Hello fellow POV-Ray'ers!

    I am currently writing a very user-friendly distributed rendering
program for POV-Ray,
and, since I don't use them much myself, I'm seeking advice on the best way
to handle .ini files.

    To those who are experienced at POV-Ray, how important are ini files to
you, and what do you use them for?
Also, how often do you use multiple ini files? ( Please note that I won't be
supporting animation for the time being)

    Currently I'm planning on having the user pick a list of .ini files,
which will be transferred to each render slave. They will be specified,
in-order, in the command-line arguments to POV-Ray when a render is started.
My program will also generate a custom ini containing pertinent info such as
the tile size, render directory etc. Also this custom ini will be specified
last, so the critical settings it contains will take precedence
over anything similar that happens to be in the user specified ini's.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or comments from experienced
users as to how ini files should be handled best in a distributed render
program!

Thanks :)
George Pantazopoulos

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A broad meaning to that word, experienced.

Reading your message I wasn't sure if you were saying each possible INI
setting might be in a individual file, separately added on a command line
later on; or if any of the settings could be selected and then applied to a
single INI file, non-inclusive to that master "custom" INI mentioned.

I use them plenty, not always sticking to the default quickres.ini, but most
often for animations. I haven't used a INI to run external commands in quite
a while, were you going to allow for such a thing though? I really dropped
off using multiple ones since POV for DOS and early on in POV for Windows.
Just a trend I guess. I should get back into using them more but it can turn
into a cluttered mess if order isn't kept. I've become a editor of a few
INIs more recently instead of choosing from a myriad of them. That will
probably change in the future.

--
Farewell,
Bob

Post a reply to this message

Hi Bob,
    I meant that I would have the user specify which ini files they wanted,
in a list, and then when actually executing the POV-Ray command it would
look something like this: "pvengine.exe usersettings1.ini usersettings2.ini
usersettings3.ini master.ini"

The master.ini would contain render-job specific settings such as the render
(tile)'s coordinates, bit depth etc. Only if there are such settings
specified in the previous .ini's would they be overridden in the master.ini
All other settings would be passed as-is.

Thanks,
George


"hughes, b." <omn### [at] charternet> wrote in message
news:3d7d7354$1@news.povray.org...
> A broad meaning to that word, experienced.
>
> Reading your message I wasn't sure if you were saying each possible INI
> setting might be in a individual file, separately added on a command line
> later on; or if any of the settings could be selected and then applied to
a
> single INI file, non-inclusive to that master "custom" INI mentioned.
>
> I use them plenty, not always sticking to the default quickres.ini, but
most
> often for animations. I haven't used a INI to run external commands in
quite
> a while, were you going to allow for such a thing though? I really dropped
> off using multiple ones since POV for DOS and early on in POV for Windows.
> Just a trend I guess. I should get back into using them more but it can
turn
> into a cluttered mess if order isn't kept. I've become a editor of a few
> INIs more recently instead of choosing from a myriad of them. That will
> probably change in the future.
>
> --
> Farewell,
> Bob
>
>

Post a reply to this message