Mark Gordon wrote:
> 
> Greetings Unix users!

yea verily !

Its strange that you posted this at 02:20 because I decided to download the source and
rebuild
Pov-Ray 3.1g again about an hour ago.  I haven't done that in many months, since May
anyways.

You probably know what I'm going to say.  Brace yourself.

A multi-threaded povray and a platform independant network rendering option.  The
network rendering
option, in my dream world, would turn rendering into a client server model where a
povray server
would manage the workload for a set of clients.  Some high TCP/UDP port service number
like 7890
could be used to communicate between clients and the server.  The image file could get
dumped on
some NFS mount or whatever, thats not important.  The network rendering feature could
utilize two
modes of workload distribution, balanced per image and balanced per frame.  What I
mean by that is
that a single image could be rendered by distributing the scanline tasks to the
clients OR for
animation you could have the frames distributed to the clients.  The possibility for
supporting
client dropout would be slick but not needed at first pass.  Essentially the server
could check the
operational status of the clients with a PINC ( Povray Intenet Network Check ) packet
that would
demand a response from the listening clients ( I'm thinking of a broadcast packet but
who knows )
and if one had dropped out then its job gets reassigned or put back in the work queue.

Just my dreaming ...

Dennis Clarke

http://www.interlog.com/~dclarke/povray/povray.html

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