".

Regarding reflection - whenever I have reflecting water, then stars makes
the ocean look like it has contracted glow in the dark measles. Even a deep
space scene : a metal spacecraft or metallic asteroid looks strange with
little white spots all over it. Of course I could just use no_reflection in
the star object definitions, but then we go back to the first problem : RAM
eatin evil stars that don't directly contribute. Its better to *generate*
1000 stars and have them all show up rather than attempt to generate a
zillion just to show a thousand and have my RAM blow up.
:)
----------------
Tim (et al) - I was looking over a backup CD that I made a year or so ago,
and rediscovered a lot of tutorials from the "Cyclopedia" website - I need
to re-learn v_axis_rotate (etc) again, and then I think I can make a good,
compact customized visible-only star generation routine. I forgot, a year
or so ago I successfully used those functions to convert small (triangle)
meshes to intersections (of planes) so that I could do proper CSG on the
objects. If I can reach that level of proficiency again, I should be able
to do this.

- Thanks again all.

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