clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

> As so often, the devil is in the details though: For instance, how would
> you expect POV-Ray to react when rendering an animation, and /some/
> frames already exist while others do not?

I'll have to give it a whirl, but IIRC, in the past when I've done just that,
POV-Ray seemed to have made up some alternate filename suffix, and then I had 2
sets of animation frames in the same directory.
Even if that's not the present case, to answer your question, I'd expect it to
scan for the presence of all anticipated new filenames, and either issue a
warning with a "Continue?" prompt, or just add the "bypass suffix".
That's why I suggested it could be turned on and off.

> Also, it may be non-trivial to implement this in a manner that would fit
> the intended architecture (part of which has already been put in place)
> when we go for distributed rendering.

Well, yes - I don't have a clear view of the code structure from your
perspective.

>
> Besides, should this be a Windows-only feature (you're posting to
> povray.windows, after all)? That would probably make things even more
> complicated.

I'm not picky - I thought maybe somehow doing it in Windows would make it easier
for some reason.

> And last not least, is this something you deem important enough to put
> other stuff aside for? Unfortunately, there's only so much manpower we
> have at our disposal.

I just thought it would be a nice safeguard against accidentally overwriting
images that took a long time to render, or accidentally clicking "RUN" (admit it
- we've all done it" when you hadn't manually renamed the last test render prior
to rendering the new iteration) when you've been working on something for a long
time, it's late, you're tired and distracted....

No worries, just throwing it out there as something to think about.

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