"Carlo C." <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> I don't want to sound like a heretic...
>
> It seems to me that there are still speed problems with
> recursion_limit > 1.

That's why I'm still fighting with the whole smash :P

I've been fighting these ever since I submitted the code for beta.29-rad, and
haven't checked in any substantial changes since then. I just haven't been able
to come up with something I'd put a "probably stable" label on.

The beta.29-rad code did deserve that label, because it has the nice property of
being ridden of each end every of those uglies inherited from the 3.6 code.

Unfortunately, some seem to have been not bugs but undocumented features; so
here I'm stuck with the more exhaustive job of sifting through all the shit to
find some grains of sand in it, so to speak.


As of now, I'm back at MegaPOV 1.2.1 performance (speaking of CPU time) on an
64-bit AMD QuadCore Linux system for the majority of my portfolio of
benchmarking scenes (plus/minus roughly 10%), with an occasional scene taking
up to 61% more CPU time - except for recursion_limit > 1 scenes with a
significant amount of reflection, which may need up to 470% more processing
power (thanks to Cermak for providing the meanest radiosity test scenes I've
seen so far :P).

I'm not happy with this yet: To achieve this, the radiosity sample cache octree
is degenerated into not much more than a voxel tree at recursion levels 2 and
above - in a rather uncontrolled fashion. I'd be more happier with a
straightforward, honest "forget about spheres of influence and gradient, now
we're going for hard-cutoff cubes" approach. And I've yet to identify why
reflections behave that bad.


> My small idea: Is possible insert a keyword like *method* (as in "media") to
> choose between radiosity_type_3.6 and radiosity_type_clipka (under
> developement)?

Yuck. 3.6 didn't just cheat - it also had a host of outright design errors.

I'm positively *not* reviving 3.6 radiosity. Maybe re-introducing some of the
cheats, that's all. In a more systematic, straightforward, well-documented
fashion. To let future generations know right from the start that it's *not* a
bug.


> Clipka, a huge thank you for your efforts on the radiosity code.

You're welcome (*walks off still grumbling*)

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