As some might have already seen, I've kept working
on my Worldbowl image for some time now, and I've
stumbled across and idea whilst doing that...

As I've written the Mesh-Modifying-Macros, these have
the ability to save and load the meshes modified (and to
a certain degree modelled) with them. I've also written
the IO-Macros some time ago, which easily save and
load arrays and single identifiers, though they don't
support strings, at least not yet.

Now, Worldbowl has got several meshes using my
MMM, and I've kept saving them to disk, loading
them for renders, doing some tests in between with
larger resolution-meshes, which were saved and loaded...
Problem was, all these worked with the same few
identifiers:
Mesh_To_Disk & Mesh_From_Disk, boolean switches
used to determine if Meshes should be saved, just generated,
or just loaded. I've switched to some more complicated
boolean checks in between (is the file present? If not, generate
the data and load, but if switch is set, generate anyway, etc).

This was getting quiet painful.

Now I've had the final idea: A set of macros designed to keep
track of the details being used, versus the former details, and
thus the need to generate anew or just load.
What the system would do was to attach an identifier (a string)
to a vector (5-component internally) and a filename (again, string).
You initialize the system, if possible, it loads and checks the old
data.
Then, with some simple macros, it tells you to either:
generate and save the data (reply= false),
or load it (reply= true).
It hands the required filenames and uses these to track the files
itself.

Some Macros would be added, in order to return a uv-vector,
or just an rgb one, instead of the full 5-component vector.

I was wondering if anyone had any further ideas I might add
to the system (its gonna be pure pov, keep that in mind),
so I'd thought I'd ask for suggestions here.

Regards,
Tim

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

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