Here's another issue that may get us before it's over --- memory.

It's very easy to create a scene --- one building, let alone a whole
city! --- that can consume all available memory even on a well endowed
machine.  Any good trees or plants will definitely be a problem.

I think that it's important to stress to all of the "builders" to be
frugal in their designs.  Perhaps some hard limitations on how much
the "Peak Memory Allocated" value in POV can go up when their scene is
included in a benchmark/baseline file (such as your basic city file
with no one else's scene's included).

Another possiblity, although not a simple one, is to establish a
standard for LOD (Level of Detail) control in the scene and all of its
components.  In such a scheme, when the camera position was mor than a
certain distance away from a given object (or perhaps a whole block)
that object (or in the case of blocks, multiple objects in that block)
would either not be parsed into the scene or would have simpler, less
detailed objects parsed in.   This would allow greater freedom in
creating detailed, memory-pig objects that could be seen in a close-up
render ( or a  fly-through or a walk-through ).  but would not consume
memory when it wasn't necessary.

Perhaps someone out there has already worked out the details of a LOD
control mechanism in POV that we could adopt.

  George

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George Hunt --- Raytracer Obsessivo
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/lightsword
102### [at] compuservecom
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