In article <36419414.0@news.povray.org> , "Whatever" <bou### [at] nospamhotmailcom>
wrote:
>Like a lot of you, I play with POV, and I am awed by the images it can
>generate. Also like a lot of you, I keep getting ideas for "what if it
>could...?' or "I wish they would fix...". But reading the POV source code
>is, to me, a rather daunting task (to put it mildly).

Yes, it has not many comments, but as stated in the docs there is no more info
available and you are on your own...

>I have read quite thoroughly the docs on the POV scene description language,
>and I am rather expert at that. Now I want to move on to the next
>step--modifying POV to do some new things. But the spaghetti tangle of code
>is extremely hard for me to follow--it's very hard to know just where to
>begin, to make patches to POV. Not to mention that the commenting tends to
>be rather on the sparse side.

...as a tip, you might try to understand the parser first. It is the most difficult
to undertsnad part, I think, and knowing (not in detail) how it works will give you
lots of hints how the interenal structures are related. Having a good IDE (or
external utility) with function browser will help, too. Simply start in the main
function and look where it calls the tracing code. You will discover, that the
objects all have some common functions that are grouped in a structure Method_Struct
that looks much like a class (of course it isn't...). You find it in frame.h. I hope
that will get you started.


    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: Tho### [at] csicom

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