Oh, I know about physics, I've was involved in the game industry for a
while, and spoke at CGDC a few times on 3D toolkits.  The big advantage of
working with these toolkits though is that a lot of the hard work is done.

In particular, ODE looks pretty good.  Hypermatter is compelling due to the
possibility of having 'squishy blobs' but I'm not sure if it's pure C++, I
think at this point it's a Windows or Mac DLL.

Given the flavor if POV-Ray (from it's early CompuServer roots) is so cross
platform, that makes ODE a much better choice.

However, I got to thinking about it - if I make it a pre-processor, I'd have
to run it more or less like Moray.  Heck, maybe it should be a Moray plug in
by itself.

By 'run like Moray' I mean you'd bring up this app, load your (modified)
POV-Ray scene, then let it generate sucessive POV-Ray files for rendering.
The thing I don't like about that is it would have to read full POV-Ray
macro's and parse clock statements to be really usefull. At first, I was
thinking it would just displace some geometry, but complex anim's include
expressions that would have to be parsed by this tool.

I don't really want to make it part of the Pov-Ray source code, but given
the above paragraph, that might be much easier.

                  == John ==

"Tim Nikias" <Tim### [at] gmxde> wrote in message
news:3C15F086.F166E187@gmx.de...
>
> I think the idea is great, as long as you actually make it possible
> to:
> 1. not leave POV-Ray during setup
> 2. the programm works on several platforms
>
> Making it open-source kind a thing would also be neat, as some
> guys might come up with quicker and better solutions (that just
> happens all over the place).
>
> But, thinking about dynamics, I'd guess you'd have a hard time memorising
> all objects in scene. So, you'd probably have to put at least some option
> to tell which objects to memorise and which not.
>
> Aside of that, I guess you're probably in a fair amount of trouble, as
physics
> is sometimes more mind-boggling than you normally expect. ;)
>
> Tim
>

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