Severi Salminen wrote:
> My goal is to learn (good) C++ programming, to learn how (brute force)
> ray tracing works and to implement it from scratch. If I have a fully
> working program at some point I might even release it under GPL.

<digression>

I'll need to do a senior project next year for school. One of the things 
I have been thinking about is building my own raytracer.

Since my raytracer would probably never see use in the Real World, it 
would be interesting to push in some different directions that don't 
make sense in the Real World.

One idea I've had is using arbitrary-precision numbers for geometry 
(java.lang.BigDecimal comes to mind--I haven't yet looked into 
equivalent C/C++ libraries). The performance hit would make this stupid 
for Povray, but it opens up interesting ideas for massive scenes (Bill 
Pragnell's renderings of Ringworld gave me the original idea).

Actually, if I broke down and wrote the darn thing in Java, I might have 
enough time to implement animation and clustering support before the 
project ends. Then I could try to bribe the lab monitor to let me turn 
all the computers in the labs into cluster nodes. ;-)

</digression>

-- 
William Tracy
afi### [at] gmailcom -- wtr### [at] calpolyedu

These may involve hunting down whoever added whichever thing it is and 
torturing information out of them.
     -- from the GCC Documentation Project's web page

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