Here are some ideas for a future competition (promted after the SCC3
contest). http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/povray/scc3/final/
Comments, suggestions, votes all welcome. These are in no particular
order. By all means post suggestions to this group but also feel free
to email me as well.

Fast render
-----------
Idea by: Bernard
Create an artistic image that doesn't take long to render.
Voting much like SCC3 but the total vote weighted by the
inverse of the render time.
Concern: Getting the vote formula "just right".

Short time
----------
Idea by: Tek
A theme is distributed and 30 minutes later (or some other short 
period) submissions are closed. This reminds me of lightning chess.
Concern: Choosing a topic that minimises the chance of someone
having a scene already on hand.
Concern: Dealing with time zones.

Limited geometry
----------------
Idea by: Gary, Florian, Paul
Create a scene with a limited range and/or number of geometric
primitives. There are a number of variations possible here, one
is "use less than N spheres" when N could be small or perhaps
1 million. Or, use less than N spheres, N planes, N boxes" where
N might be between 2 and 10. Or, we assign a rating to each
primitive and the scene has to be built where the sum of the ratings
don't exceed some value.

Tiling
------
Idea by: Bernard
Create a small tileable (in 2D) image constructed from 3D geometry
Code would be uploaded and rendered at 256 pixels square, it would
presented tiled as a background of a WWW page. As an example see 
   http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/tmp/tile/
Voting perhaps the same as IRTC.

3D fractals
-----------
Idea by: Paul (me)
Create a 3 dimensional fractal form, voting might be similar to the
IRTC voting. In terms of creating attractive/interesting images this
has great potential, perhaps not very imaginative (?).
Concern: These often require many primitives and therefore lots of 
memory.
Concern: There may be some debate on whether some forms are fractal or 
not.

-- 
Paul Bourke
pdb_NOSPAMswin.edu.au

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Most of all I like the tiling and 3D fractals topics.
Would you only allow POV-Ray images?

 > Concern: There may be some debate on whether some forms are fractal or
 > not.

I agree. There may be even some debate on whether some forms are 3D or not :-)
It's a question of definition, but IMHO the only "true" 3D fractals POV allows 
are the built in Julia-set primitive and all kinds of Menger sponges, etc.

Of course you could call e.g. Mandelbrot sets used as hight-fields, Wada, all 
kinds of strange attractors "3D" too...
Not limiting the competition to POV-Ray could yield some even more interesting 
fractals...

-Sascha Ledinsky

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"Paul Bourke" <pdb### [at] swineduau> wrote in message
news:pdb_NOSPAM-78D05D.18372626032004@news.povray.org...
> Here are some ideas for a future competition (promted after the SCC3
> contest). http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/povray/scc3/final/
> Comments, suggestions, votes all welcome. These are in no particular
> order. By all means post suggestions to this group but also feel free
> to email me as well.
>
> Fast render
> -----------
> Idea by: Bernard
> Create an artistic image that doesn't take long to render.
> Voting much like SCC3 but the total vote weighted by the
> inverse of the render time.
> Concern: Getting the vote formula "just right".
>
> Short time
> ----------
> Idea by: Tek
> A theme is distributed and 30 minutes later (or some other short
> period) submissions are closed. This reminds me of lightning chess.
> Concern: Choosing a topic that minimises the chance of someone
> having a scene already on hand.
> Concern: Dealing with time zones.
>
> Limited geometry
> ----------------
> Idea by: Gary, Florian, Paul
> Create a scene with a limited range and/or number of geometric
> primitives. There are a number of variations possible here, one
> is "use less than N spheres" when N could be small or perhaps
> 1 million. Or, use less than N spheres, N planes, N boxes" where
> N might be between 2 and 10. Or, we assign a rating to each
> primitive and the scene has to be built where the sum of the ratings
> don't exceed some value.
>
> Tiling
> ------
> Idea by: Bernard
> Create a small tileable (in 2D) image constructed from 3D geometry
> Code would be uploaded and rendered at 256 pixels square, it would
> presented tiled as a background of a WWW page. As an example see
>    http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/tmp/tile/
> Voting perhaps the same as IRTC.
>
> 3D fractals
> -----------
> Idea by: Paul (me)
> Create a 3 dimensional fractal form, voting might be similar to the
> IRTC voting. In terms of creating attractive/interesting images this
> has great potential, perhaps not very imaginative (?).
> Concern: These often require many primitives and therefore lots of
> memory.
> Concern: There may be some debate on whether some forms are fractal or
> not.
>
> -- 
> Paul Bourke
> pdb_NOSPAMswin.edu.au

Of these, i find the limited geometry to be the most interesting, except I
would have thought about it in terms of only allowing, say, spheres and
cones for the competition, or torus and boxes. maybe coupled with a short
code restriction.

i think the short code contest is the most flexible and challenging. i would
like to see several small increases in the size of the allowed code. maybe
add 32 bytes to this next round, then another 32 bytes to the following. it
could be interesting to see how much more complex the scenes become after a
few increases.

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in news:pdb_NOSPAM-78D05D.18372626032004@news.povray.org Paul Bourke 
wrote:

> Idea by: Tek
> A theme is distributed and 30 minutes later (or some other short 
> period) submissions are closed. This reminds me of lightning chess.

It could be set up like the icfp contests over a period of 48 hours:
http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/icfpcontest/

Ingo

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Among other things, Ross Litscher wrote:

> i think the short code contest is the most flexible and challenging. i
> would like to see several small increases in the size of the allowed code.
> maybe add 32 bytes to this next round, then another 32 bytes to the
> following. it could be interesting to see how much more complex the scenes
> become after a few increases.

It would be interesting to see it reach 1MB. Imagine: 1MB full of obscure 
compressed pov SDL...

-- 
light_source{9+9*x,1}camera{orthographic look_at(1-y)/4angle 30location
9/4-z*4}light_source{-9*z,1}union{box{.9-z.1+x clipped_by{plane{2+y-4*x
0}}}box{z-y-.1.1+z}box{-.1.1+x}box{.1z-.1}pigment{rgb<.8.2,1>}}//Jellby

Post a reply to this message

"Jellby" <jel### [at] M-yahoocom> wrote in message
news:40645f5e@news.povray.org...
> Among other things, Ross Litscher wrote:
>
> > i think the short code contest is the most flexible and challenging. i
> > would like to see several small increases in the size of the allowed
code.
> > maybe add 32 bytes to this next round, then another 32 bytes to the
> > following. it could be interesting to see how much more complex the
scenes
> > become after a few increases.
>
> It would be interesting to see it reach 1MB. Imagine: 1MB full of obscure
> compressed pov SDL...
>
> -- 

lol, eww. my eyes hurt just imagining the code.

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Pretty cool ideas, but let me offer some feedback on SCC3:

1) I think it would be helpful to have links to the SDL as an extension of
TXT rather than POV.   If it were to serve as an "evangelistic tract" for
the program, these snippets of code would have more universal viewability if
it's not going to have to cause a window browser to search hard drives for
nonexistent programs.   Even when browsing during coffee breaks in the
office on a PC on which I've installed povray,  I wasn't always eager to
execute povray each time I wanted to see an image...............

2)  Were all of the ratings of first place, second place, etc., based on the
points/bytes?   It wasn't clear on my two quick trips to the display site.

Other than that it is very well done.  I'm honored to have provided a seed
of idea for something that got mentioned at slashdot!    (:-D


Of the ideas below, I like the time to render one best.  But my brain is
scheming of a way to cook the formula so that the person who submits  a
black scene doesn't win based solely on a single 6th place vote!   I think
the limited geometry is a bit obtuse....




"Paul Bourke" <pdb### [at] swineduau> wrote in message
news:pdb_NOSPAM-78D05D.18372626032004@news.povray.org...
> Here are some ideas for a future competition (promted after the SCC3
> contest). http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/povray/scc3/final/
> Comments, suggestions, votes all welcome. These are in no particular
> order. By all means post suggestions to this group but also feel free
> to email me as well.
>
> Fast render
> -----------
> Idea by: Bernard
> Create an artistic image that doesn't take long to render.
> Voting much like SCC3 but the total vote weighted by the
> inverse of the render time.
> Concern: Getting the vote formula "just right".
>
> Short time
> ----------
> Idea by: Tek
> A theme is distributed and 30 minutes later (or some other short
> period) submissions are closed. This reminds me of lightning chess.
> Concern: Choosing a topic that minimises the chance of someone
> having a scene already on hand.
> Concern: Dealing with time zones.
>
> Limited geometry
> ----------------
> Idea by: Gary, Florian, Paul
> Create a scene with a limited range and/or number of geometric
> primitives. There are a number of variations possible here, one
> is "use less than N spheres" when N could be small or perhaps
> 1 million. Or, use less than N spheres, N planes, N boxes" where
> N might be between 2 and 10. Or, we assign a rating to each
> primitive and the scene has to be built where the sum of the ratings
> don't exceed some value.
>
> Tiling
> ------
> Idea by: Bernard
> Create a small tileable (in 2D) image constructed from 3D geometry
> Code would be uploaded and rendered at 256 pixels square, it would
> presented tiled as a background of a WWW page. As an example see
>    http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/tmp/tile/
> Voting perhaps the same as IRTC.
>
> 3D fractals
> -----------
> Idea by: Paul (me)
> Create a 3 dimensional fractal form, voting might be similar to the
> IRTC voting. In terms of creating attractive/interesting images this
> has great potential, perhaps not very imaginative (?).
> Concern: These often require many primitives and therefore lots of
> memory.
> Concern: There may be some debate on whether some forms are fractal or
> not.
>
> -- 
> Paul Bourke
> pdb_NOSPAMswin.edu.au

Post a reply to this message

> 1) I think it would be helpful to have links to the SDL as an extension of
> TXT rather than POV.   If it were to serve as an "evangelistic tract" for
> the program, these snippets of code would have more universal viewability if
> it's not going to have to cause a window browser to search hard drives for
> nonexistent programs.   Even when browsing during coffee breaks in the
> office on a PC on which I've installed povray,  I wasn't always eager to
> execute povray each time I wanted to see an image...............

Hmmm, is that widespread? 
I haven't used a MSWindows machine for many years now (don't even thing
I have access to one) so am a bit out of touch but isn't the correct
behavour
1. If there is a mime type set up use that.....therefore no delay.
2. If no mime type then prompt the user. If you don't like the ptompt
   set the mime type to your favurite text editor..the one you use for
   POV.

> 2)  Were all of the ratings of first place, second place, etc., based on the
> points/bytes?   It wasn't clear on my two quick trips to the display site.

See http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~pbourke/povray/scc3/
First place is points/bytes
Second place is points
Third place is points/bytes^2

> Of the ideas below, I like the time to render one best. 

The problem I see with this is that it doesn't mean much to non
POVRay people. The short code contest could be appreciated by a 
wide computer literate community. Indeed people these days have a
higher expection when it comes to speed and so some nice image that
takes 1 minute might be considered cool by the POVRay community
but may give other people the impression that POVRay is a slow 
renderer.

-- 
Paul Bourke
pdb_NOSPAMswin.edu.au

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Paul Bourke <pdb### [at] swineduau> wrote:
> Hmmm, is that widespread? 

  It's a problem with IE. It does not care about the mime type of the
file but tries to "guess" what it is by the extension of the file name
and its contents (thus breaking all possible RFCs about this out here).

  (This is the reason why if a broken server sends eg. a .zip file with
the text/plain mime type IE will open it with winzip (or whatever) instead
of showing it as plain text as every other browser does. This has the
negative effect that people will think the other browsers are broken,
while it's the server which is broken and IE is breaking the standards
by ignoring the mime type. It discourages server maintainers to fix their
servers because they will not be aware of the true reason why their file
is not showing in the other browsers. This also has the effects that there
have been tons of IE exploits related to this: Sen a file with the image/jpeg
mime type, with a .jpg extension, but containing vbscript, and some older
IE version will execute the vbscript instead of showing a broken image
icon like every other browser does...)

-- 
plane{-x+y,-1pigment{bozo color_map{[0rgb x][1rgb x+y]}turbulence 1}}
sphere{0,2pigment{rgbt 1}interior{media{emission 1density{spherical
density_map{[0rgb 0][.5rgb<1,.5>][1rgb 1]}turbulence.9}}}scale
<1,1,3>hollow}text{ttf"timrom""Warp".1,0translate<-1,-.1,2>}//  - Warp -

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> It would be interesting to see it reach 1MB. Imagine: 1MB full of obscure 
> compressed pov SDL...
I guess some time earlier someone would try to develop some script to 
compress POV-syntax :) Could be an interesting job: While some stuff is 
trivial (e.g. spaces between vectors etc.) some are more advanced 
(shorten identifier and variable names) and some are really tough (real 
optimisation, like checking wether using an identifier or simply the 
numbers for a number occuring more than once is shorter).

But yes, it would look cool!

Florian

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