> I wonder if it's worth the efforts.  Of course it's very nice to be able
> to calculate the state of the system at several arbitrary points of time
> but for most purposes this is not necessary since you either calculate a
> complete animation or you just want one final result.  And your method
> can't calculate any more complicated influences like wind, friction etc.

Well, I've begun this project just about more than two
years ago, so I was hardly thinking about implementation
issues, but rather my own skills at that moment. I just moved
from there, and at some point decided to stay non I/O.
Also, I'm a purist kind of artist, modelling and creating
with the intention of being able to say that "absolutely
everything you see is made by me", thus for particle effects
(which shall be used for explosions, smoke, etc) I needed
my own particle system.
I can still remember the day I began: A few spheres scattered
randomly across a disc, moving from their initial location to
a given end-location in a given time. It all evolved from there...

> BTW, you gain quite some speed advantage if you use a hardcoded system.
> If you turn off collisions between masses in Sim-POV and use method 2
> environment
> collisions you can use quite large time steps without problems and will
> have quite negligible simulation times with particle counts like in your
> sample.

I know that "hardcoding" calculations with C++ or even make a
custom version of POV increases the speed with which it is
calculated. Still, I like to use "original" packages, so I use POV-Ray
in its "pure" state. I only downloaded MegaPOV once, after
I knew that isosurfaces would get implemented, to have a look
at that.
And this way, my script can be run by anyone using POV-Ray,
no recompiling necessary. I like this aspect very much, which
is the same reason why I personally like Java, though C++ is
much more effective and AFAIK faster in many situations.

And regarding parsing times... I'm a very patient kind of guy, if
there is need for it. I do like getting things as quick as possible,
but if the ability of saying "that picture is MINE! *grin*" requires
a few more hours of tracing, no problem. I'm about to build
a second PC from former, updated parts, in order to have a
single PC just set up to trace images once I'm finished with
one...

--
Tim Nikias
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights/index.html
Email: Tim### [at] gmxde

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