Fa3ien wrote:

>> Interesting concept.
>> Trying to think of a situation where the presence of objects can only
>> be determined during a render...
>> Failing...
> 
> "trace" seems to me the most obvious example of "bi-directionality"
> between the rendering engine and the scripting language.
> 
> (yeah, it's not during a render, it's during parsing, but it relies on
> data (result of an intersection computation) which should be given by the
>  rendering engine)

Correct.

> Of course, that kind of feature could be extended to new possibilities, 
> such as the one evoked.
> 
> That's why, IMO, POV-Ray should been seen as a "rendering system", 
> instead of a "rendering engine fed by a script".

Exactly, though doing so on all levels is tricks with the current
implementation. I.e. that is why (isosurface) functions cannot access
declared arrays dynamically at render-time.

> This doesn't mean the rendering engine and scripting system can't be 
> separated at code level (being able to develop other complete or partial
> scripting languages would be great), but whatever interfacing system
> (bytecode, etc..) takes place MUST be able to manage that kind of
> bi-directonality.>

The solution to the parse vs render time limits would be to make all
features of a scene object replaceable by the user from within the language
- i.e. even replace the intersection algorithm or the transformation
computations. That would also put POV on-par with Renderman.

	Thorsten

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