> >I have an idea: why not make a POV-Ray screen saver, like the
Seti[at]Home
> >one, or those use to break a cryptographic challenge or to decode genome?
> BRILLIANT!!! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

Technically, there's no problem, it's just that POV would have to go into
pause when the mouse moves or someone presses a key on the keyboard.

> >While the scene would be of reasonable size (unless using huge meshes),
> >the rendered images would be big, which make a less practical idea than
> >Seti, where exchanged data is rather small...
> >Perhaps it will more usable when most people will have broadband
> >connexions to Internet.
> You're right there, it would only be practical for broadband users. All
that
> uploading huge files would take weeks over a snail pace dialup connection.
> :-(

I'm working on a LAN POV server for personal use (well, me and my brother),
but I'm not sure how such a system would work over the internet - images are
quite big, you know, and if you're uploading a lot, you'll spend maybe more
time transmitting than raytracing...

> However, this could be handy for when you want to render a really slow
scene
> or an animation, and you don't want to have your computer tied up for
hours
> (or even days) at a time. Maybe you could have a way to link the saver to
a
> file on your hard drive, and it would store a temp file containing the
> pixel it was up to and which calculation it was on (oh yeah, and the frame
> if doing an animation).

Why not just press the Pause button on POV, work, then press it again?

Personnally, I set the Render priority to its lowet setting and the GUI
setting to the highest priority when I work, and when I go home, I leave the
computer running overnight after changing the settings the other way round.
And if I've got some hefty work to do (batch stuff, mainly), I put POV in
pause.

> Hey POV-Team, why don't you make something like this to go with POV-Ray
4.0?

This is do-able - I'll see what I can come up with tonight... (screen-save
rendering...)

Chris TRIBBECK.

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