"Jaap" <jws### [at] yahoocom> wrote:
> Does it use a shared network folder? because that would limit it to 10 on
> windows xp, unless you sell out to a server license of windows.
> I wrote a very simple distributed render system using batch files generated
> by the file write functions of povray. (it's in povray.text.scene-files)
> and it took me a while to figure out this limit (there was no limit in
> win98). I later found that the limit is not just for shared folders, it
> also seems to be true for shared printers.

It does not use shared network folder, it uses cheap exchange of files
and images over TCP sockets with low overhead. If a render server in farm is
lost, it will recover the frame it had and assign it to one of surviving
servers, until there is at least one not crashed (tested).

At present moment and being in alpha stage, it is still missing
authentication
of clients on render servers. Also, the ability to split rendering of single
frame on many computers is missing at present moment. Imagemagick will be
used to reassemble the rendering, because implementing all the libraries
for all the POV-Ray supported image types would be something I can't afford
in my time schedule.

Unfortunatelly, I am not skilled with Win32 API, so you will have to install
Cygwin UNIX emulator if you want to render under Windows. You will have to
compile both povray and grc toolkit with GCC under Cygwin emulation.

I have tested it and it works. It might be considerable initial time
investment to install on every machine, but you can install from internet
and compile in parallel, and most of that time will come back when you
render faster on many more machines.

Project management would like to see a native Win32 version. Is there a
command line version of povray under XP (I will have to see)?

Mirsad

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