I have developed a new feature for Megapov which I call a "Tile map".
This is an image map, where each pixel of the image is another image. Go
look on povray.binaries.images for an example.

The really significant part, which makes this patch different from just
tiling the images separately in some other program and using the
composite in pov, is that the tiles can be sparse. The example image is
specified to be an array of 6x6 tiles, but only 13 of those tiles are
specified. The rest are transparent, and take only a tiny amount of
memory overhead, compared to an occupied tile.

I wrote this to take advantage of the Blue Marble dataset from NASA. It
is an image 86400x43200 pixels big, which when unpacked into memory
would take 11GiB. This is no good. What I have done is broken the image
up into tiles, and wrote some script which decides which tiles are
visible and close enough to need the full resolution, and only loads
those tiles.

I would like to see this patch incorporated into the next version of
Megapov. Who do I have to bribe in order to get that to happen? Aside
from this one, I have about 6 other patches I would like to get into
Megapov.

I will post the patch some time in the future, especially if anyone
shows any interest.

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