Anton Sherwood <bro### [at] poboxcom> wrote:
> I have a project in mind that involves tracing rays in non-Euclidean
> space.  Obviously it would be good if I could adapt Povray, but the code
> is largely opaque to me. In the (seeming) absence of a guide saying
> "this is how Povray's source code is structured and here's what you need
> to do to make the most common kinds of changes," can anyone suggest some
> books that might bring me up to speed?  Or is there no substitute for
> working long years on large C++ projects?

I'd say there is no substitute for exploring the code of the particular project
you're embarking to mess with...

First thing you may want to know is whether your idea is feasible with POV at
all. To answer this question you probably need to have an understanding of the
basic principle of POV operation.

Most important for you, I guess, are the very basics of the geometry stuff,
while things like texturing, media etc. might be of minor importance.

POV basically uses two essential operations n geometry: Computing all "points"
where a "ray" intersects a "shape", and testing whether a "point" is inside a
"shape".

I guess for non-Euclidean geometry you'll need to change POV's concept of a
"point" (which obviously is currently just a straightforward Euclidean 3D
location vector) and a "ray" (which currently is a combination of a point and a
3D direction vector), and the algorithms to compute ray-shape intersections and
perform inside-tests. Neither of these seem too easy to me.

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